IX Use Case: Outside Perspective For An In-house Agency

The second in a series of use-cases for Ideasicle X in the advertising world, this one focusing on an in-house agency getting outside perspective.

Turned outside-in

An in-house agency at a major retailer is extremely talented but their creative people are incredibly busy with the day-to-day retail output and even if they weren’t their teams admit they can get pretty close to their business. Too close, sometimes. Like they’re inside a wave and can barely see beyond the plunging breaker. So they want some outside thinking to help break out of past creative paradigms. Specifically, they really want this fall’s TV campaign to be different from anything they’ve done before.

The right four people may not all be insiders

The in-house ECD, Mark, managed this Ideasicle X project and wanted to have one person with category experience to anchor the others in its reality, but the other three do not have to have any category experience. In fact, upon further contemplation the ECD decides to include one of his own top writers on the team to serve this “anchoring” function. That way, they anchor both on the category AND perhaps on the inner politics of the company.

All of the four recruits must be experienced creative people who a demonstrated a mastery of the TV medium. Mark didn’t have a huge budget or much time for this project so he knew he’d have to over-invite freelancers to make sure at least four agree to the project. He searched the Ideasicle X database and found several who were promising, but also invited a few of his favorite freelancers who weren’t in the database yet by dropping their emails into the system.

Payment was agreed to be $500 for each freelancer for a 4-day idea session. He knew this was a little less than normal, but hoped he could still field a team.

In just hours, three people had accepted the job and three more rejected it. After giving it another hour, a fourth accepted. Mark looked at the four who accepted and, in the interest of time, decided to move forward with them.

Briefing inspiration

Mark has a great strategist on staff so he asked her to record a short video explaining the creative brief. She shot it right from her laptop and then Mark uploaded both the pdf of the creative brief and the video to the Idea Stream using Ideasicle X, and then launched the job.

In doing so, all of the freelancers who hadn’t responded yet to the invitation were notified that it was closed now, but to still respond in case there was an issue with a member of the selected four. Ideasicle X allows customers to have a “bench” of accepted freelancers in case they’re needed in the middle of a job.

Outside ideas beget inside ideas

Mark got 46 original TV campaign platforms for he and his teams to think through. No scripts or anything like that, but big platform ideas that his teams could turn into scripts. That’s all they needed at this point. They even got some ideas that were off brief (promotional ideas), some of which they plan to save for another time. There were also some stinkers.

Mark selected his ten favorites tv platform ideas from the Ideasicle X platform and exported those into separate PDFs. He then shared those via email with his internal teams so they could peruse them and, if inspired, develop them further (scripts) for presentation to their internal clients. So the creative process continues internally. The Ideasicle X ideas “jump start” the process.

After a few days, Mark had five fleshed out TV campaigns he and his team were proud to present to their internal brand teams.

When you can have anyone, who would you have?

What this use case illustrates is that Ideasicle X can be a powerful, and quick, way to bring in outside perspective into an environment where the thinking can get stale and insular.

Further, in-house agencies can get overwhelmed with the internal demands of the company and sadly don’t often have time for the big thinking. Conducting an Ideasicle X project with an outside team (even including one insider in Mark’s case above), can generate a lot of ideas quickly which the internal teams can then spend their time perfecting.

And the budget for what you’re willing to pay the freelancers is entirely in your control. Think of it as market forces at work.

Now it’s time for your in-house agency to put the force of Ideasicle X to work.