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.