Mum, where do ideas come from?

In big ad agency life there are two distinctive parts to having ideas. The coming up with them part then the reviewing them part.

Initially, for me, the first part was terrifying. Clutching a one-page creative brief and with a countdown to the first review with your Creative Director, you’d be sent off to extract some piece of creative wisdom from you little brain.

What if I can’t come up with anything? What if all my ideas are rubbish? How do I do this again? 

But once I got going, my mind would whir through its little internal rolodex (look them up, kids; they were useful back in the day), lighting up when it hit on something. 

How about this! Or this! Or this! My god, I’m a genius! 

The second part — the review process — I developed a complicated relationship with. It was a long, many staged and often tortuous thing. 

First, the Creative Director would want to see as many ideas as possible. Most would instantly disappear. Then what was left would be put through the wringer to see if there was any potential there. 

Accepted wisdom for CD’s was to ‘stress test the idea’, which essentially meant poking holes in it until it resembled Swiss cheese and sending us away to stitch it back together again.

After a few rounds of this, the strategists would be back on the scene. In this review, they would inevitably point out every aspect of the idea they felt didn’t fit the strategy they had already sold into the client. And so we’d have to shoehorn a bit of that in. 

Then it was the account team’s turn. They would nervously relay all the things they knew the client didn’t like in the desperate hope we could trim those edges and they could avoid a bollocking. 

Of course, with a good team and when done well, the review process should serve to strengthen an idea.

The brief should inspire a lot of great ways in. The CD should latch onto a little nugget they could see something great in, shine it up a bit and tool us to strengthen it even more. The strategist should use all their great insights to give it a turbo boost. And the suits should find the bits they know the client needs and help frame the idea around them, giving it the greatest chance of success. 

I’d like to say this is how it usually happened but that wouldn’t be true.

It takes confidence, strength and time to work that way. In the cut and thrust of daily agency life, teams were often stretched, stressed and had taken too many hits themselves to bring that confidence to the table. So instead, at each new review stage, instead of getting stronger, ideas often seemed a little more ghostly than before. 

Needless to say, I began to develop anxiety around having ideas reviewed.

The agency system was critical and competitive. Deadlines were tight and very few ideas good enough. The accepted wisdom was that you needed to harvest a thousand mediocre ones to find your pearl.

If you walked away from a review empty handed, the pressure to come up with something new the next round was intense. 

But as time went on and I became more confident in my intuitive ability to answer a brief, it was the system that seemed faulty. Why were we sending creative teams off to work in isolation then subjecting their work to all this scrutiny? Why couldn’t we focus on strengthening what’s right about an idea rather than looking for what’s wrong with it? 

And so I began developing a much gentler way to go about things for The Open Arms. 

Start Casual & Conversational

While we have a brief that we can always work back to, we don’t necessarily brief a creative team every time, particularly if the audience themselves aren’t represented in any of the people making the work. 

Instead, we go and talk to people with lived experience of the problem we are solving, working side-by-side to find a way in. All our ideas start with conversations like this, whether amongst ourselves or looking further afield if the brief demands it. Because we are certain that the best ideas are simple, straightforward and deeply human. 

Mute Your Self-saboteur

We also make everyone mute their inner critic so fledgeling ideas have every chance to succeed before having their edges dulled. This can be hard after spending so long in the hyper critical agency system. But it’s important because people often kill things they think are too direct or simple. But people need honesty and simplicity! And exploring in every direction is vital before we all latch onto something in an unself-conscious and curious way.

Don’t Make it a Numbers Game

We also don’t expect a million ideas in order to find the great one. When something sticks, we follow that path for a while, until something else pops up. And we follow that one.  Because at the end of the day every project needs just one great response (and one great back up). 

Limit Formal Reviews

A key aspect of this process is not rinsing ideas through so many layers of formal reviews that they come out antiseptic on the other side. A strong idea needs its emotional core protected if its storytelling is to connect with anyone. If you need to cancel the bit we all laughed or cried at in the very first telling, you better have a bloody good reason for doing so. Instead, we have less formal, collaborative chats where we all come curious and ready to learn rather than stressed and ready to shoot stuff down.

Stay Collaborative

We also keep our client partner involved as we go, talking to them about the general territory we are circling and getting them on board early. So when we do share the work with them they are excited and primed.

Coming up with ideas is an organic process of immersion and understanding. It’s about being open to all kinds of learning about subject and audience, then letting everything rise into clouds that might break or pass us by as a natural part of what we do. 

Ideas can ebb and flow, build slowly or come all at once. They can arrive in the middle of a conversation or while staring at the walls (it helps that we share our studio with an art gallery). Or they can take a while to extract. 

The hard work is not putting your brain into a vice to try and squeeze something out fully formed before you reveal it to a waiting committee of sharpened pencils. The hard work is about knowing when to leave it well alone and transferring all your effort into making it fly.

And sometimes it’s about going home, being silly with your kids and forgetting about it till tomorrow. Then, most likely, at least one of us will wake up in the middle of the night and tap something into our phones that sets everyone’s hearts aflutter the next day. 

We are not superhuman little idea machines.
That’s not how creativity works. 

Ideas are there to tell human stories in new and different ways. You need to let those stories seep into you. Let them roll around in your head until they start coming out as little ‘what if…’ sentences to anyone who’ll listen.

By Jess Lilley