that tardis for the creative department is on back order
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 9:22PM 
Clichés are the enemy of what we do. They're boring to work with, sure, but they're mostly not very effective at engaging consumers in new way. As creatives we all want to get past them as quickly as possible.
But there's a funny thing I've noticed. In any brainstorm, the first chunk of ideas you have is frankly nothing but clichés. And that shouldn't be a surprise. After all, we're full of clichés; we're bombarded by them every day, online, on TV, in conversation. It takes time to purge them out of our systems; it's kind of like running the tap, waiting to drain all the sludge in the pipes in order to get the really hot water.
So, you get them out of the way and that's when the interesting stuff begins to happen. That's when the really fresh ways of engaging people begin to emerge.
But the problem is that that chunk of time it takes to drain the conceptual pipes takes just that. Time. It can last just an hour, if you're incredibly lucky, or take a full day. (And I don't mean a typical day full of other jobs and meetings. I mean, a full day of doing nothing else. I've been there.) And you can't rush it. As they say, it takes as long as it takes. And that's really difficult to achieve in most agencies. Teams have multiple jobs on the go, at different levels of involvement, and there's real juggling of schedules and mindsets that has to take place. It may be the toughest challenge creatives face these days – carving out the necessary time to do their best work.
(Note: it's instructive the only place I've ever worked where this wasn't a challenge is no longer in business. Time is money, as they say, and dedicating time is an expensive proposition.)
So, we play with our time, jumping back and forth across the fourth dimension and our priorities and deadlines, and somehow find the time to keep spewing until there's nothing left to say. And that's when it gets interesting.
Reader Comments (2)
You've really opened a can of worms here. Oh no, now I've put my foot in it. D'oh! I mean...
You could devote an entire year of posts to the brainstorming process, I'm sure. But the first absolute rule I would suggest is that there be no absolute rules. Many people think the one absolute rule is that there are no bad ideas. But oh my, there are so many bad ideas.
The second absolute rule, or perhaps the first corollary to the first absolute rule, might be that we welcome your bad ideas, and we promise not to make fun of them... while you're in the room. Because sometimes, your bad idea inspires a good idea. Sometimes, the good idea is turning a bad idea on its head.
Which brings us back to D'oh! I mean... clichés.
Full disclosure: I have had what I thought was a good idea killed outright by a client because she thought it was cliché. Recently, even. But I'm not bitter. You see, I was trying to be all meta with it, and turn a cliché on its head. The hardest thing to face in a presentation is hearing a client say, perhaps in not so many words, that she doesn't think you understand that the cliché you presented, on its head, was a cliché.
And that's down to me for not selling the concept hard enough. As we all know, trying to get meta with a metaphor is a risky business, when you sometimes have to rip the arm off a mere metaphor and beat someone over the head with it to get your point across. To make my job even harder, the client had an absolute rule in her head about clichés.
So maybe the absolute rule really should be that we have no absolute rules, lest someone who is not highly skilled in the use of absolute rules get his or her hands on one.
But the rule about creatives needing time, that we can absolutely keep. It takes time to decide, for example, whether turning a cliché on its head is worth the risk. It takes time to brainstorm other ideas. And it takes time to weigh potential against risk.
And the rule that there are, occasionally, even often, bad ideas, but that you must voice even your bad ideas in a brainstorm, maybe that's a good rule too.
Honest, your bad idea won't be the worst one we've heard.
We've heard some steamers.
Couldn't agree more that turning a cliché on its head can be a really strong technique. That's why, as you say, there's the cliché about there being no such thing as a bad idea in a brainstorm. Everything in the brainstorm is fodder. Whether you spout something that's fully, brilliantly formed, or you spout something stupid that someone else turns into something brilliant, doesn't really matter for the purposes of the work. I guess it sucks for your ego, but I'd rather be in the room and be a part of the process in whatever way, than not take the risk at all.