When Evaluating Ideas, Not All Ideas Are Created Equal. 4 Filters To Identify The Best.

You’ve got a pile of creative ideas in front of you. Maybe they were generated by your in-house team, your agency, or even from an Ideasicle X project. Regardless, you’re feeling good, fortified, and excited with all this potential. But now you’ve got to evaluate these ideas and decide which ones with which to move forward. Here are four important criteria by which to filter that list down to the 3-5 best.

1. What does your brand think of the idea?

If you have a clear, we’ll articulated brand idea, then you can almost “ask” it whether it would do that idea or not and see what it tells you. Does your brand “want” to do it? If not, then reject the idea no matter how good or exciting it otherwise may be. If it is something your brand is excited about, then you’re onto something. Here’s why.

Everything your company does should further prove your brand idea in some way. Otherwise you end up with random acts of marketing. In fact, everyone in your company should be channeling that brand idea into everything they do (if you don’t have a powerful brand idea, contact me - we do brand idea assignments all the time).

So hold each idea up against your brand first and then genuinely ask yourself if your brand would be better for it. The brand is the boss.

2. Did it make you feel something?

You know what I’m talking about. You see an idea and your jaw drops slightly, your eyes open a bit more, time seems to stop exactly as long as it takes to generate chills or some other form of visceral reaction. Pay attention to these unconscious reactions because they’re real and they reflect the energy laced inside the idea you’re reviewing. Think of it as your experience over the years, your gut instincts, and your own subjective perspective coming out all at once in an energetic blender. How you feel about an idea is a powerful bellwether to determine if an idea is good or not.

3. Will it accomplish the objective?

Duh, right? But agencies can sometimes get so enamored with the creativity of an idea that they forget or dismiss the original objective. Not always a bad thing, as you want your agency to push the boundaries of what’s possible creatively. But as the “idea evaluator” it’s important avoid going overboard. You are not in the business of populating the world with creative ideas, you’re in the business of selling more product or service.

Go back to the creative brief. Is this idea accomplishing what was set out in the brief? If yes, then the idea passes. If not, the idea fails. Now, there are times I’ve seen a new idea inspire the client to completely reconsider the entire creative brief (including the objective), but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

4. Does your agency have heart for it?

This criteria matters most when your agency came up with the ideas in the first place. Two reasons why assessing your agency’s “heart” for the idea is important. One, ideas are your agency’s business so their professional opinion matters a lot. Two, your agency will need to have heart for the idea when it comes to execution, so consider their heart for the idea as “potential energy” that will be unleashed during production.

In the end, it still may be difficult to choose one big idea out of many to move forward with. But hopefully these four filters will help you accelerate the approval process. And maybe you have other criteria that you use to evaluate ideas. If so, please post in the comments below.