Better Ad Ideas: Develop the All-Round Thinking Skills of a Top Advertising Creative

1. About the Course: What separates the most in-demand ad creatives from those who struggle for ideas, for clients and for work. While most of the time it's the thinking, not just their ability to come up with great concepts, but to bring them to life in the best way. The top creatives are not only talented in one area, but adept at thinking in the other area to the truth is thought ball round conceptual skills are like gold to clients and agencies, and the hallmark of any top art creative. Those who get the best jobs, opportunities, clients, awards, and rates of pain. Whether your main skill is in writing or design. The ability to think both visually and verbally is the key to standing out as a creative, sparking more demand for your services and bringing your concepts to life in the most powerful, imaginative ways. This course will help me fast-track your development so you can develop the all-round thinking skills of a top creative. It will sharpen the area you are naturally best in, and it will strengthen the area. That's not your primary skill. As for me, my name is Rob Aspinall. I'm a creative copywriter who's been specializing in concepts now for over 16 years. I've worked on brands such as Nike, goodness, KPMG, Mercedes Benz, Unilever, in Kellogg's, Manchester United and many, many more. I'll be talking you through the course with a mix of slides, videos, camps, and examples. Lost, they'll be to form projects for you to dry out and share. So if you'd like to make lighter and better work of the conceptual process, you can either spend months searching for the right information, years learning as you go for you can develop the skills you need right here, right now in under an hour and apply the principles directly to your next creative job. So thanks for checking out the course. And if do choose to shop at your development with better ideas than I'll see you on the inside. 2. MODULE 1: VISUAL & VERBAL THINKING: The muscles in your mind are a lot like the muscles in your legs, your chest, or your back. It's very much the same kind of dynamic. The more you work your muscles physically, the stronger they get H, just as simple as that. And the stronger they get easier is to do the heavy lifting. And it's the same thing when it comes to thinking and the creative process. The strongly or creative muscles, the easier it's going to be to do the heavy lifting needed in the creative process. And it's going to help you, you know, you've got a deadweight ever brief on top of you. No one else can solve. Everybody's down in a squat and camp or shop. You're gonna be able to lift straight out and you're gonna be up lots of power straight out of that. Because you're going to have developed the muscles necessary to think in certain ways. But we need to make sure that we weren't these creative muscles evenly in words and visuals. If you were to work out your item and not you left, you'd have a massive right arm and a tiny little left down. Likewise, worked your chest too much at the gym. You back muscles are gonna get pull forwarding gonna suffer. And you're also going to look like, you know the call it turtle back. It's really gonna be bad for your posture. There's gonna be a deficit. Well, again, it's the same creatively. When we look at visual and verbal skills, let's say you are a designer or an art director. Obviously, your copyright and skills aren't going to be as honed as the copyrights, but you'll have enough skills to enhance your creative capacity in that area. Likewise, a view or a copywriter, you're not gonna have the same visual capacity as an art director or designer? Well, it's unlikely, maybe you will. But what you are able to do is build up that ability so that you can start to think of how to tell stories in pictures first before words. Now, the better we can combine the two of these, the more rounded will become as creatives. 3. Visual Thinking Explained: When it comes to ideas, the fewer words you use when you communicate something, the better. A good way to think of this is brevity is liberty. Gravity keeping things short, is gravity, in other words, it will raise the level of your game. It will raise the standard of your concepts and ideas. And again, we're back to show not tau. Now, why is it so important visually beyond getting our message across vast? Why does it really the power of what we're trying to say? Well, the thing is about human beings were all primarily visual creatures. Now some of us are more visual than others. Of course, some of us Audio plays a, a higher part. Some of those touchy-feely, the tactile element. But essentially we're all visual creatures first. We think first and foremost in pictures, because if, if you think about it in distances, we can see further than we can here. We can hear further than we can smell. We can smell further than we can talk. And we can talk further than we can taste well, why is that? Now, if you think about range and ancestors, what kept them alive? First and foremost, it was being able to see, because you can see further that increases your chances of survival in two ways. The opportunity, Oh, there's some PRA, we can get that. Or there's a threat, a Predator, right? Okay, I've got more time to run now. So c And things is more important inherent things because it gives me more distance to react and the same with hearing compared to smell. So this means that seeing isn't the most important sense. And that means that visual storytelling is hardwired into us. And we can take advantage as creatives. Which means, the more we can tell our story through images, the greater the impact will be. So what's the exercise, but how do we develop this muscle? And it's very simple. The aim here with this exercise, first of all, is to show you how to strip an idea down to just the image without losing any of the meaning, because it's pointless getting rid of words. If we're going to lose some of the meaning the audience needs to get it. It needs to have the same impact or greater bios getting rid of words. That's the whole point. So this exercise basically is about producing an image only idea that captures the attention and connects to an emotion. But the best way to show you this, rather than going through a step-by-step thing now is to actually show you with some easy little examples. 4. Use Fewer Words to Create More Powerful Ideas: So the first example, the Adichie's at now, this is a bit of a classic adventure, if you like, is one of my personal favorites. And although there is copy in this ad, it's actually very much secondary. It's relegated to the bottom by the time you read it, the entire essence of the Audi quatro was already being expressed through the visual. If this app was done today, I doubt there would be any copy at all other than probably a strap line. You see here the strap line is the Audi A4 quatro, nothing to prove. So what's happening in the visual? Well, the visual is telling us that basically the Audi on you as the owner of the cheetah and the greyhounds, the competition, and the other people. Maybe on your street, you drive around in there. And their choice of God. The greyhounds have everything to prove. They're all trying to outdo each other. Chasing in circles, you know, not the most intelligent thing to do, but they don't know any better. And the cheats, and meanwhile is lying in the traps. Because it knows it's the fastest. It's you know, it's knows that it's superior machine compared to the Greyhound. It doesn't need to chase the greyhound. You know, it does its own thing. It's only going to run if there's a meal in it for it. Basically, it knows that that hair isn't real. They're opening a loop here. And you've got to connect the dots. And when you do that, you give yourself a little pat on the back. So oh yeah, I get that. And, you know, that cheeses like me, am I that? And I want to be like that. It's just one image. But let's look at another example. Something fictional we can come up with. The product is our NPV, or people carry its got a glass roof and it, you know, it's the kind of thing you see families driving around in. There's lots of space, there's lots of boot space that kids are in there. And it's got this glass roof that you can see out of him, can see the clouds and the sun and whatever else. So this feature, Let's say more lie and creates a greater impression of space. The benefit though, is that with a panoramic view in all directions, everyone gets a better view of the world from passenger to driver, to the kids in the back. And it just makes journeys more enjoyable. Especially long journeys where there's not much going on. And the kids would probably say, unlike with so bored, everything like that. So having something to distract them and just generally having a better view of the world and having a more interesting journey. And it's quite a nice thought, isn't it sets this product apart from the next one. So the proposition essentially a see more of the world. That's what you see when you look out at the glass roof. And the strap line could be let in the world. It could be like the world in one go with light in the world. So how would an ordinary idea look? You know, we didn't apply this visual thinking. If we just said, okay, we're going to have some words and images together. Well, we don't really need to visualize it in terms of a scam. The headlines probably going to say something like more like machinery, more fun. And the visual is probably gonna be of a family in the car pointing out at scenery through the roof. The type of thing you just see every other day in a car at. But what if we limited the copy, either Rozin and VoiceOver on ImageNet, on a poster or an oppressor or an online banner. What are we limited the copy to have strap line and a really short descriptor at the bottom. It's a very simple little tweak book. Were given more of the ad over to the imagery. We've got a line here is a payoff, but it's going to be quite small. And just like the Audi cheater ad, you're going to be looking at the image first, again, it, from the image. We could even strip this copy down even further to be honest, light in the world, would the max, yes, we could just say, we've said now featuring a panoramic glass roof to explain. But maybe we'd have an image of the car in the button with the glass roof. And basically all this is doing is we've just removed the sense of having any borders at all. You know, there's no roof, there's no windows. Now whether this is a firepower and wherever the driving the idea is that they feel like they're in this environment and not in a car at all. And the Latin the world in. So if it was to be a TV ad, for instance, the giraffe might poke its head right into the car. And you can have all kinds of different environments for this. You could go through a TV ad that took you through wonderful fantasy worlds and everything. And all you've done is stripped back to a visual that tells a story. 5. Tell the Story in Images: Let's look at another example. Here. We're gonna take something mundane as we mentioned, and we're gonna make it visually arresting and tell a story at the same time. So we're going to use our product, the self-cleaning dish cloth. And the feature is that it's the only dish cloth on the market with self-cleaning nanoparticles woven into the fibers. The benefit, the emotional benefit is that you don't have the added hassle of cleaning a grimy club. And also there's actually a side benefit in that it won't have to be replaced. You know what it's like when you scrub or pan, it's full of dirt, anything that I'm gonna have to throw that out now. Well, with this class that doesn't happen. Well, let's just imagine. So. The proposition is that it's the dish cloth that cleans itself. So it's quite strong proposition, we're lucky in that we make that up for ourselves. What was the strap line? Cleans, then cleans itself and simple and straightforward. Now, the idea would be a before and after advert, the cloth cleans itself overnight. It's a very straightforward kind of approach, just showing the cloth inaction. Now, this is if you had some words on it and there's not a hell of a lot of words. But you can kind of ignore the little coffee lines there. That's just a typical scan technique where you write a few lines, it probably some little bit of information there, possibly, possibly we'd get rid of it. But the point is we've got, again, we've got a headline format here. We've got cheese day, 07:00 PM, where we've got the dirty cloth at the top, and then we've got Wednesday seven AM. So therefore, it's telling the story of what's going on. But we can do a lot more than that. By stripping back the coffee adds another layer to the concept. Even though it's a really, really simple concept. And also kind of like doing a little bit too much work for the audience here. They're not really gonna engage enough the way we're showing this. So what could it look like instead, if we got rid of those lines? Well, we'd have to actually tell the story of what was happening visually. So we'd have to show it that the dishes are done at night, for instance, or something's right down at night. And then by morning it's clean again in needs that period of time to clean itself. Well, here we've just got Visual only expression of that. But it's still a before and after. But what's happening here is that on the left we've got the nighttime and the dirty cloth. And on the right, we've got the morning time and the clean cloth. And it's simple as that the audience has to feel a little bit of work, say, oh righ, okay, it's cleaned itself overnight and we'd have the strap line cleans, then cleans itself. And you can get it from that. If you've not already got it by the time you get to the strap line, that confirms that your suspicions arise. And another thing about the visual approach is, first of all, it's more interesting, it's more colorful. And we have the contrast between the dark and the light, but also in the cleanliness area of it. You've got the light coming through, so it's gonna be really clean. And anybody who's really bothered about cleaning is gonna really kinda resonate with that because that one looks dirty and not very nice, and that one looks clean. So that looks like something. Don't really wanna clean that cloths and probably going to have to throw it away. But by Monet and you can now, oh wow, it's done. Great, good to go again. Now, what could the idea look like visually in a different way? Well, let's tweak the payoff lie a little bit just to work with the image because we can do this a bit differently. One image can spark and other idea, and this is another idea we had. And we thought, Oh, well maybe we could just tweet the image a little bit and tell the story a little bit differently and more dramatically because the before and after shots, nice, but it's not very humorous. So can we come up with an idea or a little bit more like the Audi cheetah that has a bit of humor in and has something going on as well. Seems kind of dramatic action. Well, how about this? If only everything cleaned itself? The If only is a kind of a little bit of a classic technique and you may be familiar with it already. The if only usually shows an image of something happening and compares it to the product. So it says, if only everything was like product or service. Now, what we're showing here is a woman, Let's assume she's on a way to say a wedding or a date or whatever. And she's just stepped out of our house and she just spent ages getting ready and just got this brand new dress and it's white and it's clean. And then suddenly a car comes along and splashes a puddle of standing water all over. And suddenly she's covered and she's filthy, pretty gotten. Let's just say that. Well, we're imagining that if this dress was like the cloth that would clean itself. So by the time she got to a function should actually be clean again. But unfortunately, in reality that doesn't happen. So we're just showing the fact that the cloth cleans itself through a kind of visual metaphor, if you like. And it's just far more interesting. When we strip it down. Again, the audience has to do the work, figuring out what's going on. So notice how here we just extended our idea from a single execution into potential campaign. Now, if you think about it, you could have a TV ad quite easily having, let's say, whether it's classical music or some kind of jaunty little June. And you have people in slow motion been splashed and sprayed by dirty puzzles and things of that nature. It would be a really cool campaign. And then you could just save only everything cleaned itself. Then you position the cloth. People are engaged, people are in the get the message. And it stands out from probably the usual campaigns that just show the product clean in something. You know, it's a little bit different and therefore it's disruptive and therefore it's going to be more effective. But let's look at something real. Let's look at tide stain remover. We thought we'd pick another comparable products that actually show you this working in real life and not just with something that we've created. So here's a real example of a visual idea that demonstrates the benefit of a humdrum products in a really visually arresting way. The strap line from the adverts is that it removes stains in one go. So great benefit, really clear. That's why you buy it. And was this work, how can we show this visually in a really interesting way? That's what they would have been thinking when they would have done this campaign. Now, they've used animals here. And as you can see, we've got a zebra, We've got a Dalmatian, and we've got a Lapid. And their campaign is imagining that someone's a rope tied on the separate and it's so good at removing stains that it's actually removed its stripes. Obviously that's impossible in real life. But it's the advertising truth, not the real truth. And because it's so extreme, nobody's going to expect it to do that. They're just gonna get the joke, give themselves credit for it in. But it's not just engaging in terms of the pat on the back. It's really visually arresting as well. And it's so companionable in terms of the callers, the using in terms of the animals, and you get it straight away. Well, what's going on? Okay. I see the line remove stains in one go. I get it. Same with the dalmatian. It's removed, the Dalmatian spots. And leopards aren't supposed to be able to change the spots, but to add gets written in one go. So that's a great example of thinking visually. And if it works for stain removal, it works for everything. 6. Class Project 1: Create a Visual-Only idea: Now let's turn this over to you. I'd like you to choose an advert for a product or service or a brand. It can be real or it can be imaginary with copy or a voiceover. Now, see if you can tell the same story with just a single image. So what you're aiming to do here is to deliver the same exact same message without losing any of the power with just a single image. And what you'll probably find when you do this is that it adds power when you strip away the copy. In other words, what you're gonna do is take something, an idea for an adverb or an existing advert, and you're going to sketch out your own version. This is how I got into my first job in copywriting and this is a tip for you if you're looking to do this. I went through magazines and tore out adverse that I thought I could do better on to show my conceptual muscles. And I got the job from it. I learned that technique from somebody who done the same thing. The receptionist who'd gone on to become a copywriter, she sold a course, then this is what to do. I did that and it succeeded. So that's a little tip if you are looking to get into the business little sidebar here. But that's a good thing to do if you haven't got a portfolio is not about the drawing on the worst draw or ever. But it's the thought that counts so long as you can get your idea across, that's what matters. Even if it takes you three goes to get to the best visual execution of it. 4-5-6 CO2 gas, just about developing the skill. It's like going to the gym. You don't expect to just do one rep and then bang the muscles there. Just have more goes with it. 7. Verbal Thinking Explained: So now we've done visual reps. We need to move on to verbal reps, again, to balance out mussels. Imagine we've just done some chest press in. Now we need to do some back pole in and verbal wraps are gonna give us this strong spine to our concepts. So even if you're a designer or art director, you're able to do actually decent copy as well, even if it's not your thing. So let's take a look at these verbal exercises. The stronger our copy only skills, the more effective our campaigns went low on space and budgets. So it's not just about developing your around muscles. You could be at the point where you think, I've only got the small amount of space, we haven't got a budget for a great image either or wanna do topography. It needs to be stripped back, whatever the reason. Sometimes doing something with copy only can just be as pretty much as impactful as image only. So we want to have that skill. We want to build the counterweight crater muscle to visual storytelling. Now, again, going back to our hierarchy of the senses, the audible sense, auditory sense I think is the correct term I've been colon or audio inaudible. This is second on the hierarchy. So first you've got the ability to see sabertooth tiger coming out. Second, you've got the ability to hear a snake in the grass. You've got the ability to ear a volcano exploded in the distance. We better get up and get moving. You've got the ability to hear your child crying quarter here, another member of the tribe called knew from across the jungle. But language is taken us from cliques and whistles. And our storytelling as evolved as well. Originally, storytelling was all about lessons around a campfire. And this is how people would learn that share information and data, learn about each other and all kind of different things they needed to know. Language became huge to human survival. So unsurprisingly, the language is moved internally into what you could call mental chatter. The mind nowadays shatters all day long. It's almost like a one-way phone call. It never ends and sometimes it's two-way conversation, even out loud. You've got a voice in your own head and then your answer in your own voice, sometimes even out loud. I mean, you know, if you bit crazy like me. So we need to interrupt this chatter so that we can insert our message in to the conversation. This means our words need to actually carry a real emotional punch to power throw to Lund and make an impact. That's what's going to float the boat. That's what's gonna make the subconscious pay attention, is what's going to snap them out of the little pattern and disrupt this chatter that's not bound, shouting louder. It's about making a different kind of noise, saying something different, or maybe saying the same thing in a different way as we're going to look at. 8. Expressing the Visual in Words: Let's look at example one again, letting the world. We looked at how this appeared visually as in the family or in the car. And it's almost like there's no car around them. But how can we nail lists verbally in a way that, that can be just as impactful. And in fact, maybe we can add a little bit more personality and humor in the process. Because that's ultimately a lot of the time how we express our personality is through the words that come out of our mouths. So let's take this NPV, multi-purpose vehicle or people carrier with the panoramic and roof the max, yes. And let's use our strap line again. Let in the world as the punchline. I day one could be using vocal expressions to tell the story. So we don't even necessarily need to have words being spoken per se. Let's look at what we mean by that. Well, how about this? We've got all these vocal expressions do use the, as the laughter, the laws. Dom, Gs, ooh, la, la, la, la, la, l, o mg. And that's just the adults in the car. So it looks like at first glance, this is the kinda why kids might reacts to go nu would have gotten out there going, laughing their heads off the law in a way they're OMG. And, but as it turns out, when we get to this line at the end, that's just the adults in the car. We're showing rather than telling, but through words you don't always have to. When we say Show and Tell You don't have to show a picture. You can show the experience through the words, just like you would do in a novel, Through the characters. So we're expressing the extra venture get on every journey and the wonder in every journey through just using these vocal expressions. So this is one technique where you just use sounds and things like this. And it just brings it to life. It makes it a little bit exciting. And then the idea is that you just put a little punchline at the end. Now let's look at idea to what the kids might say. Mom, can we not be there yet? This is a really simple line. Eq put this on a billboard with a car at the bottom or whatever, if you wanted to, or you could do it in a really tight little space is still going to work. And what it's saying is basically the kids don't want to get to their destination because they're having so much fun in this NPV with the boss roof. They don't wanna get there. Even though they've just cut that. They don't want to they want to stay in there because they're having so much fun. It's a little bit like the kid playing with the cardboard box. And the more interested in the, in the box because the kids, you know, that's what the light. What about this instead here that it's the sound that kids make when staring out of the new Mac's yes, panoramic roof. In other words, Silence. So this is a great benefit for parents because the kids, just like they're not going to be moan in about Are we there yet? They're gonna be quiet. They're gonna be kinda a little bit spellbound go and I look at this, look at that. You know, even if the making noise, it's not gonna be crying and moaning. It's gonna be pleasant noises like laughter and things like that. Employment to each other. How well look at that, look at that. It's another way of bringing the message out emotionally in just three words. Now, that'll probably make a good little radio segment because you'd have the words and then obviously, you know, on what it's like on radio, anything that's not noise stands out a mile. You'd have the little bit of silence. And then you'd have the belittle job there. And again, the audience has to put it together, deft silence with the sound the kids make. Obviously the making no sound, which is benefit. 9. Rollercoasters & Cereal: Using Words to Convey Emotion: But let's look at another example. Busch Gardens, again, somewhere real and a completely different product that we're selling. Very exciting, a long way away from the cloth. How on earth do we get the sense of thrills and adventures and everything like that? How do we capture that in just words alone? Because Bush guns is home to some of the biggest scariest rollercoasters if you've ever been there, as well as animals, they've gotta love thrill rides. So how can we represent the emotional benefit of these rides of Go into Busch Gardens? Well, what do you experience when you go there? And what's the auditory version of that? Well, it's to let out laughter, to shout, to scream. It was just time to react. So the idea here is to use these sounds to convey the experience. And ultimately the essence of the experience could be summed up visually a lot like this. Like it's just really thrilling and VO1 is more scary when you're queuing up for the ride once you get on it, it's just well, I've been on a couple that's still scary. I hear on it. But for the most part, you're just going to be caught up in the moment, you know, you don't have time to be scared because you're going really fast and you forget about everything in you just to get it again. So the same thing represented verbally might be something like this. When was the last time you watched? Who, who, who we were. Wow. The animals or wild the rides or even wilder. And forget my bad acting for a while. We're just using this simple technique. We could have just asked the question, when was the last time you went for a thrilling adventure or vacation, or a holiday or members last time you got on a roller coaster and really enjoyed yourself. Barring, was telling, not showing, we need to show. So we show that with simple little sounds like this. Really you can imagine that on a big poster or on a radio sparring and TV ad, you ask, when was the last time you, and then you can cut in different people screaming and laughing and everything else. So again, it's giving you something that's disruptive, that stands out and all from a copy only idea. Now, obviously, if you were to do it in terms of a TV ad with all that may even imagery. It's no longer a copy only add put because he worked on the idea just verbally on its own. Suddenly you've got a new idea that you wouldn't have otherwise had. Let's look at a final example. This is Kellogg's crunching up conflicts. Now in the UK at the very least, they are consistently marketed with this strap line or something approximating the strap line. The trouble is they taste too good. So the fact that they taste too good is almost getting to be a problem. And that's the joke. Now for decades, they've run the same kind of campaign precisely because it's very effective given crunching up call flex their own identity and position them as a treat. So this campaign is featured people dropping everything for a bowl of crunching up to the detriment of their own lives and even those around them. So i had been actually if some of the adverts are endangering other people's lives. Now, of course, they're just making a joke is just an advertising truth. And the audience gets that it's a job because it's so ridiculous. But let's assume we're working on this. And for whatever reason, we can only use words. Maybe it's a radio spot. Maybe it's just a little ad where we haven't got much space, whatever, you know, an online banner. It doesn't really matter. We're just doing this as an exercise. So how do we turn this visual comic form of storytelling into words? Because usually the adverts, you see the person doing this thing that they're doing. And it causes all kinds of problem. You actually watch this and most of its visual with a few words to accompany it. How do we represent this verbally rather than visually? Well, how about this? Very simply, the narrator or the copywriter even starts to eat a bowl of crunchy nought and they can't finish their sentence. So it could work vocally with the narrator. Or it could work if you're just seeing it at its most basic element. If it's just a sentence in front of your eyes with the logo below it. This is the idea, how do we bring that to life? Crunchy, not nom nominal. The trouble is they nominal non, non, non, non nom, nom. Crunching or conflicts? The trouble is, they taste to god. So the idea, let's imagine this is on a poster. The person right in the headline for the poster. Brother currently not obviously, not literally. Are they writing down nom, nom, nom as they're doing it. But it's representing that this stuff is so tasty are so good that even the copyrights can't finish the sentence. Or maybe it will work even more effectively with an aerator. All the supposed to say is crunching up conflicts. The trouble is they say yes to God and they can't even say that. Now if you were to put the line at the end of it, you would probably say that the trouble is they tasty nominally under as well. You could even go one further. And now, having done that, you can actually imagine this working as a TV out as well. So imagine a narrator in a booth and he in a bowl of cereal in the cart and they just can't even finish a sentence. So they end up getting fired. But they don't care because they've got the box of cereal and the Chow and down through it. 10. Class Project 2: Create a Verbal-Only Idea: So let's turn this over to you again. Take one or more visually lead adverse in whatever format. It doesn't matter. Now see if you can replicate the message using only words. So this is the exact opposite. The mirror image, if you will, of what we did earlier, where we turn something with words and images into image only restrict it back. Now we're going to strip it back. We're going to strip out the image and Joshua's words. It could be the same idea that you've already had in the last exercise in word form. Or it could be something completely new. And again, it could be real, it could be imagined. You could use this on a live job, but try and stick to the same strap line or pay off line or message as in the original. Let's say you're taking an existing idea and redoing it or that you were working on before. Stick to the same thing if he can. Because not only does it discipline you a bit and give you a bit more focus is basically doing the opposite. You need to be able to use the skill no matter what you're working on. So rather than change the line to make the copy work, find a way to make the copy work, to work with that line. Because the other thing is, it's not just about coming up with an idea as a creative, you need to be able to come up with an idea that's got quote unquote lags. It means that it's got the potential to expand into a full blown campaign over all kinds of different media. And then to run for potentially along time. So we need to be able to do a lot of different things with the campaign. A great way to get it more legs is to be able to toggle between the visual and verbal, not only to conjure up new variations on the idea, but to be able to work across media in different ways and to complement the message. So here's some inspiration before you do this exercise on word only formats because you might be thinking, yeah, but I'm not done this before. Nothing springs to mind like you've show me, give me some stars for ten on what we can do. Well, first of all, you could do a postcard or letter. In other words, you can write it as a postcard or letter, is the viewer right into a friend. You could quote something, inspirational quotes or a really easy way into an ad. Because they often sum up what you're trying to say. We can use colloquial words or phrases, in other words, slang and things like that. And you can also write them in really humorous. Why said? The way they're spoken can be the way they are written and that really get people's attention. You can use screaming, shouting, or noises, as we've already covered. You can use lists of ingredients. So the kind of ingredients that go into your product or offer for instance. And you can actually repeat that visually in terms of like, let's say you were selling holidays officially, you might show a suitcase with different things in there that represents what you're gonna be doing on holiday and kind of the benefit of it. And then verbally you could do the same list as well. Government health warnings, warning signs in general. So you could say, beware causes lots of fun. Terrible example. You know, let's say it's more to do with danger. You're gonna have a little bit too much fun doing this. You can have mock rules. Rule number three, row number 47, whatever it is. And the mach rule, it may be a rule for when it's written as a rule. It's actually a benefit in my b rule number three, there are no rules. For instance, it could be text messages or text conversation, including text speak. It could be a snippet of conversations, reviews, or testimonials, real or imagined. It could be actually asking the audience a question. This is really good. It's a really powerful technique. Asking them a question, opens up a dialogue with them and gets them to provide the answer. And the opposite of that is actually answering machine or imagine question as if you're reading the audiences minds out. The first one asking the audience question might be, Isn't it time you fill in the blank? Whereas answering machine question will be something like yes, it is 50% off. Obviously can what we'd better ones than those kinda go in tough my head as I'm going through this. But you could also do Q and a or FAQ, So a question and answer. Well, frequently asked questions. And again, you could have the audience asking something and you provide in the answer. The answer might always be the same thing. So let's say you have TV advert or commercial showing different people in different scenarios. And there are a range of customers and they all want to know if the covered by the insurance. And so you could show all kinds of different people from farmers to extreme sport junkies, to granddad sipping a cup of tea. And the good news is you're saying, am I covered? Yes. Or you could have frequently asked questions and you could do some really bunkers questions, like do silly, really silly version of it. Because you know, all these companies have FAQs. What have you sent that up a little bit in joked around. You could also have scribbled notes or note to self notes yourself. Do this different next time, may, and maybe that's the product or something. Note to self shielded on this should abort this product. You could also have the small print thing where there's a little start, a little bit small print. It's usually small print is a bad thing, isn't it? It's taken away from me. Well, whatever it was reversed, whatever it was actually giving you extra stuff or the small print saying There is no small print, something like that. You can also use lists. People absolutely love lists. You look at most blogs. The role of lists are all top ten, top five, this top three, this three things, five things or a 100 best films of the decade, whatever it is. And you can do this in different ways. As a to-do list. As a shoppingList. Like your product at the end, maybe, for instance, Christmas. You might get this, get this, get this sprouts, Turkey, whatever. And then you've got a product. Can have a checklist, you can have a favorite list and you can even have a most hated less. And there you just tapping into its almost the antithesis of your products or service. Hangman is another good way. You can bring things to life verbally. You can use letters in words, or you can use words in phrases that are left blank on purpose for the audience to fill in mentally. Again, it's the pat on the back. The very famous example of this, which was done by a guy called George lowest, who claims Don Draper from madman was based on him. We don't know whether that's true. Hahaha, back in the old days. And basically, he was tasked with launching Tommy Hill figure brand. And they had a billboard and they had the hangman thing. And they had just enough letters for you to make out the names of famous designer brands. And then at the end they had the tummy healthy, good thing just underneath. So basically they were associated with that brand, with these top designers. 11. MODULE 2: ELEVATE YOUR IDEAS: Now, how do we improve our ability to take our ideas to a completely new level, whether we're just starting out in our creative careers, just starting to discover these ideas on how we work. We're more experienced pros and we just wanted to hone and develop attorneys a little bit more. What you're about to learn in this module, we're going to talk about how to sort your effective ideas from your ineffective ones. But also why it's important to have quote unquote bad ideas. I use that term very loosely because we don't really want to use good and bad per se. And we'll be getting into that as we talk through the module. We'll also be looking at how to take your creative thinking to the next level, as we've just discussed. And also the exact formula for a super effective idea to really ramp things up. And it's at once advanced, yet also very, very simple. And it will just elevate all of your ideas if you're not doing this already. This is simple formula that we'll be using in order to elevate ourselves above most of the competition, if you like. So let us look at what separates an effective idea from an ineffective idea beyond what we were talking about in module eight, when we're making sure first of all, that we're on message and that we're on brand and the look and feel is right and we have congruence. And we also are working with the full knowledge of what the media is and what the budget is and everything else. What else can we do to make our ideas effective out of the gate? First of all, we need to get it into our minds that there's no such thing as a bad idea. There's just an idea that isn't suited to the goal at hand. Either an idea is unsuitable or it's not relevant, or it's just not optimal, rather than good and bad, as effective or ineffective. Who's suitable or unsuitable, or as optimal or sub-optimal. What we're aiming for in this course is to not only come up with the right kind of campaigns, but also optimize them as well. And that's what this module is all about. It's about optimization. It's a skill to discern between what makes an effective and an ineffective idea. When we understand the theory, we can build and apply this skill really can get used to doing it. We're gonna teach you some simple concepts in this module. You'll then be able to kind of repeat every time you do a job. Now, the people who are best at what they do, they're like this because they make better decisions. This is what creative thinking is all about really. What separates you from the competition and how good you are. How consistent you are in your results is the decisions you're making as you're preparing to come up with ideas. And then actually in the midst of the conceptual process itself, come and go with the ideas. The mindset you should start off with. This is not self-censoring. Certainly not at first. Because the idea is you initially have, you may find the actually grow on you a little bit like when you hear a song on the radio, when you first hear it, if it registers at all, it might be that you just don't like the song. But then once you're here at three or four times, suddenly you're singing in the shower and suddenly it makes sense to you or something might happen in your life, that song becomes relevant. The lyrics are relevant to your circumstance and that changes the way you see the song. We need, the idea is time to breathe and maybe we need to show them to somebody else first as well. He may be able to recognize that no, this is a good idea. We also conversely, may see other people's ideas. And they don't realize how good an effective they are. And we can tell them as well and we can encourage them. So I think when we're working with individuals or teams, we should be sharing the so-called bad results with the so-called goods. So if you have ideas you think are a little bit weaker, share them anyway. Don't be afraid to put them on the table. Because a sketchy thought may actually spark another thought or idea that's much stronger. So you may have a half idea, anything that has not really whole idea, it doesn't quite make sense. Well, put it out in front of you anyway or in front of anybody that you're working with because that could spark a much better idea in the process. Also, a half idea can actually be combined with another half idea. He found this all the time. I've certainly had this experience, those crisp. And we have together as a team where we have one strand of thinking and another strand of thinking. And they just, it doesn't always work this way, but sometimes it's just a happy coincidence and they just come together and make them more compelling whole. Plus, getting your bad ideas down on paper actually makes room for stronger concepts. It's almost like clearing space and getting them out of the way. Because you know what, it's like. The first line that you might write in an e-mail. The first job that you might make someone not necessarily the best one? Likely. Do you think I should have said this or shut us a dao? That would've been a funny thing to say. So give yourself a chance to get the so-called rubbish out of the way we like. And also by seeing what wrong looks like, what you perceive as wrong, it actually can help conceive what right looks like. For instance, let's say you're looking at picture of a whale. Now in isolation that may not look huge if you put a cat next to it, suddenly you got perspective. Anything that are whales massive and the cat is tiny. You take the whale away, then the cat doesn't look as small and don't know what a whale and a cat we'll be doing together at the same time. Who knows? But sometimes you need perspective. The wrong almost gives you a clearer sense of the right. A bad ideas down and the juices flowing. How can we get into the next level of thinking? How can we really raise our game in terms of the adverts? And the idea is that we're producing all top-level ideas have a couple of things in common. First of all, they capture the attention of the audience. That seems like a bit of a no-brainer, but you have to do that. But also they actually create emotional investment and what we couldn't into a bit of a formula for you. So you can remember what to do and how to do it. 12. Capture the Attention: First of all, let's look at capturing the attention of the audience. Now, the worlds are noisy place. So unsurprisingly, our campaigns needs to capture the attention in the first place. All these things competing for their sensory attention. Listen to this, look at this feel this experience, this. You have to stand out in a busy space. You almost have to cut through the noise. So if we don't capture the attention in the first place, people aren't gonna, they're just not going to engage anyway with warmer saying, we need to basically stop the audience in their trucks, or at the very least catch their eye or in fact the ray. But we don't actually need to completely convinced someone there. And then maybe they're driving down the road. Maybe they walk in past poster. Maybe they're just flicking through TV. Maybe the seeing an online banner. Maybe they're just quickly reading an email that gets sent to them. Maybe the browsing through social media now it was scrolling through and they see an advert. Now, whatever it is, it doesn't need to tell the whole story necessarily. You can tell the story through a coordinated campaign, but more importantly, it doesn't need to convince them to take the action right then. Because the latest thinking is that it takes up to 16 points of contact with the campaign for the audience to take the action and TBI or to do whatever you want them to do. So that's 16 separate touch points. However, we do need to get their attention on interested each touch point to a certain degree. We want them to consume the message. We want them to see the imagery here, the words read the words. See the strap line each time. So we do need to capture the attention and keep it for long enough to deliver that message. Your hard to pin down an animal long enough to jab it with a needle. As essentially what we're trying to do in a really crude way of putting it across to this end. And effective message must speak to people. And it must speak to people in two ways. First of all, it must speak to their heart through the emotional subconscious mind we've already talked about. And B, it must also talked to the head through the rational conscious. Again. Here we're talking about emotional benefits and then we're backing it up with rational features. Now again, we don't need to do that in every single communication. For incidence of billboards, not gonna go through all the features on an iPhone, but by the time they come to the website, obviously it will then go through the more rational stuff and all the sub benefits to convince them to buy. The reason we combine both is because where the heart and head go, the body follows and it always follows in the form of action. Again, we've got the subconscious mind on board. It wants the thing, the conscious mind is agreeing to it. So action and choose. This means when we're creating our ideas, we really want to, not only to grab the attention, but also to create this emotional investment. We actually want to aim to make them laugh, smile, gas, recoil, raise an eyebrow and surprise whatever it is we almost lightened need to keep them entertained in some way, even into that form of entertainment is to shock and scare them and repel them in some way. It's all about pattern interruption. Pattern interruption snaps people out of autopilot and turns them onto our message. Now, what are we talking about there? Well, what we're talking about is that 95% of behavior is habitual. You're on autopilot and ninety-five percent of the timeouts, but it's thought to be what do you think needs to happen? We need to get them to pay conscious attention long enough to take this message and we need to turn their heads, if you like, and really tune into our message just long enough for us to deliver it. Because otherwise it's just going to get lost. If they are leafing through a magazine and you don't get them to stop. It's just like wallpaper. Essentially. If they're watching TV and not really paying any, any kind of attention, they're not going to remember the message the next time they see it. There's just going to be no connection there. This is what pattern interruption is all about. 13. Disruption is Your Friend 1/2: A disruption is the key to capture an attention essentially in the advertising world. To go deeper into this subject of interrupting audiences habit patterns of thinking of the visual focus of the mental chatter. You may have heard this term before. If it's fully understood, is very powerful, which is why many agencies is very astutely based their own offer around it. If you go onto the website, they may talk about disruption. Put simply, it's the ability to cut through the overwhelming noise of a saturated world, all the sensory information flying at you. We want to be able to cut through all that so that the audience takes away our message above others. Yet most campaigns that felt ill and they fail for land because they fall at this very important first hurdle, the capturing the intention side, which depends on disruption. The thing is, though about disruption, they fail not because the campaigns are bright enough or loud enough, but because they don't stand out enough. Well, hang on. Robbie might be saying, Well, why are you talking about how can you be bright and loud and not stand out? It just seems like an oxymoron. It seems like it doesn't make sense. Well, let's backup a little bit and dive deeper into what disruption really is. First, I want you to picture walking into the room. Let's say it's a large room. This room is really busy. And let us imagine that everyone in the room is dressed head to toe in neon colors in pinks and yellows and orange and green. And these neon colored t-shirts with matching trousers or leggings or whatever, however you imagine it. Now imagine everyone in the same room. They were all shouting and waving in your direction, the trying to get your attention yelling at you to look that way. The point in at the chest and saying read this slogan, read the slogan. And the slogans are written in big bold funky letters on the chest. In the Zola. There's always noise going on, all these bright colors going on. And all these people, these needy people try and get you to focus on them. Now, imagine that one lone other person in that room, and they're dressed in shades of black and gray. They're not jumping up and down. In fact, they're not even saying a word. The wherein this plain black t-shirt that says just ignore me in smaller. Who do you think stands out most in this room? Is it the faceless, noisy, needy mass? The people you struggled to tell apart from one another and can't wait to get away from? Or is it the one person in the room who's sporting a completely different look with a different energy in a different agenda. Apparently. Who has the most sense of mystery as well? Who do you want to know more about and really spend time with? By contrast, well, the key to disruption is not about being the brightest and the loudest person in the room. It's been the most unique. So the person who's loci, who's just completely differently, the person who stands out is the person who you remember. Think of how many big massive budget CGI crash, bang, wallet, blockbusters stayed with you for days after watching them. How many of the scenes do you remember how to the dialogue? What about the character journeys and things like that? How many creepy horrors? Like little low budget G3P horrors or thought-provoking movies stuck with you long after they ended. It's not the in your face business that you remember. The inventiveness of what you watch, that you remember. And it's saying that advertising, it's not the interface of the creative execution. The inventiveness of the creative strategy that causes the disruption of the thought or habit pattern. Now generally speaking, there are four levels of disruption and there are four methods, the four levels of disruption. And we're going to generalize them down to four, the four levels of disruption. First of all, we've got disrupting the potential. We just snapped people out of what the focusing on what the locking up, what they're listening. We just get their attention to go, oh, what's this? Then we've got disrupting their behavior. Well, we actually changed the behavior of the person. We introduce a new habit or a new choice or a new decision. This is what we're essentially driving out. Really as great as we're trying to introduce a new behavior, even if the new behavior is just buying X, Y, or Z, then we've got disrupting the marketplace. So it could be a brand new product that changes the landscape. If you like, a product with a new USP that suddenly all the other products try and be like, why can you think of the iPod when that came out for the iPad, suddenly there were loads a new tablets available because of that. Another example is watches. The watch market used to be dominated by Swiss watches. It was all mechanical. Then in the late seventies, early eighties, Casio and Japan started making watches. They started using this quartz digital technology. And then everything. The whole, the whole watch market basically shifted to the Far East. And then the whole marketplace shifted in the whole industry shifted to digital. Lead can also have disrupting the standard model. For instance, when Karl Benz started to make one, EAD developed one of the first motor cars have not the first. And obviously now known as Mercedes Benz. Mercedes was an investor in carbons because his old investor thought he was mad when he said he was gonna invent the motorcar and he had to find a new investor and that was Mercedes became him. But when he was originally developed in this mode, scar, the horse and cart, that was kind of the standard model. And everybody thought, oh, horse and cart is gonna be around forever. That's how we travel. This idea of the motor cars is ridiculous. And to the point where Karl Benz, he used to have to go and test it at night, so no one saw it when it broke down and fail than the outer push it back home. But obviously now the horse and car is seen as this is used as a metaphor for old fashioned because the standard model was disrupted. 14. Disruption is Your Friend 2/2: We've got four methods of disruption that tie into these. And as you'll see the each turn it on its head. So let's look at the first 1. First of all, we can make a different kind of noise. Let's say you've got sports arenas. There's a ton of noise going on, the crowd sharing and shouting and everything else. Well, what does the referee use to stop the play to get applies attention in this really noisy environment. These are whistle because it's SRO, it makes a completely different noise to everything else and it cuts through the noise. Or you can go in other way, like say a teacher. That would be a really noisy class when they walk in. Let's say she stands at the front and doesn't make a single sound. What tends to happen is one-by-one, the kids in the class stop talking, stop shouting, stop screaming, and they all quiet and down. And then the lesson can begin. She's making a different kind of knows, so different that she's not even making a nice. But what happens is everybody pays attention to that noise. And suddenly the surrounding noise drops away because it's different, it stands out. Now, let us say the method of disruption is visual. Well, here we would look purposefully out of place. You could call it standing out. It's using our neon metaphor again. Everybody is dressed in really bright clothes and this, that, and the other well of you are dressed in black. You just stand out because you'll look different. In a lot of cases is a lot of advertising, however, that's trying to wall off the same. This is the opposite of what you should be doing. You should be trying to look different. Not by trying to be bigger and brighter and bolder, but just been different than the way you look. And of course, authentic to your brand. Now, you can also go in a new direction. And if you take the Casio example, that's what they did by one in a new direction. They went digital rather than mechanical and they disrupted the marketplace. Then finally, we have, when it comes to the standard model, well, rather than trying, a lot of people are trying to upgrade the standard model or work on it a little bit, trying to make it 1% better or whatever each time. Well, the best way to disrupt the standard model, the standard way of doing things in society or whatever it may be, is to render the standard model obsolete, essentially to replace it with something brand new. That's another form of disruption that's kind of beyond the realms of what we're doing here. Most of the time, most of the time we're gonna be making a different noise, looking purposefully our place, or going in a new direction. Now, to show you how it works at its most basic level, you can disrupt people's attention through an advert on Facebook, just through the use of an image. Now, it's actually the purpose of an image on a sponsored Facebook post or paid adver to stop the Facebook user in their tracks. That's the, pretty much the sole purpose of the image. It's just simply to stand out is to stop the person scrolling. The choice of image. The idea is that the color of it should be different to the color palette of Facebook because it makes you stop in your tracks from all this other noise going on. Now, it helps if it's the image is aligned or the video is aligned to your message, of course, but it's actually not necessary. Which is a bit of a head scramble for an advertising creative when it comes to what we've been taught about traditional advertising, everything should match up and everything should be complete. But as long as it stops those eyeballs and four fingers from moving down the screen. That's essentially all it's there to do. A bit of a side point. But if you're working on a Facebook ad, that's quite useful to know. We can also look at another example of our different kind of noise. Budweiser is Wassup campaign, let's call it. Remember the advert where the guy calls up his friend and he goes like that and they will go West to do it better than I did. When Budweiser did this. It was kind of early days of viral marketing really. Essentially everyone was doing it to each other. You'd bring your friend and do it or you go with their WhatsApp and all that. And you'd think about Budweiser because it record the advert, you recall the imagery of it happening and then obviously can't disassociate from Budweiser. And it was just Budweiser again, it's beer company is doing something different. The g2, they've got no other choice. They've not got any USPS, has gotten nothing unique to say. Essentially, they have to say or do something in a unique way instead, remember we said in an earlier module, we said, you can either say something unique or you can say something in a unique way, the same thing in a unique way. And that's how they cause disruption and therefore engagement, how they caught people's attention. This is a great technique, especially when we've not got anything unique. 15. Create Emotional Investment: Emotional investment. This is the second part of this little 12 punch we've got. This is all about speaking to the essence of who our audience are. What do they like? How did they identify with the world? What are the goals for the future? How would they like to live or what problem are they trying to solve? We're always trying to solve one problem or another. Enroll was trying to strive to achieve something different or better in our lives. Again, it comes back to the pain and pleasure equation. And it also goes back to the work we did earlier in the process where we've done our research, whether it's already been done for us or we do on our own research into who the audience are and we've gone into their shoes so that we can see beyond our own biases. When we see the world from their perspective, we can feel the emotions that they feel and we can actually understand where they're coming from button. Not only do we need to understand their emotional point of view, we need to do another little trick. Now, what we're doing is creating an open loop for our audience to complete. So what does that mean? What would we mean when we're talking about open loops? While the open loop is another name for a cliffhanger, you'll most often hear the term open-loop used in things like TV and film, but you'll also hear it used in, for instance, email marketing. And let's say you're watching an episode of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. It's the big moment that the episode ends on the, leaves, something open in the story and then it says To be continued. And you think, Oh, I've got to wait another week to watch it. But you know, you're going to watch it because it's left you hanging essentially. These cliff hangers are also called open loops. It's called an open-loop because there's a gap in what's just happened on what's gonna happen in he needs to resolve that gap. Now humans are actually hardwired to want to close any loops that are left open in the telling of a story. And there's a good reason for that. There's a good reason why a rational, intelligent, successful professional, for instance, will stay up later than they should read the end of the novel or the end of a chapter, knowing that the next day they're gonna be super tired and it's going to affect their life. And that's because the pain of an open-loop pain of something unresolved is greater than the pain of being too tired the next day. The trouble is a lack of resolution. Essentially is uncertainty. When our brains were wiring up, our ancient ancestors were running about. Uncertainty could spell death. Not knowing what's coming around the corner, whether it's a saber tooth tiger or whatever it is, it's dangerous. We're hard wired to avoid it. We're hard-wired to find out what's happening and resolve these things. So desperately want to close any loops left open in the telling of a story. Because when we do that, we know what's coming around the corner. We can predict stuff and we can survive. Again, it's going back to these really basic functions in the limbic brain that people sometimes call the reptile brain. When you come to creating your ideas, always make sure you build open loops into them. Now you may be doing this are automatically already. Even if you are, It's useful to be consciously aware of what you're doing because you just have more control over and you can double-check that you doing this to a good extent. So as we've covered open loops in ideas, they weren't very similar, but not quite the same to film and TV and chapters in novels. And also in terms of marketing e-mails. But open loops in actual concepts are a little bit different. It's not that there's a clef anger per se. It's just that this is actually a small gap in the telling of the story. What do we mean by that? Well, in other words, we don't explain absolutely everything. Instead we leave a gap within the copy and, or the imagery, then the audience has to do a little bit of work to fill in that gap. Because they have to do a little bit of work. They actually spend the time investing in advert. Which means we're not just grabbing their attention. We're keeping it for a long enough to get our message across. We're also create an emotional investment at the same time. Now, the gap can't be too big. In other words, it can't be too abstract. It's got to be recognizable if you like, what's going on to make the leap. But it can't be too small either. In other words, it can't be too predictable or boring. Let's look at an example. This is a really basic example because we want to show how it works on even the most mundane kind of adverts. We can improve and elevate just by adding an open loop. Now this is one without an open-loop. We just saw in some milk. And you can see on the bottler of the milk is now half prices lost two pounds to British bands, It's now one pound. Then we also have the date the author ends on the sticker. And you wanted to go to town on this, you could have a big flush with operands this date. But this is assuming it's just an advert. Let's say it's in the store. You're walking past it. Got this advert. And it says half-price milk, limited time only. Now, you might go. Okay, I've priced milk, let's say it's colorful. It grabs your attention. It's doing at least half the job. But is it creating any emotional investment? Are you having to do any of the work? No, you're not because the image says it and then the headline says it as well. And there's no gap. There is no gap there between image and headline. Now let's look at one with an openly. We've not only simplified the art, we've added another dimension to it. Now it's, again, it's still only milk gets very souls and there's no big deal. But we've just made it a little bit of Upon. We're no longer saying exactly what the image says in the headline. Milk it while it lasts. In other words, take advantage of this offer before it runs out. Now people have to make the tiny little leap between the colloquial phrase, milk it. In other words, to extract more out of something while it lasts. So don't miss out, get this. They have to do a title or task which forces them engage more with the advert than otherwise. And in the process, even if they don't consciously think this, they actually give themselves a pat on the back. Now the golden rule in advertising, essentially creative advertising certainly is never have the headline saying the same thing as the image. Because there's no, there's just no engagement required. And then the person looking at the ADA, they don't have anything to do and therefore they're almost like washes over them. Now this means that the copy must tell 1.5 of the story and the imagery. The other, when I say copy and imagery, it could be in a post-survey, can be in a press advert Coby on the TV in terms of a script and moving images, it really doesn't matter what it is. The audience then connects the two in the middle. And as a result, they give themselves a little pat on the back. Say well-done. In other words, they give themselves credit for closing the loop. And they get the relief of closing the loop to get a little, a tiny little dopamine high as a result. Let's look at some other examples of how this works. Audiences give themselves a pat on the back when they, first of all work out who the murderer is on a TV show or in a novel. They might give themselves apart on the back when they get the punchline in a joke. They may get the cultural reference made in a movie that maybe somebody else or most people they know won't get, but they get because they know movies really well. They may give themselves apart on the back when they know the answer to a question on a TV game show. Or if they figure out the meaning to a song, lyric of the answer a question correctly in a seminar or class. Now, the main thing in the correlating thing in all these examples is that the audience gets a positive feeling when they associate that feeling with the thing they're interacting with. And in terms of our job as creative advertisers, we want them to attach that positive feeling that pat on the back with brand or product or service or whatever we are promoting. 16. The False Negative Example: Let's look at something. And Chris Cole, the engagement ring. Basically once you've got a compelling message, but let's assume you've worked on a proposition. Let's assume you've developed a strap line even. Well, the best way to deliver your proposition is with the engagement ring. As we've already covered. As humans, we're all kind of on a need-to-know basis in that we always need to know. We need to know how something ends or we need to know what everything means. And we need, well, we try and go over in our heads to predict how things will turn out. And what happens is here, put simply. First of all, we create a gap in understanding so that the audience has to put 22 together. They have to, they have to fill in that little gap in the loop if you want in the logically in order to work out what's going on. Then when they do that, a little connections made a little bit of electricity, a little bit of lightning. And that's the point of realization. Then what happens as we talked about the pat on the back, It's the moment of reward where they feel both the relief of solving the riddle of your, now it's not palpable. It's not necessarily gonna go, oh, we are fine for views and go for that. Now, it's gonna be just a little tiny thing on a subconscious level at the connected that loop and figured it out. And they'll get a little bit of a reward as a result. So just think of it as an engagement ring. The best way to deliver a proposition with an engagement ring, to get the kind of response we want. Just to go back a little bit though. The gap in understanding is the most important part. That's the bit we have to do. This is the absolute key to the whole process. Audiences are almost always smarter and more sophisticated than many people in advertising think are in business. Think if they have the right frames of reference, this is important. And if the gap in understanding is the right size, what do we mean by those two things? Well, basically, it needs to be the right gap for the audience in the subject matter. The frames of reference, their experiences while they're familiar with maybe the way the terminology or vernacular they're familiar with. And also the size of the Leap. Let's say you have a pop culture reference or a movie reference or something like that. The audience needs to be aware of what that references in order to make the leap. It can't be too big and it can't be too small. It's kind of like the Goldilocks zone. Again, the thing is it might be a bigger or smaller gap for you or your colleagues or clients. Hopefully it won't because you're the one doing the idea is more likely to be your colleagues or clients. In other words, they may not get it. It may be too obvious for them or it may be too abstract for them. But that doesn't matter. He knew may also think, Is this too obvious or is this to obstruct? The reason it doesn't matter is because it's all about the audience, is only ever about the audience. The gap needs to be right for them so that they have the frame of reference so that they're getting it, but it's not too obvious. Let's give you an example. Okay. So myself and Chris, we worked on a job some years ago. It was for a campaign aimed at a technology audience. And the kind of tech geniuses who design apps and AI and, and write code and all that kind of stuff. And if we try to talk about algorithms and things like that, encode and you know, all the technical stuff where you would have been way out of our depth, neither of us would've known what we were talking about and we've probably got it wrong. At the same time, the landscape, in terms of the advertising landscape they were used to seeing and what was, although it was all kind of saying it was all kind of wallpaper was ones and zeros. And the next-gen tech and whiz bang and coding and everyone's showing the future. Essentially, our message was, I can't remember what we were selling now. It was a next gen kind of cell and it was future and it was does this, that and the other. But what no one else was doing was showing the past. We said basically, everyone's digging this way. How can we zag the other way? Because that's how we're gonna get disruption of the creative outlet, a lot of the campaigns out there, we're talking to the head through possibility, through potential, through challenge. They weren't really talking to the heart in terms of the child who loved apply. Because people who love tech and stuff like that liked to play around, like to experiment. So this is where we figured out we could not only go in a different direction, as in not talking to the intellectual in the person, but talking to the child in the person. Not just about going in different directions. We can make a different kind of noise and we could actually look purposely our place to disrupt the audiences pattern. But on top of that, we can also deliver our proposition through our engagement ring that we're talking about here. By simply creating small gap in understanding that our audience would get. Now the exact content and wording of the campaign, again, they escaped me. We've done so many. But what I do remember is that we created a campaign based around 80s and 90s, arcade and computer games. I played some of these games and they were really kind of quirky and the odd, really cool like retro music. So the idea was not only to stir up fond memories in people old enough to apply them, bought the justice cool and popular today with younger audiences because they're seen as retro classics. The point is the gap in understanding was too big and too abstract for the agency account director we were working with because they didn't have the frame of reference like they didn't have the memory of it. They didn't have the emotional connection to it wasn't part of the childhood growing up. It was unfamiliar to them and neither was it familiar to the client on an emotional level, boats, the client had been smart enough from the outset to recognize that they didn't have the same knowledge as the audience. They'd predetermined that wherever we did, it will be shown to the coders, their engineers, and their product designers to test their levels of engagement with the concept, which is a great idea. Because obviously they were essentially the target market. That doesn't happen very often. You get that, but it was a nice happy accident. You can see right there. And then if the campaigns work and forget that chance, it's a great idea. Now we showed it to their people, the people who represented the target market and absolutely loved it because they got to make the connection between the message and the recognition of games that we will drop in hence in visual clues us to. And in doing so, it also validated their retro gaming knowledge and stood up positive feelings connected to memories of the youth and things like that. If they were old enough, the more recent memories of discovering and playing these old classic games and all that stuff. So in this case, as in all cases, it wasn't our frame of reference or the agencies frame of reference or the client's frame of reference that counted only the audience's ability to close the gap based on who they were and what they responded to. But that's the key really to the engagement ring. It's all about that gap in understanding, making sure it's the right size and making sure it's the right frame of reference for the audience. So even if you think, well, this is dominant down a little bit, well, it might be just right for the audience or review, think it's over. This is really highfalutin and maybe this is a bit pretentious. Maybe that's right though. Just focus on the audience and you won't go wrong. 17. Connecting to Emotions: This leads us into connecting to emotions. This is part of this emotional connection. It's not just about the raw emotion, whether it's fear, surprise, worry, love, whatever it is. It's also about getting them to spend a little bit of energy getting into these emotions. So there's a saying by Donald Hebb, neuro psychologist, I think he said it in 1949 and it's now known as Hebb's Law in neuropsychology and that is what fires together, wires together. What do we mean by that? Well, the brain automatically binds the chemicals associated with an emotion, whatever is being experienced at that moment in time. When we have an emotion, the brain essentially produces a chemical. Fluids the body with a chemical. Fair has a chemical, love has a chemical. Laughter, has a cat. Joy has a chemical. Whatever it is, there's chemical for it. And it will basically bind that chemical to the experience at that particular moment. That means that wherever emotion we store up in our audience, they'll then associate that emotion with whatever it is that we're promoting. That's the beauty of this. We can really take advantage of this. This means we actually, we don't need to just connect with one type of emotion. You can do it with both. So let's actually look at negative first. When a product or service will solve, will lessen, will relieve or avoid the problem we want to connect offer to negative emotions. So let's say you've got painkillers, negative emotions, good to sell off, because it's all about solving the problem. That's what our product is doing. But we must promote the offer as the solution and antidote to the negative feelings. In other words, a move away from pain towards pleasure so we don't just go. You've got to add a girl terrible for your owner. That star, where we then position our products is the antidote or solution. Let's look In some examples of how this works. Legal advice, we're reversing injustice, avoiding loss or confusion. Antibacterial detergents quelling fear of germs and preventing contraction of illness. Air fresheners, getting rid of nasty smells, skin cleanser cleaning and GAAP, embarrassing and painful acne. Food on the girl, calling hunger without interrupting your day. Notice how in each case the product binds to the negative pain point and reverses it through a positive resolution. When we've got something that's solving a problem, what do we want to do? We want to magnify the problem. We want to connect to the negative and then turn it round into a positive. So anybody who tells you, and I've heard this plenty of time before, we can't say anything negative related to our product. It's Boulder Dash Conway partner, because we can do exactly that and we should do exactly that. If we're solving a problem. The darker it is, the brighter our product will look in comparison to it. Now let's connect to the positive as well. Many times will be firing and wiring with only positive emotions because this is advertising London, of course, things are nice and shiny and bright. So what do we mean by this? Well, there are no real pain points, say an apple and there's only really fun and beautiful experiences that make life or rich, effortless experience. Instance, in most Apple campaigns, that's what you see. Now. Paint does exist in this equation that we're talking about, even connected to the positive, there is a pain yet. We're not really highlighting the pain or we're not saying, Oh, look at this. You've got a headache, you've got this wrong. This is wrong, this is wrong. The pain is cultivated by the audience. In this case, it comes from the gap between where they are now and where they could be with the product or service. Suddenly where they are now isn't good enough. It's like if you spend time with millionaires, you want to be a millionaire and you feel inadequate because you're not a millionaire. If you are a millionaire and you spend time with billionaires, suddenly you feel inadequate because you're not a billionaire. Even though before you probably felt really rich now you actually feel pouring comparison because you'll see in what you quote unquote lack there in front of you by comparison. Let's look at a few more examples of this. Let's take perfume or cologne. This increases desirability, and therefore it comes with a slew of associated benefits. A luxury car means increased comfort and self-esteem. Streaming service, for instance, Netflix brings increased joy and entertainment. Two-for-one on take-away pizza. Well, you get an increased sense of satisfaction in terms of value for money, enjoyment. And let's say you're socializing together. And also satiety as well as it's going to fill you up. Let's take something a bit more joyless. Talk about business to business services. Well, the positive here is increased profitability for the business. In B2B, as we call it. It's almost always about the bottom line. So all this means that, let's say the above examples are marketed effectively. If they are, then the audience will feel both a heightened sense of desire and consequently an increased sense of dissatisfaction or lack with where they are. Now, when we can harness the twin psychological forces of both these push and pull actions, we can drive action in the form of going, okay, I'm gonna buy or I'm going to expand this energy on what they want me to expand it on. Let's recap a moment because it's a lot to take in. Creating negative emotional connections. Involves, essentially involves crisis management. For instance, defending the current position, mitigating future disaster, or stopping or avoiding pain. Creating positive emotional connections, however, is concerned with the effect of increase. It's moving towards greater pleasure and away from the pain of any new found lack. Which means our ideas can fire and wire with both negative emotions. First by magnifying the existing or potential pain as we just touched on. And positioning GAR offer as the means to move away from it. This is a very simple way. You're working on something that stops a pain point. It's a very simple way to think of the setup of an Adobe like you magnify the pain and then you position the offer away from it. Very simple. You use a negative emotion to introduce your offer. And then of course, if it was a TV ad, for instance, by the end of the advert, this is positive emotion to replace it. Then we've got positive emotions. These magnify the potential for increased pleasure. And then our offer is essentially the vessel is the vehicle or the means to move towards it. You could have this, or you could only have this by investing your time, your energy, or money in this. 18. A Formula For Ideas: It would be really useful if we had a formula for ideas in order just to put this together and recap it. And fortunately we have one. Put simply, remember this formula. This is r equals mc squared, if you will. We capture the attention. First of all, we have to do that in order to engage with the audience in the first place. And to do that, we have to cause disruption as we've already covered. But we also need to then engage the audience in terms of making them do a little bit of work so that they invest long enough in the advert for us to get our message across. And we do that by creating an open-loop with a gap in the understanding. And then we get that engagement ring factor, if you will. What we're able to do then is then connect them to the main emotion, the pain point or the pleasure point that we're conveying in order to motivate them subconsciously. And therefore then the subconscious will go to work on the conscious and say, Okay, we want this, this is going to move us away from pain. It's gonna move us towards pleasure, etc. etc. And therefore, you don't just get then emotional investment in the advert. You then get action or as a result, Maybe not okay, when they engage with your idea per se, but further down the line. So let's say somebody sees a big billboard and there's an advert for cereal or a cleaning product or whatever it is, we're not putting a call to action on there to say go online and buy it. Now. It may say available in this store may be. But what we're doing is we're saying up sail further down the line so that when they're in the store, when they're in the supermarket shopping with their trolley or the cart, they see the product and then on some level lie recall the advert, the message and they decide that that's the product for them. They put it in the trolley or the car and then they go and buy it. No matter if they have the experience that tallies up with what we've promoted, we're going to form some sort of a loyalty there. And then they're gonna repeat the action later on. When we get this right, when we get the attention, when we get the pat on the back and when we tap into a fear or desire, what we get is what we like to call a sticky idea, a winning idea. It's basically sticky idea. It has what we call sticker ability. In other words, it sticks in the brain. What we really wanted to do is stick in the mind. But of course, in order to, for the mind to have the memory of this advert and the emotional resonance, whether it has to create new neural pathways to connect to it. The conscious mind pays attention to the message. It goes into the subconscious mind and that's where it sits and it bubbles and boils in the background. Now it may be at the floor of the mind if the need for something is urgent or pressing or if they're in the position of the buying Gail, something like that. Let's say it's point of sale. But in most cases it's going to sit in the back of the mind and it's just gonna grow and grow and grow. It's a bit like a seed. And with every touch point of a campaign, we're gonna water and nurture that seed until it's ripe, until it's ready, until the audience takes action. And again, we may have 16 different touch points. So we need a really containable idea with a really strong message in the middle of it that just keeps nurturing this idea that keeps getting their attention, that keeps causing them to close these open loops and keeps tapping into this fear, old desire and reminding them every single time. And that's how we create a sticky idea in it's how we create a sticky brand. 19. Showing vs Tellingl: There are two more elements to create a highly effective idea. They'll help you tell a big, bold story without stretching the truth too far. First of all, you've probably heard this saying, show, don't tell. Well, what exactly does it mean? Well, first of all, it's relevant to creative advertising as it is in novels, movies, you've probably heard this used in relation to a film or a book. Well, it just means that you're not spelling things out in terms of telling. You're actually demonstrating what you're trying to get across, demonstrating the point I'm trying to go across through actions, through things happening. Because we're always telling a story, even if it's the story of a business brand or offer. So this is really relevant to what we're doing here. We must tell the story through action rather than through claim when it comes to advertising. In a story and novel or a movie, it might be just be explaining the story of what's happening. This happens, then that happens and nothing less. And they think that this is who this character is, rather than actually just the characters applying certain traits and taking certain actions that tells the story, which do you think is more compelling? Well, it's more compelling when you watch something happen in, through the actions of a character. And it's the same with the advertising. Rather than just saying, this does this, this does that if we can actually see it in action, if we can see the product or service in action, it just makes it far more powerful. Always ask yourself, are we showing, are we telling? An example is a global awareness campaign for Viagra, let's say, and it's a fictional campaign. It's not fictional products, obviously, everybody knows the little blue pill by now, but we're just gonna use a fictional example. Now, let's use a proposition. Let's say Viagra is trusted to help manage, achieve, and maintain a interaction. What does that look like is a strap line, first of all, well, it keeps you up at night. See what we're doing. There is not only are we reducing our condensing the message down, we're adding a little bit of humor in there. We're actually creating an open-loop already. People need to work out what that means. So you can, this is actually an example of where you can just have a headline and Crane open-loop as well. It doesn't need to be in headline or image, and vice versa. You can have an image where a story is being told and you need to connect the dots if you like. And we'll begin to this in module turnabout how to do this. Now a telling version of the idea might look like this. It might simply be telling you, it keeps you up at night Viagra and then there's a box of Viagra that night? Yes, this does have an open loop. You have to do a little bit of the work and it doesn't mean keep me awake, means helped me get and maintain interaction. But this is a bit blend. I mean, it's not the best for grabbing our attention. And there's not a lot of emotional connection here. Showing will allow us to do more of this, make our artwork a lot harder as well. Showing version of the idea might look like this. The headline is keeping fronts up at night and the MHC is of course, of the Eiffel Tower. Now what does the Eiffel Tower represented in this other? Well, it represents the file-like object is the direction. First of all, you have to do a little bit more closing loops to do that. You have to connect the Eiffel Tower to France. You have to connect keeping fronts up at night. Okay, Got it, Got that. But also you have to connect the visual open-loop. When you do that, you not only give yourself a big apart on the back, you're also getting the humor of it. So suddenly this idea is a little bit funny. There's a little bit of jam going on. And you connect with it a little bit more emotionally as well. And also it's more attention grabbing simply because you're looking at a picture of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night as opposed to a box of Viagra, then we don't actually even need the line at the bottom keeping you up at night. We can just have the box. So we can still have the product in the bump corner. This is a campaign. We're talking about a global awareness campaign, but we're talking about France in the advert will wise this well, you can then see how this campaign would work. You could do it for every country, pretty much around the world, more or less every country has a major city and more or less every major city has a large phallic shaped paper. There's a tall building that resembles Amanda bandage. So suddenly got a big campaign. All just from showing, rather than telling if we stopped at the tallying advert can't really do much with that. You got a one-off ad that's there. There's a little bit of a pat on the back and an open-loop button. How much you want. Suddenly when you show the message, suddenly you've got a campaign, you've got a whole campaign because you just don't that little bit more work to think, how can we show this in a creative way? And also it's worth mentioning that if you look at the headline on this slide here, a global awareness campaign for Viagra. We've also got a strategy which allows us to think in this way. In truth. We've talked about showing. Now it's time to talk about truth telling. By all means, tell the truth and definitely do. Bought soon as this is advertised. We're not just going to tell any old truth. We're going to tell the best version of the truth. What on earth am I talking about here? Well, the future of any brand or business depends on the loyalty of its audience. And the loyalty is built by a simple equation. Again, you match the promise of a particular end result with the actual end result. What do I mean by this? Well, if the actual end result doesn't resemble the promise we made, but we were made as the audience. We're gonna feel cheated. I'm gonna say, well, they told me it was this and it's not. You're always gonna, no matter how good the thing is, you're going to have a negative experience to some extent, even if the thing is still great, you're going to think, Wow, But I was promised this. When that happens, we actually fire and y and negative emotions with that brand. The opposite happens, what we're aiming to do. And of course we then tell anybody or listen about it, about our bad experience. And usually most of the time that happens instantly allow and social media. And then that's why you get companies who are people are monitoring the feeds Just to, just to scramble into action, to try and put out the fire. But there's no need to do that if we take the right approach with our creative advertising. Not just only in concepts that are expressed through marketing, but also on things like websites, things like e-mails. How do we amp it up without going too far? Well, we're going to talk about this now. We're gonna talk about the truth and how far you can stretch it and how to stretch it as well without breaking that perceived promise to the audience. Now, you can do this. You can stretch the truth because the customer experience needing actually measure up exactly to how it's portrayed. For instance, Viagra, no one in their right mind thinks via grid can give them an interaction the size of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe some crazy personality thinks that's true, but I think the vast majority of people would agree That's not gonna happen. They know that it's a little bit like creative license. Audiences understand the difference between absolute reality and advertising reality. Just light will only watch Independence Day. They know that aliens aren't really invading. It's just a story. And they know they understand that we're using a bit of creative license in our messaging. They allow us this because that means we can entertain them. If they didn't allow us any creative license. Everything will be really boring. Wouldn't in the world will be a dollar place even without others. However, at the same time, the work doors need to represent some kind of reality. It needs to be real on some level, it needs to be true on some little level. Our job as creative thinkers is to understand where that level is, where the line is, and to identify the true experience of the product or service. Then we tell the biggest and best version. Now, the more we exaggerate the truth to otherworldly levels, the more extreme it is, the less the audience will expect or desire the brand to deliver that experience. And so they won't get disappointed. And let's take an example of this. Imagine this scenario. Imagine this advert on TV. Let's say we've got a sombrero wherein donkey appears just as someone opens a bug of Chile nachos, let's say there's some new Chelly nachos. The audience is not going to actually expect to sombrero wearing donkey to appear out of thin air when they open a bag of Chile nachos. After the Berlin buck from the sharp or store. Neither are they going to expect them to back heel them off the sofa through the nearest wall. They won't be disappointed when this doesn't happen. But if we're exaggerating the, beyond the bounds of nature, we must ground the idea in reality through matter of fact copy that doesn't over-promise. So we've got this advert. They opened the bag of Chelly nachos, a sombrero or in donkey appears and back heels and through a wall. But let's explain what we're talking about here. It can explain it with little strap line or tagline for the campaign. New Chelly nachos, they come with a kick. So here we've got a completely bizarre out of this world idea. Although not so bizarre anymore because advertising is a lot more sophisticated. And then we've got a line that grounds that essentially in the truth, new Chelly nachos, they come with a kick. Now it's true that they come with a kick. It's not true that a donkey is gonna pay and get you through a wall, of course. But again, nobody in their right mind would expect that to happen. Nobody sees it on the TV and goes, I want that to happen. I'm gonna buy a bag of jelly nachos. They open it and wait for this donkey to appear. You know, it doesn't happen. 20. The Best Version of the Truth: Let's look at an example of how we can tell the best truth. One very simple example is, let's call it the 9010 example. The brain interprets things very differently depending on how we present something. Depending on how we present the truth, people will take away very different meanings. Essentially it's different versions of the same statistical information. That's essentially what we're presenting women presenting the truth in one way or another. The reason people use the phrase, There are lies, **** lies, and then there are statistics. Probably paraphrasing is that as human beings, we have a need to apply meaning to everything. Even hard statistics, which inevitably skews the stats and twists them to fit our model of reality. And this is for good reason because we didn't do this. If we didn't apply meaning to everything. It kind of goes back to brain being assaulted with billions of bits of information per second. Then we need to filter in order to make it possible for us. Even just think stream function. We need to be able to categorize instantly to make sense of everything in order to narrow it down to what's important so that we can process information, but also so we can act or react in the appropriate way. And sometimes we're acting and reacting in the blink of an eye. First, we need to categorize if it's say, friend or foe, opportunity or threat, pleasure or pain. And to categorize anything, we need to know whether it's inherently good or inherently bad. We need to know which box to put it in. We have to do this constantly. So like most things in life, our brains take shortcuts in order to achieve this. But the trouble is not means we have blind spots. It means that we're making false assumptions all day long. If you're an optimist, you'll see things differently to if you're a pessimist. If you're crazy about fitness, you will see a doughnut definitely to, let's say Homer Simpson. As creators, we can actually make the most of this through how we tell the truth, the telling of the best truth, if you will. And it's no accident that mechanic Eriksson, one of the largest and oldest advertising agencies in the world, one of the most famous their strap line is, or at least it used to be the truth well told. That's because that's essentially what advertising is. If you really strip it down. We're telling the truth, but in the best possible way. Now, let's take the 9010 example and we'll base it around. We'll take a product like cookies. This is a really simple example of how the smallest tweak in the telling of a truth can lead to a dramatically different experience for the audience. Now if you're playing golf and you make, and you're on the TI, driving off. And you make just the tiniest adjustment to the angle of your club. It could be the difference between that London next to the flag in London, flying off in London in the tree somewhere. And it's the same principle here. Really small tweak in the way we present the truth, present the same information one way or another can lead to a dramatically different results. Dramatically different image of what we're selling in the audience's mind. As we can see in the example here, we have two heads. Let's assume it's the same exact person with the same personality, the same feelings, and same frames of reference, everything else. But on the left, our sample person is looking at a bag of cookies. And on the front that bag of cookies is printed 10% sugar to this, the associate, all kinds of bad stuff associated ill-health, weight gain, guilty feelings, shouldn't be eating there, etc, etc. On the right, however, the exact same person looks at the same bag of cookies, but this time on the front of the package in it says 90% sugar-free. Now, suddenly the same person has a whole load of other things in their mind. I'm like, oh, healthy and being good? Yes. Okay. That's okay. As you can see, the sugar content of the cookies doesn't change. The cookie is still contained 10% sugar each time. Which sounds like quite a lot. When you say it like that. What changes is the presentation of the truth? This time, on the right, we're presenting the cookies as 90% free from sugar. Because of the only contain 10% sugar. Then by definition, the 90% free of sugar. It's a simple but very powerful tweak and how we convey our message. Because 10% sugar actually magnifies the drawback or the pain point, which leads to all kinds of negative connotations and implications in the mind of the customer. And while the subconscious child might want the cookies. Well, let's just assume for most of us, that's true. The Conscious Parent and refuses to sign off on the purchase at least long enough to walk away because the potential downsides are too great to bear that. Assuming this is someone who's reasonably healthy, maybe they're trying to stay in shape and keep a lid on the waistline, etc, etc. With all the things about sugar and media, the average person probably will be fairly conscious of it. And the point is, we are only present in this truth, in this way. Because they're conscious of it, the cookie monster doesn't need any convincing is the devil maker superfan gained getting cookies come up main. We don't have to do this for the cookie monster. We can just pull the cookies that he's going to buy, whatever. Super fancy, don't have to worry too much about. But the other person who has this devil on one shoulder and angel on the other. This is where the best truth comes in and this is where we can magnify the benefit while minimizing the pain point. For today's health and body conscious consumer, 90% sugar-free minimizes the pain involved. The desire is already there for the Cauchy's, but the 90% sugar-free gives the subconscious child in the ammunition it needs to convince the parent that the logic is sound. As in we can enjoy the Cauchy without the guilt. Look, it's not too bad, It's pretty healthy. It's a win-win for us. This happens because our assumptive brains, they put it in the box of healthier, The categorize one or the other. 90% is healthier. Healthier than what you might ask? After all, we're still talking about 10% sugar white. It doesn't matter. The best version of the truth wins. Now, notice we're not saying sugar-free. That will be taking it too far. Then we're misrepresenting the offer. Where essentially this ally we couldn't just say sugar-free on the thing. I was taking it too far. 90% sugar-free is just another way of putting the truth across. Just to wrap this little example of the best version of the truth allows us to magnify those emotional benefits while minimizing the pain points involved. And even turning them into final convinces for the subconscious to convince the parent with words that we give them. We can use words when we're telling a best versions of the truth, such as up to four for as little as we can use investment rather than cost. And we can use all the phrases like quick, easy and hassle-free. And these will these like subtle little word in that helps us kind of minimize the pain point. But more than that, we can actually also tell the worst version of the truth what you can do that as well, simply by telling the biggest and worst version of the problem or challenge that the product or service will then help the audience to resolve. It's the same principle, except we're stretching the truth of the problem as far as it will naturally go without straying into the realms of life. For example, rather than showing someone with their hands or their head and a milder version to daylight because they've got a hangover. They had too much to drink the night before. We show them with a marching band inside the skull, or a 1000 megawatt light in their eyes. Or perhaps they wake up as re-innovated corpse until I pop paraphrase in tablets in a glass of water and it puts a stop to their morning misery. Example illustrates how we can blow it out of all proportion. Perhaps, where the customer wakes up as the creature from the night before. And then we can anchor that with a matter of fact, strap line to reality so that the message resonates emotionally, but that the audience doesn't expect the advertising truth to be delivered. Are you going to turn into the creature from the night before? No, not literally, but people understand the metaphor. Again, it's the gap in understanding. They can pull out together. Simple. Now, to help us dial up the energy out and dial the energy in down, we can actually use more wording like this. And there will be wording you'll be familiar with as a consumer. Let's take minimizing the cost. Let's say we want to dial down the energy going in by using these kind of best versions of truths. Well, the phrase for as little as is just one example of where we can apply best and worst truth to amplify these final convinces just as we magnify the emotional benefits. Another example might be investment rather than price or cost. Or you may even say onetime investment when dealing with a higher initial price point. Let's say it's going to cost you $1000 now, but then that's it. It's a onetime investment in you've got it for life. So this helps you to get over that hurdle of costs a lot. It just minimizes the pain point of investing the money. Then there's other, as we've mentioned this a little phrase like hassle-free and so on. I mean, nothing's devoid of hassle. Nothing is hassle-free. There's always something to do, but the audience's allows us to round. Let's say it's like rounding of $1.82 dollars and saying this will make you around $2, the audience that allows us to round up the benefit if no other reason than hassle-free is part of the modern-day vocabulary. More importantly, though, it's easy for the brain to categorize. It can put it in a box. It wants to put it in one box or another. There's no gray area. So it's easy for the audience to get and they buy into it. Now, these are some typical final convinces you'll probably be familiar with. But another phrase that embodies the best or worst truth dynamic is the D2 or as much as. And these can be used in both the selling of the benefits and the supporting features, the final convinces. Now, you may recognize the op2 phrase from sale season when clothing stores, They slashed the prices and they plastered the windows with these huge discounted figures such as 70% R5, all these windows stickers. The actual truth of the matter is more likely that only one or two items is 70% off or were at some point in the sale when they first put up those window stickers. It could also be that the retailer, maybe they're prepared to slash prices up to 70%. Maybe they plan to at some point if it comes to that on some of the items that can't shift at the last minute. But the best version of the truth here is not that most of the close 20% discount over 40% discount, let's say 99% of the clothing is around that. It's the 70% off part. That's the best version of the truth. That's where the real cell is. That's where the opportunity is for the costumer and where the fear of missing out the FOMO is as well. The 70% is. It's essentially the emotional kick up the pants we need to drag ourselves or our loved ones into the store and checkout the sale. What's more, will often tend to read the message as 70% of everything in the store. I've done this myself. It's very easy to do. That means we have a tendency to ignore the up-to part because our brains are purposefully lazy again, as we said, to minimize the expenditure of his conscious reasoning. Using the conscious mind calls for a lot more energy to be expended than subconscious, than the subconscious kind of autopilot patterns. That's why when you have to concentrate and focus, it takes a lot of energy and you can feel tired after. Now, this is an accepted norm in the London, the consumer this up to factor. Once we're inside the store, most of us, we're not going to stop to ponder them moralities of the vagaries of whether any of these outfits are really 70% off or how many are. We're going to get down to the serious business instead of rummaging through the rocks happier, we find 40% of an item that fits and doesn't look like it's from a bygone era from another century. Nevermind the quality. Just feel that deep discount. The store may also use the phrase on selected items in tandem with the up to phrase. It might say up to 70% of selected items, which is code for the stuff they can't shift. Essentially stuff no one wants. But of course no one's gonna say 20% of a handful of things you otherwise probably wouldn't buy. May very well never under wearing and stuff the way in your wardrobe or closet somewhere. Conversely, on the other side of things, if the product or services sold on avoiding the potential pitfall or cost, not on the pleasure or desirability or the opportunity if it's a pitfall. So let's say it could cost you time, money, energy, or lost opportunity in the future. The op2 or as much as technique can be deployed in the same way, for instance, the same kind of technique we can use. So you may say save as much as XYZ. Or you could imply that the audience may suffer pain further down the line if they don't buy, buy now, pay later. Too good to miss. Guarantee your place as in, you might miss out. There are only so many seats, while stocks last selling faster, all that kind of stuff. Now none of these are hard and fast statements in that there's a really big chance you're not going to regret it. But you may do, is bringing in that element of doubt, maybe you will, by telling the worst truth centrally. We don't have to actually tell them. This is all going to sell out or anything like that. We have to just suggest that that's possibility and consumers, they'll make that leap and then the more likely to act because they don't want to miss out. Fomo is real, it's a real struggle, is real. 21. Overselling & Underselling: Let's look at how to oversell and undissolved truth because I think it works both ways. And sometimes it's good to contrast one extreme with another. If you're not careful, you can actually end up doing either of these things. And here's a quick example of that. Because there was a story in the papers in the UK of a government department being rumbled for stretching the truth too far to the point it became alive. Basically, they were attempting to convince people who were on different separate benefits. They were trying to convince them to sign up for a scheme called the Universal Credit. Now it's been really controversial and where the general election on the cards, this government department that is responsible for the scheme. They decided to run a press campaign to promote the scheme and get more people to sign up. Because at the end of the day, if it's a bit of white around the neck, if it, if it's something people associated negatively to the government, is one more thing to hang them with. So they want to reverse that and they wanted it to be seen in more of a good light because there's been so much press around it. Now the irony is the campaign was supposed to dispel any negative myths from the media that if people signed up to the scheme, they would lose out. This campaign was aimed to say, no, you'll be better off if you do. The media are peddling is a myth and here are the facts. The copy feature of this myth and fact setup would say myth number one block, fact that the deck countering it. However, the facts that they proclaimed in the campaign turned out to be myths too. They went too far with the truth. The campaign even went and they went further than that. They went so far as to run an ad on the front page that made it look like it was a featured story. That is the newspapers featured story. They'd looked into the facts and said No, no, no. The fact says it's really good. And you can do this with papers and things, but usually you have to make it clear that it's what you would call an advertorial. It's an adverb posing as an editorial, because otherwise people are just going to go, oh, it's reported in the media, in the papers. So therefore, it's true and I'm not being sold to. This is just information. This is impartial information, although whether newspapers in part, as a whole or the amount of book, needless to say, the media other absolute field day with it. And the campaign backfired spectacularly. But in the same article that reported this severe overstretching of the truth. The opposition party. They did the opposite. They undersold the truth, which is almost just as bad. Not talking about morality or anything like that in terms of getting the results we want. A senior politician came out from the opposition party. They were quoted as saying The campaign was a waste of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money. Well, not only was this not the best version of the truth or the worst version of the truth in this case, it wasn't even the full version of the truth. The full version of the truth was that the government department add a light to the country. But be they'd also spent 250 thousand pounds on the campaign from taxpayers money. Now, what sounds worse to you, wasting thousands of pounds of taxpayers money. Wasting 250 thousand pounds of taxpayers money. Just by being more specific, the figure swells alarm, or even worse, what about wasting a quarter of a million pounds? Suddenly we've got the word million involved, that's far more powerful. And it's the same true, it's the same truth just presented differently. Or worse still, what about wasting a quarter of a million in taxpayers money to deceive the public in a failed attempt to spare its own blushes on a failing scheme. Not only the full truth, but taken to its full conclusion. This is an example of under selling the truth. You just say, Oh, the waste is 1000 pounds of taxpayers money. It's nowhere near as powerful. Now, I'm not obviously not sharing the story of a political stab at anyone, but it's just how important it is to hit the sweet spot when it comes to truth telling, if you oversell, you risk souring the brand experience in the eyes of the customer. If you undersell, however, you're leaving valuable emotional punch on the table. Think about it is the Goldilocks zone. Again, we want a Goldilocks not porridge. We need to make sure that we're both telling the best version or the worst version of the truth as relevant. But we're not taking it too far. It's like a muscle. We want to stretch the truth as far as it will naturally go. If it starts to feel uncomfortable back off a little bit. But if you think you can push a little further, see if you can just see if you can ramp it up a little bit emotionally telling of the truth little more. And if you keep emotions in mind, that's really key and that will help to guide you a little bit. Can we make this a little bit more emotional and still haven't, it'd be real. And is there a better way to present this information? Remember our 90% sugar-free as opposed to 10% sugar? Just examine the different ways you can present it. A try write in different versions of it, and just use your common sense essentially. 22. Crimes to Avoid: Now we've covered all the elements, all the parts that go into the anatomy of a really good idea, a winning idea, a highly effective, sticky idea. But it does help to show what bad looks like as well. You can use it as a contrast. So what's the direct opposite of all these things were saying to do here? Well, it's the phenomenon it will call the difference in difference. With the difference is one of the biggest and most common crimes. Why? Well, it's the classic blend form of messaging that commits what we'll call the triple murder. The Triple murder. It kills intrigue, it kills desire, and it kills results. It kills intrigued because it has no clear unique proposition or open-loop or engagement ring. To grab and key potential. It kills desire because it has no clear connection to a strong pain or pleasure point in the audience's life. And it kills results because there's no emotional benefits. Or final convince her, shown as the best or worst truth to spur action. And the punishment is the death of the campaign is as simple as that, or a life sentence in terms of an underperforming brand. Now, the width a difference, the x, y, z, where the difference is the most common of all major crimes, ECO all the time. It's this with a difference where different and different where the advertising behalf of a company or your advertising yourself. And you'll see other related crimes as well. So it's almost kind of like here we have one of these. We made it so you should now go and buy it. We're not gonna actually really attempt to convince you why you would or should. A shiny thing where it grabs your attention. But there's nothing for the audience to do. Or it says, because we said so. In other words, it's telling you to like this thing and telling you should get it. But they're not really showing you the emotional benefit. They're not really evidencing what we're saying. Or why not try. Why you could say, well, I can think of lots of reasons. Why not? Why should I? Again, you've got to give people a reason to care. Product tax. It exists. Again, this is kinda like here. I have one of these hits here. So you see these kinds of things all the time. He's not trying hard enough. Or they're not really connecting to an emotion, to the product which is presenting the products. Maybe they haven't got a clear proposition. The other under the spectrum, army clever. They have made an effort to try and entertain you for normalised being clever, for clever sake, not actually being clear about what they're doing and what the sewing you and why you should go and get one. Here. It has got one of these. They're all basically variations of theme more or less. And the problem is, the audience doesn't know why they should care. The brand or the person says, because this can apply to you as an individual as well. The brand or persons says, where different XYZ products acts thing with a difference. They can say I'm different. The audience thinks. Model like how, like what? Unlike why? Show me what this difference is and then show me why I should care. The audience fields either confused, cold, or bored. What does the audience do? It doesn't go online and click. It doesn't give us credit card details. It doesn't sign up for anything on his phone or whatever it is. And it's because they feel indifferent because we haven't given them a strong enough reason to care. We haven't Spar that desire through either the visual or verbal telling of the best or worst truth or both. One example of this, I was walking in the, walking down the street recently and I was walking through the streets of Manchester for those of you not from the UK, It's a city in the North of England. It's the home of two well-known football or soccer teams. So it's quite a big and busy city and there's a lot of hotels around there and things like that. So I'm out walking around on a notice in an advert or one of those hotels, one of these hotels. And bearing in mind it's a four-star hotel, but it's in an old Edwardian building. And it's kind of like a smaller boutique version of Jane. The advert simply said, hotel rooms where the difference, and that's it. This is what I'm talking about here. Is this kind of adverb is like the antithesis of everything we're saying. But what exactly was the difference that they were talking about? Why is a passing costumer? Should I be expected or move to care? And how can I be expected to know what this differences. But this is a major problem when there's no attempt to demonstrate what you're saying. No way for the audience to observe the evidence behind the claim. The can't tell them by this because it's awesome to have to see that it's awesome. What's more? There's no attention being grabbed. There's no form of disruption, there's no form of engagement, no pleasure, there's no pain, there's no nothing. There's just a vague inference that something's different here. I mean, it could be that it's a boutique hotel, the app part of a chain. It could be that it's four-star rooms for a three-star prices. It could be service, it could be anything, but we don't show that in an engaging way that is tied into your audience, your target audience, and their emotions, and what's important to them. Then you've no chance. You've got to give it some disruption and you've got to give it some ability. 23. Winning Examples: Let's look at a few more examples of showing rather than telling, but also incorporate the things we've been talking about. In terms of disrupting the audience's attention. In terms of creating a gap in understanding and connecting to a specific emotion in the delivery of the message. Even if the emotion is not explicitly put across, the audience, will do the inferring follows. We don't have to always spell it out. Let's look at a few good examples. Real examples, not stuff we've made up just to show you it working in, let's say real life, as we may call it. The first one, is actually Snickers. And as you may be able to see from this example, stray away. It looks very much like a Mars bar, which is obviously the rival bar. Now this is actually a form of, there's a term called knocking copy. And quite simply you see it a lot with supermarkets where they go, Oh, this supermarkets more expensive than the phrase knocking copy. It doesn't cover visuals while this is the visual version of that. Their branding, their own Snickers bar, Mars branding. They roll this compound now and all kinds of different ways where they show someone underperforming. Let's say the usually a ninja in one of the adverts there a ninja in when they start the advert, there are total clots. They're really clumsy the following through the roof because in all kinds of chaos. And then someone hands them as Snickers bar and they eat it and then they turn back to a ninja because they feel like themselves. Again, there's this proposition through, delivered through the strap line that you are not you when you're hungry. So eat a Snickers and you'll be back to your best. What they're doing essentially is knocking the Mars by saying the same as Snickers bar isn't itself when it's hungry, it needs to have a Snickers. It's really kind of, in a way, it's surreal when you think about it is kind of ridiculous. Suspect has bars isn't gonna be a snake as it is not cut its own personality and behavior. But that doesn't matter. This is a way of showing this proposition in a creative way. Getting you to do a little bit of the work. You have to go, well, that looks like a Mars bar, but it's a Snickers. What's being said? You're not you when you're hungry. Oh, the Snickers bar isn't feeling like itself. And again, you give yourself a little pat on the back. It works with your frame of reference. And again, you take home that message that you are not you and you're hungry. Therefore, maybe when you're at the vending machine in future you see the snickers and you remember the message, you go, oh yeah, Okay, I'm hungry, I need to eat a Snickers. Let's look at this other example. And this is the Mona Lisa. And you'll see this, you'll see this being done quite alarming Christendom one with the Mona Lisa as well. This is quite a good one to do. It's an easy way and if you will. And this is the truth being told in the best possible way and being shown rather than being explained. It gets your attention because there's something different. If you think about the Mona Lisa, we're all used to seeing the Mona Lisa in certain way. Well now we've seen in a different way, the subconscious is going on. This looks different. What's going on here? Then you have to work it out. Then you work out, and then you look at what the product is. And then you go, oh, right, Okay. Espresso. And what does it do? It's instant. It's an instant. Wake up essentially. Maybe in the morning when you most need it, because it's espresso obviously. It's a powerful sharp It's a powerful shove caffeine. So this advert saying all the Mona Lisa is drunker and once she's been posed. And now again, this is a ridiculous version of the truth. Of course, she's not. Instant espresso wasn't available when she was posing for this painting. But they're just increased the eye size. You have to look at it and go, oh, right. Okay. I get it. She's got a shot of caffeine or eyes are gone wise use Megara awake now. You get that little pat on the back again. And just again, it just disrupts your attention and you get the emotion of it. Ever drink this bang, I'm gonna be alert and awake and want to feel good. Let's look at a slightly more sophisticated example. As in, you have to do that a little bit more of work here. And here you've got a line, a goldfish in water, and you've got a hedgehog, and then you've got the pay-off line. Precision parking parking assist by Volkswagen. Obviously helps you to reverse into a space. Does it for you? Now, here we have to connect. The hedgehog has reversed into this space very carefully. Because if they didn't park accurately between these bugs, they'd pop the bargain, the goldfish would be all over the floor. But because it's parked in perfectly, they're all safe. And God now obviously will automatically put this together, which gives us the engagement. And also it disrupts your attention because you go in or what's going on here. Everyone who drives out to do the reverse park. And you're worried about hitting the curb in front and hitting the car behind while trying to reverse in. No one wants to do it and look silly, but also you don't want to cause damage to your car and there's, you know, only got to make that leap. You also have the emotional thought in your head as well. It's an emotional cell as well. But what they do in here is also telling the best or worst version of the truth by saying, well, it's almost like a matter of life and death for the goldfish. It should be avoided. That's just an advert there's showing rather than telling, telling the best version of the truth, capturing the attention, creating some engagement through a gap in the understanding that you have to fill in. And also it's then on some level it's connecting to that emotion as well that you associate with the benefit or rights, peace of mind, essentially, it's gonna do it for me. I don't need to worry about that. Let's look at one here. For DRX, very, very simple adverb. You either work on them or in nine months time, you're going to be hit with a child that you didn't plan for one? Yeah. At this stage in your life, there's very simple. Again, it's showing not telling me. It's telling the best version of the truth, if you will, is technically it's just the truth is capturing your attention. Because you got to figure out what's that, what's going on here. And then you give yourself a pat on the back when you get it. It's a little bit humorous. So again, it gives you a little good feeling which the reattach to direct. So there'll be in collaborating the funny and yeah, also it's got the, the double emotional impact because you think, oh, wow, No, I don't want to baby right now. I'm definitely going to work on them. And next time you're in the pharmacy or the store view around that kind of aisle, you're going to think, Yeah, I need to get economy your x. Again. Here we have another one. This is worse version of the truth all over. It's, you eat too much ice cream and things like that. You're going to end up with a massive belly. If you eat an ice cream, are you going to end up obese? Know? But again, it's the worst version of the truth. It's assuming that if you eat enough for these things, enough ice creams, you're going to end up like this. And again, gets our attention because something's not quite right about this. And we have to fill in the gap and go, Oh, it's an ice cream, but it's also a belly at the same time. Just a few examples of things we can do visually to really capture everything that we're talking about here. How to show and not tell, and how to tell the best version of the truth, and how to disrupt people's attention, get their engagement, and connect to an emotion. 24. MODULE 3: TEST & PRESENT YOUR IDEAS: What we're gonna cover in this module, we're actually gonna step out of our creative mindset and into our critic mindset. That's not as boring or as cynical as it sounds, but we're going to look at how to evaluate our ideas once we've got them. We're also going to cover how to present the initial ideas and the two different stages involved in presentation. We're also going to cover how many concepts to present and in what order to present them in any kind of initial stuff that needs to go into a presentation before you actually do the unveiling. Let's look at it really first, why we're doing always. Basically, it's to avoid something that we could call clever for clubbers sake. Clever ideas can be a brilliant super weapon in our creative arsenal, but only if they serve the purpose or the delivery of the desired end result. Something will always master and something will always serve. So we need to make sure what's mastering is the objective that we're working to. And what serving is the creative process. Rather than serving the idea. The idea needs to be serving girls. The first and last job of a creative advertising idea is that it must sell to our clients and to our audiences. If we're a creative working for a business, we have two cells to do. Ultimately, it has to sell the products or service to the audience, but it has to sell to the client first for it to get that far. Now, many creators out there may be of the mindset that, oh, I've produced something clever and award worthy. It'll get the audience's attention and it will make us all look good. So my job's done, my work is done well, that's okay for a certain standard of work. But our priority here is that we want to actually go much further than that. Instead, we want our ideas to follow through with this end result. This all means that it doesn't actually matter whether it's clever or not. It doesn't matter if it's artistic or not. It doesn't matter to us if it's award-winning gone. Not all that matters to us is that it's the most efficient thing that it can be when it comes to meeting the goal that we identify are the star of the conceptual process. We're not a slave to the method, were a slave to the result. Whereas some people are obsessed with pleasing methods like I wanted to win an award or it has to be artistic or asked to be clever. Now, we don't care. I mean, take Bruce Lee for instance, as an example of what we're trying to achieve. He aimed every punchy through an inch or two behind his opponents had this meant that is punches. They didn't just land the face. They follow through with gray or force. In the same way, we don't just want to land a kind of blow on the surface of the audience's mind, if you will, with a momentary impact that then fade, stray away. We want a campaign that actually continues to resonate, whether it camps out in the fall of the mind or more likely it's going to bubble away in the background of the subconscious. But at another way, we don't just want the job interview or the first day we want the job or the relationship. We want to become part of the audiences, business or life, or at least we want our product or service or brand to become that way through our ideas. So this is where evaluating what we've done comes into play. And it's also how we can add even more value to ourselves as great is because we're not just the people who come up with a bigger, better ideas and more of them on-demand. And unless time, we're also the people who get it, quote unquote, we can drop on it and cut through any other BS and we can nail the brand, nail a brief nail the audience and the solution. Another way to look at it is shooting an arrow. The releasing of the concept into a fully worked execution when it gets turned into the TV, outdoor billboard or whatever it is. This is like the releasing of the arrow when that happens, when it goes live out there in the world. That can be equated to the arrow landing somewhere on or around the target. When we don't our conceptual work, we release it to execution. And the execution carries at the rest of the way through to landing on its target. But whether it hits dead center and sticks in there on that target all depends on the drawing back of the boat and actually holding a study focused aim on the bulls-eye. If the arrow is to hit its target. Dead center, where it's supposed to be, the drawer and back has to be study. It has to be held to the right moment. But most importantly of all, the aim needs to be true. Essentially the drawer and the aim will determine the success of the rest of the shop. In this can be likened to the creative process. The drawer and back of the bow and the holding steady of the aim is where all the power is generated and it generated in the concept stage. What we do in the concept stage, it will determine the final landing place of ROE view on our concepts. Before we release the arrow, we need to make sure we stay fixed on the target. What we're gonna do is we're going to put the right checks and balances in place to keep our aim study and trig. We're going to interrogate our ideas, but at the same time, we're going to actually separate the evaluation process, this process now that we're about to embark on from the origination of the ideas. And now we're kind of flipping our mindset of you will think of it this way. This little phrase, Don't self-censor. Do a sense check when you're doing the creative process, when you're coming up with your ideas, don't censor yourself. Go ahead and do whatever. Don't prejudge, just get it down and see where it goes experiment. But when you get to the point where you've got all your ideas, we need to send check them. We need to check that we're still gonna hit the mark that we're still aiming at the target. Without a mind, let's now look at how we can go about testing our ideas before we go on to present them to our clients or stakeholders, or pay masters or to the world. How do we evaluate our ideas? How do we decide which of the best ideas to present or move forward with? Because throwing away a concept can be hard. I've been there, I've done it and is difficult when you think I really like this concept. But it's just not right, it's just not working all we've got a better one all we need to narrow it down. We can't put them all in there. It can be especially hard if you only have a handful of concepts to choose from, like one or two or three. Now, hopefully, you won't be in that situation using our techniques in this course, but just in case we need to be able to be ruthless with ourselves. It's easy to scamper concept only to realize far too late that it's flawed. And suddenly you're in the mode of you're trying to fix it and it's forged. That leads to all kinds of blood, sweat, tears, problems and you name it. We want to avoid that the conceptual and scalp stage Florida concepts fixed or abandoned at this point. In order to evaluate, we need to know what the common floors are with an idea. And these result of mine and Chris's experience over the years, and they can be quite varied in quite a few of them. First of all, it might not be practical or fit for purpose. So it might be a really nice idea, but it's not meeting the objective or it doesn't fit the media quite right. It's not going to work with the budget or practical considerations. It might not work with the brand guidelines. Maybe it's too hard to execute the way you'd like. Maybe considered in budget and considering the skills if anybody who's gonna be executing it, you just can't do it the way you want to do it. And therefore, the idea is going to suffer when it's executed. It's not going to translate. It might also be too abstract and difficult to explain. Now, if it's too abstract, basically the audience isn't gonna be able to connect the dots. If it's too difficult to explain, then it's not gonna fit as an adverb. It also could be too familiar and it doesn't grab the attention. So it could be a solid advert, but it's just a bit boring. It doesn't really loved with any power. There's nothing disruptive about it. There's nothing engaging about it. Alternatively, it's already been done. Now. There's nothing wrong with something already been done. But if it's been done to death, then it becomes a problem. Then it becomes just wallpaper. If something was done a few years ago, once or twice, That's okay. Whatever, if you see it being done all the time, then try and avoid it because it's too familiar. Alternatively, the problem may be, doesn't connect with an emotion. Could be a clever idea, but there's no clear or powerful emotion behind It's not tapping into a pain or pleasure point. It might be that it doesn't create an open-loop in the first place. Far from being too abstract, it's closed off already. There's an image of banana headline that says banana. It might be that the logic chain isn't robust. You may remember we touched on having a three-line all the way through. It just doesn't fit. There's different elements competing. As Chris says, the logic has to be a 100% there. We don't want the audience doing a lot of work. We want them doing somewhere, but not a lot. If we're struggling to make it fit on our own minds, what are they gonna think? It might be that an idea doesn't fit with the brand or the brand guidelines. And again, hopefully the work we've done earlier on, we'll make sure that we're aware of this before we even come up with the idea. But it's good just to double-check that we're on brand guidelines as well. Is this how we want to appear as a brand going forward? It may be that it doesn't suit the media, it to be used, or that it only works on one form of media really well and then it doesn't campaign out. So remember we talked about it requires 16 touch points before somebody is ready to buy. So if the impact is relegated to one piece of media, then we're really minimizing the impact of the campaign and the amount of people who are going to respond and do what we want them to do. It may be that it's a one-off idea that doesn't translate across a campaign. So you've got a great idea for a TV ad, but it doesn't translate into posters, online ads, e-mails, website, whatever it is. Hopefully it can work regardless of media, but we just need to make sure that that's the case. The concept could also be too passive if their incidence, it's not directly addressing the audience. Just double down on that and make sure. Another flow with the idea might be that it doesn't work within pre-existing communications we need to dovetail with. So it's not necessarily that we're gonna be coming up with something brand new every time. They may already be a campaign out there and he was probably gonna be an established brand out there. We need to obviously be aware of that and make sure that we're not just going off in a wild new direction. If it needs to fit some pre-existing suite of communications or adverts. 25. Five Questions to Ask: In order to tell, pose, root out these floors or avoid these floors. There are five key questions we need to ask of our ideas. Number one, the most obvious question ever. Does it answer the brief? But you'd be surprised how often this question doesn't get asked. It's amazing. For instance, does it solve the problem or achieve the goal of the campaign that we set out in the first place. Because if it doesn't, you may actually be tempted to push it through. First of all, we don't want it to feel like working on the concept was a waste of time. So it's natural, you don't want to let it go. It might be that there's a deadline looming and we feel we need to present something even though we're not quite there yet. The whole message areas. If an idea doesn't meet the brief, kill your darlings. This is saying from Stephen King, the famous orator author. He used to say it with a scene or a sentence. Even though you may love it and may like it and may have enjoyed writing it. If it's not essential for the story. Kill your darlings. Your darlings is comparing two almost like your ideas and your words and everything else. But you have to be ruthless. You have to be a cold calculating killer and kill off anything that doesn't answer the brief. The next question, question two, it right for your audience. Again, a no brainer. These are obvious questions, but it's amazing how often than not rarely asked. In other words, does the idea fit with who the audience are? Does it resonate with what they identify with the challenges they face, their interests, their income level, the consumer habits, and the stage in life. We also need to ask ourselves another question. Another question is part of this. Does it talk to them the way they might talk to themselves and others? Is the tone, right? In other words, essentially we're having a conversation with them. We need to have that conversation in a way that they liked to talk. That all comes down to the tone of the advert, tone of the idea of we talk into them in the right way. For instance, skateboarding teens talk differently than high-flying corporate executives, even though the both human beings and even though it's all, everybody has the same traits and emotions. Essentially, they're at a different stage of life. They're just different people. So they need talking to in different ways. Again, if your idea doesn't fit your audience, it's not going to gain traction. So we've got two choices. We either bring it in line, we see if we can tweak it. So that does talk to the audience and it still works. Or we go out, Darling, we throw it out. We say, okay, maybe that's an idea for another day. It's not always wrong, it's wrong for the audience. Question three, does it fit the brand? Key question? Does the imagery, tone of voice and content of the message for the ethos, industry, position within the marketplace that the brand in habits, does it fit? Question four, is it in line with the brand message? You might think, Oh, this is the same thing as the previous question. While it's slightly different, slightly more focused on any wording that might be out there already that we need to dovetail with. So is the messaging within the idea, the strap line that headline the copy? Is it consistent with the other communications put out by the brand? Do we need to say certain things that might affect the idea? The idea needs to fit seamlessly and it's about setting the right tone going forward as well. You're creating a brand. You want to set a tone and put a message out there you're going to be able to live with and you're gonna be able to use and reuse and expand on long into the future. You don't hamstring yourself or being a place where you're jumping from one idea to the other. And they all look totally, definitely all say different things. Essentially, That's not good for your brand. Now, if you're creating a brand for the first time, focus in on what's the one message you want to carry forward into the future. It might be that the brand is already positioned and you just positioned in a campaign, but you may well be in a place where you're establishing the brand. And therefore you need to say, Okay, Which road or we go in down, and why are we going down that road? Any ideas that we do? Conceptual stage needs to fit with that. If not, you know what to do. Kill that darling. Simple as that, as ruthless, as horrible as it sounds. Now, question five. So I think what? This is, the one question above all else, you have to ask yourself, if you want your ideas to be effective and whether you ask it with cursing or not, doesn't matter. But ask the question. If you follow the principles in this course, you should have this one covered anyway. Well, this is just a little double-check failsafe method, whatever you call it. Why should the audience care about what this brand has to say? Because if you don't ask yourself this question and then answer it with the idea, the audience is essentially going to ask themselves that question on some level. They're gonna say, Well, why should I care? I'm going to move on. This. So what mentality, it's not just in the idea itself, is not just in the imagery and in the structure of the concept or the headline of a strap line or anything like that. It actually extends right throughout your copy. Every single word of your copy when you're talking to the audience, you shouldn't be able to say so what basically in the way if they've got a reason to care at every point. Finally, we've covered these five questions. What we finally need to do is check against three fundamentals of a highly effective idea, of a winning idea. Number one, dose the idea, capture the attention. Will it stand out from the crowd, either a message, either an appearance or ideally both. Will it look purposely our place? Will it make a different kind of noise? Will it do something different? Will it be disruptive that it interrupts the audience pattern of attention long enough virus to inject them with the idea, with the message. Once we've got their attention. Does the idea create an open-loop? Does it create that ring of engagement where we've got a small gap of understanding in the telling of our story for the audience to connect and fill in. And then therefore give themselves a pat on the back so that they are engaging with the advert. Just the idea connect to an emotion. Have you created the exact desired emotion that will spur the audience into the appropriate action? Are you tapping in to the exact pain points or pleasure point, the fear or the desire in one form or another as it is, in order to spot that desire and the subconscious mind. And then to have a talk on the sleeve of the conscious mind. We need this, this is a priority now. Need, need, need. Let's get, get, get. And then it'll go to work on convincing the conscious mind. And you've provided them with the final convinces, the features, if you will. And you've maximized the energy out in terms of the benefits and minimize the energy in terms of what you have to do to get it, then therefore, you can be confident with enough touchpoints. And if it's right for the audience that the girl act on your message and you're gonna get a result. 26. Bulletproof Your Thinking: So when we've evaluated our ideas and we've got some grounds to narrow them down. And gatherers small shortlist of you want of ideas, then it's time to actually present them beyond ourselves, beyond our creative team, to whoever the relevant audiences for us, whether it's a client, whether it's a colleague, whether it's a boss, whether it's a test audience. We need to now sculpt these ideas of properly in order to present them. Now there's a common conundrum when it comes to ideas and the presentation of them. And that's how many ideas should you present back? How many is too many is a better question, I think, because if you're ever thinking of presenting back a ton of concepts, then stop. Now if you get to the present in back more than four ideas, you need to stop yourself and hit the brakes. Say, okay, let's backup a little bit. You need to ask yourself this. Do we really need more than four options? Because if we haven't nailed the solution in for ideas, half we nailed it at all. Do we really know the answer, the proper answer here? Somebody may have said, no, I want to see five or six concepts and insist on it, then that's fine. But if you are in charge of deciding how many concepts you go back with, then if you strain over four, we need to do some whittling down really. Here's a handy guide to stick to. Definitely no more than four. Ideally, no more than 33 is a good number. Basically, it offers a choice of ideas without going overboard. It means that you can actually start with something safe, end with something edgier, then present something as a bridge in-between something that's a bit in the middle. What you do in there is your presents something that's going to be more familiar with what the client or your internal audience, if you like, is used to seeing. So therefore the kind of relax a little bit, they go okay, yeah, I'm used to say and that they've not gone crazy and we've got something we can go ahead with. No, I've got one option. I'd be happy to put out there. But then we can push on a little bit and give them something that we can say, oh, well, that's one. How about we go further? And then they're a bit, what happens is when you present something safer at the star, let's assume you have got a slightly safer option out of the three. What they do is they relax. They become more open to whatever else. Show them because you've got that one in the bank. So they're not worrying going on. What are the gun show me next. And then there'll be more receptive to the second one you show them, the more likely to go with it and to have the reaction of the audience will have because a client reaction and audience reaction, or an account executive reaction and the audience reaction are two completely different things all the time because they've got different priorities. The audience doesn't care. They're not come into the concept with any of the baggage that an account executive might RVs worried about what the client is gonna say and then this and then what have we done before and blah-blah-blah. And is it going is it going to work? If you can reassure them at first with a safe concept and then move them on a bit further. It's a bit like attempt in a rabbit forward to drop it is slowly, slowly catchy monkey. Having three concepts allows you to do that something in the middle. So that by the time you present the edgier thing, by the time you go, if you really want to push it, they probably thought, okay, we've got that super safe one. The other one's fine. We can go with that. And whatever the Shelby now is fine. It's a bonus. The guards down a little bit, and then they can just interact with that third concept with a bit of more of a phone mindset, a bit more like the mindset you had when you create in it. Now for this can hurt you in the next step of the process when it comes to execution, we call it Frankenstein's monster. And it's basically a fudge together of ideas. What will happen sometimes is the client might like or whoever you're presenting to might like two or more of the concepts. But unlike you who have adopted this kill the darlings mentality, he may say call, can you combine two concepts are more than two. The real nightmare, and it's just terrible for the execution, it's terrible for the idea. You water them down both ideas and putting things together that aren't designed to fit. If somebody asks you to do this, here are two alternatives that you can suggest to a client or whoever it is, is the stakeholder who wants you to do this. The first option is that you can suggest staggering the different concepts over a longer period of time. This means that you can keep the same message fresh with different campaigns. So you can use all the concepts that you've got, but you can use them one-by-one. Let's say you said safe, middle ground, edgier. You'd say, Okay, we'll launch his safe. Then we'll go middle ground, then we'll go and we'll go six months or six months or six months. This, you can use all of the concepts, the client or whoever can see them all realized and Ron and everything that they don't have to sacrifice one of them, but they're not being mashed together and training some sort of monstrosity. The alternative is, the second option is to start a fresh. The new concept that contains the elements that they like. Take elements of what they liked from the different ideas. But don't keep the ideas per se. You're not taking the overall idea. Maybe it's taken a headline, maybe taken an image and you're saying, can we make these work together? But maybe we're creating a new strap line and new version of the proposition that ties them together. And that makes sense a bit more. Maybe we can do that, but maybe it's a case of saying, okay, we would rather go back to the drawing board. And based on the things that you like, we can now create a brand new concept because sometimes people, a lot of the time people don't know what they're looking for until we see it or see what they don't like in that way, that gives you a bit more guidance. Just be clear with them. They say, look, if you match two things together, probably not going to work is better if we go back to the drawing board, come up with a fresh concept based on what you like. And we'll go from there. When it comes to presenting. Always, always, always start with stamps. First of all, it saves all parties involved wasting time, wasting money, wasting energy, working up concepts, and going through the approval stage when you may work up concepts that don't get chosen. And then you've spent a lot of energy coming up with the executions and everything that designing them right in them. And then the idea, maybe you've done that for three concepts and then only one of them gets chosen. We just wasted a load of time and the load money and everything else, working up executions for all three concepts, there is no need to do that. Basically, it pays to involve the decision-makers early in the process. And this is about scams do base camps, by the way, we mean properly drawn up versions of the concepts, but not actually executed with design and not for coffee and things like that. You may have some well-done drawings and a few lines of copyright and not at the whole enchilada. When you do this, when you get them involved at the scalp stages actually increases buy-in. And it allows you to tweak the idea while it's in development, while it's still in the early stages. It also flags up any weaknesses in the idea, such as how it will potentially rollout. Maybe there's something that he mentioned before. Before you start working on the full design and copy and you can have a discussion with them about execution as well based on what they're going in front of them, they can make a more informed decision about the idea and then maybe say, Oh, I will this work? How will that? It leads to more of a discussion before you get started. So it saves blood, sweat, and tears along the line. Also, crucially, this is probably the most important part. It allows anyone evaluating the work to judge it on its conceptual merits, not the execution. So somebody may have a thing against a certain type of image or a certain type of word or color or whatever it is. The strip that away. They're just looking at the concept itself. They're just looking at the message and therefore, they can make a more informed decision. If you are basing your campaign around one or more t-values, you're also going to want to storyboard out your concept. You're not gonna make it. Of course. That's another key reason why you're doing scanf form, all this kind of stuff you can't do well yet. You can just produce in skunk form. Because the other thing that happens is, let's say it's for a client. They may assume that's what it's gonna look like, especially if you're not there to present. They may think, oh, this is what he's gone a lot like, oh no, I don't want it to look like this. And maybe it's just a mocked up version. It's not finished yet or it's just in your mind, it's just one possibility of how it can lock. But in their minds it's a done deal and it has to look like this. So what you can do if you do want to explore visual styles, you can actually show that in the form of a mood board. For instance, George Lucas, who created Star Wars. He sold the script of Star Wars. Movie studios, did it using a handful of artistic impressions from scenes in movies that he had in his head and he had a really good artist do it. And he sold the script based on that, you know, it's just a little insight into the potential rather than actually trying to execute. 27. Create Winning Presentations: How do we order our presentation when we put it together? For a bulletproof presentation, just follow the simple logical order. This is the auto. Me and Chris, we've kind of refined this. Nothing is not rocket science, but these are the elements that we put in and this is the order that we follow just to have a robust presentation title page, just for your own benefit, give it a clear and unique title to avoid confusion. So in what you save as, as well, because this is more for if you're new to doing this, you'll end up with all kinds of presentations and different variants on them as well, different versions. So just try and have a naming system so that you can know which version is and what it is. What you do then is recap the brief and there's a good reason you do this. Sometimes you got to remind the person looking at it of what the challenge was in the first place or what the objective was, what the brief is. Because first of all, the main Chris hub this very recently actually, we were given a brief we did presentation to meet the brief and the client came back to us and said, oh, this isn't what I wanted. We said, well, this is the brief he gave us. They basically changed the brief. When it came to like a dispute about the work, we said, well, this is what you briefed us with, and it matches that brief. It's as simple as that. So that's one of the pitfalls to avoid us. Why you should always recap the brief and summarize it a little bit so that everybody knows what the challenges so that when we present the solution, it fits, is bulletproof if you like. No one can say, oh, this isn't right where you can say, well, this is debrief tools. We all agreed this was the issue and this is what we're looking to solve. So you just getting rid of any goalpost changing and then your work being blamed for it. So again, you might call this the problem, you could call it the challenge, the brief introduction color while you well, it doesn't really matter. This a paragraph of text. And if you follow that little formula, the brief problem, the objective, you won't go wrong. Then you may just call it thinking great strategy or the solution. Basically, this is the response to the Brief. Now, obviously you're not showing anything yet. What you're showing is your strategic thinking in response to the brief. So he's saying, well, if this is the question that you post those on how to solve it, this is the answer, this is solution, this is what it should be. If we're to meet this objective, we need to do X, Y, and Z. I'd say this is really key. It will do a lot for you when you present your ideas. Then this a little bit like a funnel rarely we're going down from the brief into the strategy and now into the proposition, because we've put the brief there then in response, but the solution. Now the proposition will make total sense. This is where you distill everything down to a short compelling sentence that forms the basis of their creative. We've already done our work on this. We've got a strategic proposition. Even if you've been handed a proposition to start with, steel mentioned it here. Again, it might be that they've come up with the greatest strategy or the strategy to follow. But just recap it all the way through. It's showing that you understand the brief and you understand the message to deliver to the audience. Then we get to the creative concepts. What we'd suggest is, before revealing each concept, try and build the excitement and prime your audience for buy-in with a rationale, with a campaign strap line. And optionally a manifesto which I'll explain in a moment. Basically not showing the concept yet. It's a bit like having the curtain in front of the concepts and you're about to reveal it and they're gonna wanna see it. They want you to pull back the curtain and see it. You're not letting them have it just yet. The building a little bit of excitement in intrigue. But you're also setting up concepts with a rationale c0 going through the thinking again and EV count all the way through. Get them to agree. Get them to give you a yes on the introduction, this was the brief yes, this is the right creative strategy. And yes, of course this is the right strap line for it. So I would suggest here yet have the strap line. And then the manifesto. Again, this is optional book manifesto is essentially a creative rationale. It's written in the tone of voice that you're going to adopt for your campaign. And it's basically just capturing the spirit or the essence of what he's saying. Slightly more creative way than a rationale. This will just help to sell in the concept because it'll get them excited about their own brand. So let's say you've revealed the concepts and gone through them. Then it's all about progressing onto workshop ideas. Let's call them as a conceptual creative. You may not be involved in this process. You may, just like me and Chris often do. We just do the ideas and then we hand them over. Nowadays, we're often involved in the early stage. We present the stamps, they choose an idea and then it's over to whoever the grave team is working on the idea. But just in case we need to cover this off so that you have a clear idea. Basically, follow the same running order as the presentation. You may as well include the early rationales, the intro, et cetera, et cetera. But you can strip it down to the one campaign now, maybe you're presenting to at this stage, but just follow the running order the same again and present some mocked-up executions. But again, just make sure the client knows that this is not the finished thing. The main thing to remember, even at this stage, even in the mock execution stage, it's not about the quantity of words. If images of executions or ideas, you're better off mocking up a smaller amount of work or the highest standard of high-quality so that the message comes across better. Success lies in the quality and clarity of your thinking and how it's put across. Let's assume you're working with a client. Client is gonna react better to something that looks better. Whereas if you've been rushed and working up the idea, There's all these different things to work up. You can't spend the time to really follow through on the idea. They're going to have a negative impression of the idea. They're gonna think the ideas fallen short. It's not that the idea is for them ensure that you just not had enough time to work things through properly. So what have we learned in this module? Well, we've learned that testing your ideas for a tight fit against the brand message in the audience is absolutely crucial. We need to do this before we present back our ideas. We also need to test our ideas for attention, as in the ability to capture it and keep it to create an open-loop and to anchor to the emotional connection. And of course, always ask ourselves so I think what before proceeding with an idea, cursing, of course is optional. And then to start by presenting with scallops and sell in the thinking First. Thus, the most important thing. 28. MODULE 4: DEVELOP & DEAL WITH FEEDBACK: What you're about to learn in this module, we're going to look at what to do if your ideas are rejected because ultimately, that happens at some point to all of us. Also how to provide constructive feedback. Then we'll be talking about why you should never fear criticism. Criticism is actually very useful. We'll be looking at the mindset in how to look at it. It doesn't set you back, it actually helps you propel you forward. Finally, we'll be looking at a little Jedi mind trick, outer turn a no into a yes. Now, if you believe a concept is right for the client and can really help them, or is right for your business and can really help your business to shine into profit, or will be showing you how to influence the creative process for the good of all parties. So let's get going, okay, dealing with rejection first and foremost, it's natural to feel a sting when an idea is rejected. It does get easier though if you're new to the process. The more you do it, the more you develop a thicker skin to it, and the more you realize it's not that big a deal, it's just part of the process. And to be honest, it's like anything. The more you're exposed to something, the less it affects you, you become immune or numb to it Really, what does a certain way we can look at it? There are two things to know. Don't flog a dead concept. It's just a waste of everybody's time and be just don't take it personally. I know it's hard sometimes. But the way to look at, as we've been discussing throughout this course, is that it's not art, It's not a fragment of your soul that's getting destroyed and trampled on. It's just business. We've come up with a one possible way to get a certain result. And somebody else doesn't agree with that way they have a different perspective on the matter. Whether you think they're right or wrong, they're the person who makes the decision. So we have to accept that because there are plenty more concepts in the sea. Plot it that way. First of all, let's look into this in a little bit more detail. The idea that we don't plug a DAG concepts. If the person you're working with are presenting to doesn't believe in your concept, just let it go and just say, Okay, what can we do with it? Because it's worth realizing early on when it's worth arguing for and when to move on and have been the biggest culprit of this. Trying to argue people around to concepts and ideas that they're just not feeling well, they're just not getting. Again, it's trying to argue with a lot of the time their subconscious mind, their emotional reaction to it with logic and it doesn't work. I've come to realize that and to just my approach as a result in the past of inquiry argumentative by cutting know, I know this is right, so I'm gonna push it through. Well, my opinion isn't necessarily the right opinion. So you just end up wasting energy, essentially. Learn when to let it go. Now it could be that the idea works in your head, but it doesn't translate onto paper. So this is another thing. You may have an idea in your mind that you go back and see it when you get it down on paper, just, it's just not translating. So rather than trying to force it to work when it's not going to have a go at seeing if you can make it work, but if he can't admit defeat site, right? Well, we'll put it to one side. You don't necessarily need to throw it away for good. You can just put it to one side because that concept, it may work far, far better for something else down the line. The three weeks down the line, you may have maybe working on the brief. You can now. Thank God, I didn't use that for that because now it's perfect for this. Don't see it as a waste of time in terms of the work you've put in, C is just future potential. Now, as we mentioned earlier on, you're trying to solve a problem using creative thinking. That everyone can benefit you, your business, your clients, and the audience. So if you shift your focus from yourself to everybody, there's a thing in nature where nature optimizes for the whole rather than the individual thing within nature. We can take that same approach mentally, we can say, okay, well, we're trying to optimize for the whole, we're trying to come up with an overall solution that suits everybody, that everybody's happy with, that everyone benefits from. At the end of the day, if your clients are happy, the business you work for is happy, et cetera, et cetera in here are going to benefit from it. You're going to profit from it. Some of the key to success in creative is not just the work that you do. It's also your ability to actually work within a bigger unit of you will work within a team or work within how the client operates, is your ability to fit in as well as stand out that matters and to be diplomatic. And me and Chris were the last source of people who are like that naturally, but we've learned to fit in especially freelance in over the years together. We've learned to be far more diplomatic and realize that it's not always about what's right as much as you should try and do that in the first instance. Sometimes it's just being able to back down and go okay and fit in with whatever the client wants or the business ones. So try and put some emotional distance between yourself and your ideas. There's a phenomenon known as emotional divorce. So before somebody breaks up, but somebody, they'll often emotionally divorced themselves from that person because it makes it easier to do. Because on some level, probably subconsciously they've already decided that that's the mission. They start to distance themselves so that it's an easier wrench, if you will. We can put a little bit of that emotional distance between ourselves and our ideas so that if we have to break up from them, we're not going to be arguing the task when it's really a pointless exercise. Of course, you can put your point across. But once you've done that kind of backoff and say, Okay, it's your choice. Again, the thing to remember is we're not creating subjective works of art. Were trying to convince audiences to think and do something. I think being able to frame it like that in your mind does help because you've seen it as just business and it's coming up with a strategy and an approach that everybody's happy with. This leads us into collaboration versus competition is really a mindset issue. Again, this is another thing that will help you set you apart when it comes to the value that you offer as a creative and how effective you are as well. And I'll also how easy you find it and how fun you find it. When it comes to doing the work. It's human nature to want to compete. We're looking at everybody else and thinking, how do I compare people? Say don't compare yourself to others. It's almost impossible. Rarely, we're all looking to be the best, to do better, to do more to be better than others on some subconscious level. Four in creative work that can hurt us, it pays far, far more to collaborate instead, when it comes to being a creative, it doesn't just pay off in terms of your reputation as a creative is gonna pay off in cold hard cash as well. And now we're talking whether you're a creative in an agency where the other business collaborating with another business. And the great thing about collaboration is that it gives you strength in numbers when it comes to selling in your work. If you, for instance, are a copywriter or an art director, if you can team up with somebody else. It's really valuable to clients. They absolutely love creative teams because you're not just half a service, if you will. Like, I couldn't go out there as a copywriter and do Ole our direction in-design design and everything like that. I can't do that. Just as Chris couldn't go out as an art director and do the copywriting. That's not his skill set and okay, we've developed skills in these areas to be more rounded, to be able to do some of that. I can do a stamp, but it's not gonna be able to scratch. Chris can do some headlines, but then he's not gonna be able to do copy as well as I can do it. So often clients, they love creative teams because you can do it altogether as one and also two heads are better than one. And they know that most creators will be open to collaborating and presenting ideas as a team. When you present as a team, it's far harder for somebody to push back an idea of two people agree with each other and say no, this is a good idea. When you collaborate, when you forget about competition and you just thinking about creation, I just find generally the competition tends to melt away. So if you are present in back as team that has two or more of you. And even if you're brand new to each other, and even if even if the other person you don't feel has done much to it, always present your work back using the words are on weight. And our thinking is, and we came up with this idea, not simply because it's just a good way to, again, you've seen in a good light, you're not just going III, III. Also not just because you don't want to make the other person feel crappy. But also again, when you say the words we and our thinking is this, it's harder to push back against it to people who think it's a good idea is to people who think it's the right way to go. And that is going to help to convince the person you may be presenting to. Especially if there's only one of them, you can outnumber them. 29. How to Give Creative Feedback: Let's get onto providing feedback. How best to do this, because it's not always the easiest thing to do and the other person's on the receiving end, of course, and you know how it feels to have an idea critiqued, let's say rather than criticized. Here's how to provide constructive feedback. Now, judging the work of another, you could be a client, you could be working with a person. Really, what we want to do here is have a set way of doing it. This is really important, is such a vital part of their process. Iterative need constructive feedback. You're not giving them proper feedback. They're not going to know what to do. And again, if you're the creative working with another creative, you need to provide constructive feedback so they know what you want and what you expect and what you're trying to push up. So constructive is the operative word. The key is to always begin your feedback with a positive observation. The thing is, I've noticed over the years, the people who are good at providing feedback, they're often creative directors actually, they'll start off, even if they don't like an idea. Like smile and assassins, they will provide a positive observation first. They'll say, Oh, I like the stamp or the design or the copy or the headline, the choice of image, or the thinking, or the creativity involved or something like that. Or they'll say, Oh, it's a good start, All right, great style. Or they may even just say I liked the idea is great work. Then they'll deliver them the real feedback, which is, I'm not sure it's right, I'm not sure it's there yet. Blah-blah-blah. You could start off by saying You're like the scam, you like the design, the copy of the headline, whatever it is, just say something positive about the work first. It can just be the smallest thing. It doesn't matter what it is. Then provide the feedback because it just stops the defenses. If you've ever been in this position where you're presenting work, you'll know it's very easy to get defensive. Somebody starts off on the attack and it's not like they're attacking you bought the starting off with some form of criticism. If they say they don't like you even or something like that. If you just start off with something positive, they're gonna be more in the right mindset to accept the criticism when you've said something positive. So that's just to kind of little mini ninja tip there. Only then once you've done that move onto why the idea isn't right for the brief. And again, this is key. It's why the idea isn't right for the brief or the objective. It's not saying there's not a good idea or anything like that. So you could say, first of all, start off by saying what is working, but then say, what isn't working or what you think could be done to make it work. Trying to present this as an objective thing, it's a business thing. You don't go on about our day. That's rubbish. Oh, that's wrong. You say not sure. It's quite meeting the brief. I wonder if there's something we can do to fix it or I wonder if there's another idea. What do you think? Use questions like that. Whatever we could do this, whatever we could do that maybe focused on an element that's not working because I will maybe this isn't quite right. How can we make that better? It's not you destroying the idea that they've done. It's you both looking at it and go and how can we make it better? So once we've done that, we need to make sure we're delivering the kind of feedback that people can work off as well. We need to be specific about things where we said this isn't working, that isn't working as well as it showed our code. That's been kind of specific, picking a specific elements of the idea. We need to then provide some solid feedback that somebody can act on. So it's now going to just go and this isn't right. Carry on doing work. Or you'll often hear the phrase, have fun with it. Keep going, have fun with it. Well, keep going and have fun with it is kind of useless to a creative people need to know how to fix the problem. You need to know, essentially it needs to know what the problem is before they can fix it. They need to know what you don't like about it. What do you think isn't working about it? They need to know this so they can get it right next time. I mean, I've heard one of my colleagues wants who's doing web design for a client. And the client said, Can you make it more washing machine? On earth? Is that where do you even start? You don't even know where to start. That's the problem. So you need to provide specific feedback on not so much what you don't like, what you think isn't working and what you think will work better or could work better alongside the brief. Be as specific as you possibly can. There's nothing worse than hearing those words. Have fun with it. It's a good start. Keep going. Yes, you can start off with it's a good start, but you need to provide the specific feedback. 30. What If Your Ideas Are Rejected?: What about the nightmare scenario? What if all your ideas are rejected? The first thing is not to panic. The temptation is to think of what we're gonna do. But I've never seen somebody go, I don't like these ideas. Therefore, your sack, that's more likely we'll go there. Not quite right. Can you do some more? The worst-case scenario is just it's going to eat into your budget a bit more. A lot of the time they'll give you more budget to do some more ideas. They don't need to like every idea. They just need to like the one. They're just looking for that one idea. Another anecdote, when I was first die now I was lucky enough to work with a guy from Saatchi and Saatchi who helped me become a better creative in the process. And we were doing some freelance work together for an agency. And I was kind of permanent severe like I was in this agency quite a lot. They said to me you're going to present the ideas and I-Thaw Rayleigh, this was a big job for them and it meant a lot of money for this agency. And I was thinking why descending the junior into present? These two guys around this agency, we're both from big London agencies, are very experienced, is a very experienced creative director. And then I found out when I went to present them that they were basically the client was coming in and the client's wife and everybody was scared of the client's wife because she was so hard to please. And at the end of the day, it was her opinion that counted even though she didn't work in the business. We've done the ideas and the idea is really great if by the way, and she didn't like, we were told You didn't like edgy stuff. So I go in there and start presenting to think we don't five ideas again, many rarely, but we were told to cover all the bases. And I could see as I was presenting them, wasn't getting much of an emotional reaction. That was kind of getting the shark eyes a little bit. And then I saw my two bosses slide and lower and lower under the table with a hand over their eyes getting ready for the assault. Stop present in all the ideas and allied one of the executions out for each idea in a row. And again, we don't all these executions rather than doing scams, which I would never recommend. And she pointed the first idea and said, I hate. You pointed out the second idea and said Hate. Then she looked at the third one instead, Haidt, and this is the first time I presented. It wasn't a natural presenter on a start. And then she looked at the number four and said, Kate, now for our guardian, go fifth, hate, I'm gonna be sacked. They're going to be sacked, globe blah, blah. And then by the end, she looked at the end. One, picked it up and one, I love this, love, love, love, love, love. Do this one brilliant. And she went fantastic work. And then she walked out when I'm going shopping now, the client, when she'd gone, he shocked the guy's hands and just went brilliant work, well done, absolutely nailed it. Now, that was seen as a big success, but the client's wife hated for the idea's, absolutely hated them. Not just dislike them or shading care that she hated those first four ideas. Or she cared about was she absolutely loved the last one. And that's all she remembered. And then they did the campaign. It was successful at rest is history. That little story. It's just a little Soyuz to show you that you're not trying to make the client like every single idea. You just trying to get them to like what? If they reject the first three ideas or the first two ideas? Don't worry. Let's say you've done three and then reject those. Well, you can go back to the drawing board with feedback of what they do like. You can treat that as just an exploration exercise if you like. We found out what they don't like and now we can do what they do like. And sometimes what you'll also find is you'll get a brief. You answer the brief with your creative work, and then you find out that that's not the real brief. There's a completely different brief. That's not your fault. Again, we go back to what you put in your presentation as long as you feed their brief back to them and say this was the brief that you gave us. They'll then turn around and go, You know what? This isn't a brief. Let's tell you the real brief now. And then then that's great because you can go okay, well, we found that out together. Now we can answer this and you can involve them in the process a little bit and you can get them to say exactly what they're really looking for. Now if you've gone through module two of this course, that is a half the point of that step. To avoid this, it's to work within your agency, within your team, and also with the client to make sure you're working on the real brief, to make sure the goal posts don't get moved later on. 31. Get More Ideas Approved: For those rare times when you absolutely positive or he want to get an idea through, there is something you can do. Now, it may not always work. You can certainly try it before it becomes obvious that can't get anywhere. Now you can't get from a no to a yes without a, maybe you need that bridge in the middle. People need that. Maybe they need that element of doubt in the mind you need to create that. Now our aim is to introduce the maybe into the process into their mind. Here's how it works. A client or a decision maker may reject an idea. They say they don't like it, they don't get it. They don't think it's right. They're not feeling it or it just flat out scars and usually it's because they've not done anything like this before and they're not aware that disruption is a good thing in advertising. So what we can do is we start by asking them if there's anything they do like about it. Now, there are a number of questions we can ask here to help us do this. We're not trying to lead them all the way up the mountain. Mark gonna say, let's climb this mountain right to the top. What we're going to ask them to do is take one or two little steps forward for a time until they find that the climb that mountain already without realizing they're doing it, we're trying to get them to agree to small things first rather than the big thing of this is the right concept. So you could ask a number of questions. You could ask. Is there anything you do like about the idea? You may ask? Can we agree that the thinking is sound? You can use that for proposition as well. You can use it for strap line. You may also ask, excuse the strap line, make logical sense. You're not even asking them. Do you like it? Do you think it's right? Does it make sense to you? Because again, this will start to introduce not only elements of doubt in the row mind like Oh, I prejudge this a little bit too soon. It will also get them to agree, well, technically the straight-line is right in terms of logic. So maybe it's right in terms of creative as well. In terms of message. You could also ask, what do you think of this color? Bod like purple. And then I say, oh yeah, yeah, I like the color. Okay. How about the headline? Could we keep the headline? You may not like the image body like the headline. They may say, Oh yeah, I liked the headline on the mesa. I'm not sure about the headline. Well, do you think we could write something similar? You'll probably be able to present a couple of ideas there creatively on the spot because you'll know the idea by then. I've done that when I'm presenting word again, I don't like that headline, not sure about that. And I said, well, we could say it like this and they go, Oh yeah, Okay, great. Or I say, if the headline is the only thing stopping you from like in it, we can change that, don't worry about it. You could also ask them, Do you like the design and layout? Can we agree that the layout is correct? You could ask, how about the choice of image or photography? Do like the photography style. Did they like the style or do they like to style of illustration? And did they like the content that we've gotten there? Can we agree? And if you notice, what we're using is agreement style language, and we're also using the word wheel lot so that it's kind of a collaborative experience. You bringing the men as though they're involved in the actual idea as well. They will see the idea is that as they'll see that I was involved in creating the idea and of course, wherever you think is yours, you more likely to favor alike. You may also ask, can we agree that it fits the lock of the brand? Can we agree that it reflects your audience back to them? Or can we agree that it reflects the brief talk to you? What do you agree that it's creative enough? Like, for instance, it might be kind of wildly creative. Well, you can just say, Can we agree that it's creative enough? You turn it around a little bit. You could ask, do you think it would stand out from the competition? Now the can't deny that it does. If they think it's pushing it. Does it grab your attention? Are we capturing the right mood and emotion? What do you think of the call to action? The line at the end that says by this act now, have we got that right? The more yes is you can get the molar or agreements you can get. We'll start to introduce the element of tau into the mind. It'll start to get them to a place of maybe rather than no, he's kind of reaching a tipping point, if you will, over into a yes. So you may say, what about the copy? Is the content of the copyright? Perhaps we can keep some of the copy or tweak it somehow. What do you think about that? What do you consider keeping any of the elements in this idea? Then would you be willing to let us make few tweaks to the execution or to the scamper, to the idea and show them back to you. And I see how you feel then would you be willing to see another version or execution of this idea and then give us feedback on that. And they may think, yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, I'm willing to give it a shot and see what else you can do with it. But you can ask what are the elements that we can fix? And then they may say, Okay, well it's this and this and this, and then you can get around that. And if you can solve those little sticking points, you can keep the idea and they can agree. We can use phrasing to get a yes as well. And the thing about this technique is, it is based on science. I won't go into it, but people will do anything to stay consistent with their own sense of identity. If they agree to one thing and say Yes, that's what I believe they will then have to stay consistent with it. Once you've introduced all these kind of yes, yes, yes. Yes. This idea works like this. Yes, this idea works like that. This is right, this is right, this is right, this is right, this is right. The cart and then dial back on that. And then suddenly they'll start to think maybe this idea is right after all, and maybe I've liked it all along. So researchers in the UK have found that how you phrase things can play a big role in your success when it comes to seeking agreement. If someone rejects an idea or a request initially, phrases such as what do you consider? Or would you be willing to actually increase the chances of a positive answer? Just the phrasing alone will do that for you. This means that it places the focus on the flexibility of their character, not their opinion of the work. So again, we're going back to this, is this character element is this. I've agreed to this and I'm not the sort of character to go back on my word on what I say. So therefore, I must stay consistent with my view of my character. I must agree that the work is right now. We're only obviously we're only recommending you do this if it, you know, it's gonna make a great impact for their business in doing it for their benefit over yours. It's positive influence for their own benefit. Everyone likes to think they're reasonable and agreeable. This is the point. People will always change their minds rather than change their self-image. They're self images of being agreeable and reasonable like most people, that's how most people see themselves. Then what do you think is easier to change your mind about an idea or a concept, or to change your entire self-image. While it's very, very difficult to change your self image, it either takes time or it takes a big event in your life, a big emotional event in your life. So that's not going to change. It's your mind about a certain little thing that's gonna change about an idea. 32. Get Clients and Bosses to Say Yes: Small agreements lead to big ones with agreement on some smaller elements of the idea or the execution. When you've got agreement on these, ask one or more of these following questions. Can we agree it would make a memorable campaign? Or you could ask, would you agree that it would make a memorable campaign? Do you think we might leave the idea, the mixed for now? Because what you've might find is it starts to grow on them in the background the more they look at it, because it becomes familiar or not trust this unfamiliar creative leap that they were initially presented with. The may also show it to somebody else in their business or even a family member. And they say, Oh, I really like that, I think it works. They might have a different opinion. They may not be seen it with the same baggage as the person or the same reservations. It's somebody else's opinion. Or they think it's good as well. Alright, maybe I've been too quick to judge it. Again. If they agree that it's a memorable campaign, if they agree to have it anger around them a little bit longer, it makes it easier for them to then accept the come back into the yes. That second part is really, it can be really powerful. And then what they'll often say is, I always knew it was the right one all along. You can also ask this question. You can say, well perhaps we could come back to this idea later. What do you think? Again, give it time to grow on them. They don't have to answer now. They're not under any pressure to throw it out or decide now they can let it bubble because often it's like a song growing on a film. Maybe you watch it the second time round. You didn't like it at first and then you'll like it. So you could say something like this. How about we leave it with you and let you live with it for a few days? Or what do you consider showing it to your team? Because we know that other people have different opinions and other people aren't coming at it with the same baggage. So would you be willing for us to test the idea with your audience? That's another great one because at the end of the day, you can test against sample audience and they love it. That's the ultimate. The client can't deny that the end of the day, the audiences king, as we've already talked about many times in this course, the audience is king. It's the ultimate test. If you can test the idea with your audience, with a sample audience, you may even know people who are same kind of audience, who are that kind of target market. Once they've agreed out loud, that's important to get them to gray out loud, to XYZ, add whatever it is. They will then have to stay consistent with their declared agreements and will therefore adjust the opinion accordingly. Now this might not happen every time and you might not want to do this process every time, but it's just, it can be really powerful. And you can even make it a regular thing where you ask these questions. I mean, these last questions here. He could just ask these on a regular basis. Using this process could get countless good ideas approved. This not only good for you, it's good for the client because it saves on time, it saves on budget. And so it's good all around. It's good for the whole. What have we learned in this module? Well, we've learned that don't flog a DAG concepts and don't take feedback personally to core messages from this module. On the other hand, do you see that you can move and no to a yes on certain ideas. Whether you provide them feedback or asking for feedback, make sure it's actionable. So if you're the one providing the feedback, the onus is on you to be specific and make sure it's something somebody can work with because at the end of the day, you don't want it coming back and it's still not being right where you don't want them going away and not being clear on what you want. And likewise, if you're the one doing the work and they're not providing the specific feedback you need. The onus is on you to then say, Okay, this is what I need to work on it and this is what you can phrase it. I don't want to waste your time. I don't want to waste your money and needs specific feedback now that I can work with. Finally, don't worry if a client doesn't like an idea is objective as we can possibly make it. It's still subjective. Anything creative is a subjective thing. It doesn't mean that what you're doing is wrong or you're not good enough or anything like that. It just means that the Sony moving parts, it's just not worth worrying about. The only thing to worry about is okay, what do we need to do to either get the idea through, rectify it, to do a new idea. So be aware of the person's tastes that you are presenting to, but don't let it dampen down your creativity. This is another point. You can actually find a middle ground like I've done it plenty of times. So as Chris, where we've had to adapt a little bit because we get to know if it's a regular client, we'd get to know what they sign off. If you're the creative, if it's not your business, you can do the best that you possibly can. But at the end of the day, sometimes you just gotta deliver what they want. And as much as you may argue the point of certain concepts, if they never go for them, then you just say, okay, well, we've got to work within those limitations. So be aware of the taste, but don't let it dump in your creativity in the first place. It's still come up with good ideas that you believe in, that you know a right. But if you have a client like that, you can come up with it first to get it out of the way or come up with it last, just to cover the base. If there's something they always go for, put it in there because it's just your insurance policy basically it at the end of the day, it means you're gonna get rehired for the next job and we have to pay the bills. 33. BONUS: IDEAS UNLOCKED: Make More of Your Creative Mind: The creative mindset, what is it and what should it be? Well, Faun is the keyword here. When we're talking about creativity who were not having formed, it's almost like, well, what's the point? And the truth is when we're having fun, when we're enjoying what we do, we always get better results no matter what it is. The trouble is, a lot of people are approaching the conceptual process with the wrong mindset. Now this strangles creative thinking and it kills ideas before they've hatched. It's like the Death Star, new king. All the creative ideas that could be, because for their creative mind to work, there has to be freedom that has to be a flow of creative energy. The right mindset therefore opens up the flow of ideas and nurtures the early seeds of inspiration into brilliant and bulletproof solutions. It gives them a chance to grow because sometimes you may have a really good idea and may not even realize it. And sometimes you may come up with a thorough and think, oh, that's going nowhere. But actually it can go somewhere. It can lead to something. We just need to relax and ease into it and not take it too seriously. And just being a mindset of curiosity, really, just be open to wear an idea can go because some of the most random thoughts you can have can actually be turned into really solid, robust ideas that make total sense when it comes to actually selling a product. Let's look at this wrong mindset a little bit. Let's explore in more detail, what do we mean when we say the word wrong? Well, you may not actually have the wrong mindset. You may be in the mindset of you enjoy creative and you get on with it and you produce ideas. No problem. But a lot of people don't have that mindset. And therefore the either put pressure on themselves or they try and put pressure on you even. And that's simply because they don't understand how all this stuff works to them. It's a game of chance, it's a dark art. It's a roulette wheel spinning the, working in the blind hope that they win the lottery of ideas. Meanwhile, the clock on the wall is ticking and that suddenly had for lunch is squirming in the pit of the stomach because they've got this feeling I know tangent and out and not going to come up with anything. But the trouble is that's only making it harder to come up with something. And I've been there and I've worked with people like this and good talented people as well. And I just, I felt they didn't relax just a little bit. They'll do so much is better than they're doing because they've got the talent, they've got the skills. They just don't have quite the right mindset to get the most out of themselves. The creative processes and mystery tool or people, they think they're relying on luck and they think they're relying on random inspiration. But the key thing is to not put pressure on yourself and don't let others do the same thing. And don't try and force an idea consciously. This is a really important thing that not many people understand. It's down to the way the mind works. And as we're going to cover, we're going to look at how the mind works so that we can get the most out of it. So that by the time you finish this course, if you ever had it before, you won't have this kind of worry and down unfair. And also you won't be in the laboring under the illusion that it is about random inspiration and chance and everything like that. Because fear-based thinking just will hold you back and stop your subconscious go into work. It's like trying to drive a fast carb with the fur on the brake. Or if you've ever set off on the road and you've left the hand brake on a little bit and you don't realize that's what fear intention does to you. What is the right mindset instead, how should we be approached in concepts and ideas? What is conducive to creativity? Well, there's a really good way to increase your creative output and that's to see the entire thing is a game. It's a game of curiosity, is a game of experimentation. You thinking, what can we get out of this today? We're not saving lives. We're coming up with ideas, and there's always another idea around the corner. The important thing is to stay loose and stay curious. That's a really great way to focus your mind on what will I come up with next? What can we do with this? Now if you're following the principles in this course, hopefully you can just relax anyway in the knowledge that you'll deliver. But I think it's important at this stage before we get into the bones of the creative process, if you like, it's good for us to even approach the course in the right mindset. So by understanding where ideas come from, we can actually start to get some leverage over ourselves really, really starts to take the randomness and blind hope out of the situation. So where do ideas come from? It's not where most people think that come from. Think of it this way. Your creative intelligence essentially functions like a computer. Your conscious mind is the programmer, the person who's punching the information in essentially. Whereas your subconscious mind is the computer program itself, is the thing running in the background. When you're working on your computer, you don't actually see the computer programs working. You just see the output. You see the end product of what they're doing. There's a lot of stuff going on underneath the surface, a little bit like the matrix, but we don't need to see the matrix. We don't need to be like Neo. We can just look at the output and that's good enough for us. But we don't need to understand how the subconscious mind works. And a lot of people think the mind is the brain. The mind is in the brain. You'll look, you can look in the brain all day long. You won't find the mind is not there. It doesn't work like that. It's not something that's physical. Brain, however, is physical. It is the computer or the hardware via which the mind operates. You need to have a brain to operate your mind. Essentially, you can't have thoughts in splendid isolation. We need both things. We need the software and we need the hardware, and we need to understand how they function. How can we understand and optimize all three to be our most creative? But let's take a look at each area. First of all, the conscious mind, the programmer. This is the person you'd call you. Again, we're touching on ideas we've shared earlier in the course, but here they're becoming more relevant to how we use them creatively. Now, the function of the conscious mind is only to ever give instructions to the subconscious mind. This is hugely important to understand what we think of as ourselves, as thinking beings, as rational conscious beings. This part of our minds, our only task is to import the instruction. That's our only tasks. So it's like being on your computer, being the programmer who punches in the numbers and punches in the code. You're given instructions to your computer. Essentially, if you're given instructions via the software, then makes the hardware do certain things electronically and then you start to get the results. So the conscious mind is not the creative parts of the mind. When you sat around a table and you're coming up with ideas, it feels and seems like you've come up with the idea in your conscious mind, you're thinking about the problem and you think, Oh, I've had an idea. Words and pictures come to your mind. You write them down, you draw them out. And you think that's occurred to me consciously? Well, unfortunately not. Fortunately not as we'll find in a moment. Ideas don't come from the conscious mind, the given to you. But again, we'll get onto them. Instead, the conscious mind is only responsible for the input. It's responsible for very, very little of the output in life. For instance, let's say you're sitting in an office and it's time to go home. You would think to yourself, time to go home. I'm gonna go home. You don't actually think to yourself, okay, how do I put my coat on? I pull this arm in here, put that Alma and you don't consciously think, okay, pick up my keys. How do I do that? Okay, pick up the key and then getting into your car and you don't think much about what you're doing when you're driving. You're not thinking through the process of changing gear. In fact, a lot of the time your conscious mind is thinking about other things. What you're gonna do at the weekend, what your boss said to you, whatever it may be. Meanwhile, you're still doing things. What's happening here? Well, what you're doing is inputting instructions and then the subconscious mind during the rest, as we'll see in a moment. So it's our jobs as greatest thinkers to input the right instructions. Then our next job is just to get the **** out of the way. It's easier said than done. But there are ways we can do it in ways we can lean into it. And that's the key really, if you think about the top farmers in life, then not only really good at what they do, they're not only highly skilled and everything. And they've gotten natural talent for something. They're really good at getting out of their own way. Being relaxed enough to perform like the football or soccer player, lean or Messi. He's it regarded now is pretty much the greatest player of all time. He scores an insane amount of goals, creates an insane amount of goals with a Football Club Barcelona. They've actually found that a lot of it is not just obviously scale, is this composure in and around the area when it comes to shooting on goal. And that's apparently down to the fact that he has a really low emotional level. If you think of it like a needle. When you have a bigger emotional reaction that goes all the way into the red with messy, maybe goes halfway or less than that. He's not very Emotional, which allows him to be in a relaxed state of mind. So that when he's on the big stage on the pitch with all the world watching, he can make them most of his skills and his talents more than other people can. And that's why you can deliver better results. We're gonna see how this works now, how we can do this. But at this stage we're just understanding, first of all, how the mind operates and how the brain operates so that we have the theory of light to go with the practice, the subconscious mind, the computer program. We could also refer to this as the operating system, a bit like Windows or OSX, doing a lot of functions as soon as you turn your computer running the show, but it does rely on OS given instructions along the way. So the subconscious mind, it's only responsible for the actual output. It's not responsible for any of the input. The computer program on your computer can't decide what it wants to do. It doesn't make the decisions. Now, the person who programmed it in the first place may have told it to do certain things out of habit automatically. That happens with us. We're programmed from birth and actually they've looked at it and said, it goes back 500 years as far as that, where we're programmed through our DNA and our genetics to actually have certain traits, do certain habits, and operate in a certain way. And the way you've been programmed as child is going to determine to a large extent how you function as an adult. But a lot of it is about we input certain instructions into our subconscious mind and it gives us the output in return. And depending on what we input, it's going to output something that's consistent with that. Now, it has no ability to accept or reject an instruction or idea. It doesn't have an opinion as in no, that's a bad idea and not doing that. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. That's where the conscious mind has the power. The conscious mind has the power to choose. We have the opportunity and the power to actually programming the idea and choose, choose what the output will be by the quality of what the input is. It can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not. Fantasy and reality are the same. The creative output therefore, is the sole responsibility of the subconscious mind. The instructions aren't. The conscious mind can input information in the form of instructions. I want to do this, but it doesn't have anything to do with the results that come out, the actual action. Whereas the subconscious mind can create the action and produce the result, but it can't decide what the instruction is. As we've just mentioned, it will produce ideas consistent with the quality of instructions we give it. This is why, when people don't do this, that's why they're not getting the results later on when they don't do the strategy, when they don't think from the point of view of the audience, when they don't pray. A really solid and clear and quality proposition that's laser-focused. That's why they don't get the clear, robust ideas. And also highly creative ideas that come out of it on the other end, gets spat out because they're not put in the same quality of instructions and the instructions are putting n might be vague, they might be wishy-washy. They get vague and wishy-washy workout of the other end. What does this mean for greater? So how can we take advantage of this? Well, first of all, the great news is we don't actually need to think of an idea. If you've been working to that end before an octane. Now if that's how you've been working, you can relax and actually let go of the old idea about how you should do things because we don't need to force out ideas. In fact, quite the opposite. We just need to focus on inputting the correct instructions. More specifically, a clear picture of what we want, an exact picture of what we want. Then we just need to relax and get out of the way. How easy is that sprinters do this? You see them getting into a certain mental state. The visualise starting off from the blocks here in the gung-ho, the first part of the race, the middle part of the race, how they're going to end, what they're doing here is basically given instructions to their bodies. Now, the sprinters are just programming their bodies to say, I want this result and the subconscious mind delivers it. It says to the body, okay, we're gonna do this. And all the cells work together to do while they have to do to perform. Just allow this creative process to work as nature intended. Relax and handover the buttons, the subconscious mind. Once you've decided what you want and the strategy to get there and everything else. We learned about ANOVA and say, Okay, come up with something. 34. Tap Your Genius: The subconscious is essentially where your genius lives. It records everything that you ever come into contact with. It never sleeps. It takes everything literally. The only lives in the present has gotten no concept of time. Because time is a conscious concepts that we've come up with. It's a million times more powerful than the conscious mind as well. And it can do a trillion things at once without batting an eye. Well, technically it's batting both eyelids at the same time as well. But what you may or may not realize about the subconscious mind, It's actually plugged directly into the intelligence of the known universe. Well, what does this mean? Well, think about the exact same intelligence that gives birth to stars and tells plants to grow and planets to orbit each other and all this kind of stuff. Whatever name you give to it, you only have to look around you to know there's an intelligent order at work in mother nature, whether it's conscious, automatic, whatever it is. The really cool thing about this though, is that our subconscious minds are not just plugged into it. There are actually part of this kind of network of intelligence that permeates space-time. That's why memory itself, that our memories, they're not stored in the brain, they're actually recorded. Scientists now know that the recorded on the fabric of space, on space-time in the exact location where the event happened as we were flying through space on this thing called Earth, which is constantly drive. It doesn't just orbit around, it travels around as well. The great speed. And actually we have this concept of when as opposed to where we think time is something that happened in the past. Actually, quantum physics now tells us that time is just a kind of conscious illusion, if you will. Time is almost like a distance rather than how long something took. I know it's a bit of a kind of message where they had, but it's a human concept we invented to make sense of things, to chronicle and categorize events. We made up this system of the days and the months and the years and things like that. Just to categorize things and make sense of things for ourselves and to create some order and meaning. But why am I talking about all this though? You should walked into the wrong class or something. Well, no, it's actually very apt for us as creatives and extremely useful to know. So I'm not smoking anything and no, we can't have any. The open head diagram we've got here signifies the fact that the subconscious is now thought to be unlimited and actually connected to everything. Thanks to this, it means that we have access to all the information for the inspiration and all the ideas will ever need. In fact, way, way, way more than we'll ever need all that we can have a US. But how does this apply to creativity, to creative advertising? It means we've all got access to the same ideas, information, and inspiration. It means we've all got the same row tools at our disposal. Now might some of us be more naturally predisposed to doing this to come up with a creative advertising ideas? Yes, In all likelihood, like anything else, we all have our natural gifts and talents and things were predisposed to a bit more than some of us are more practice too. If you have more experience, of course you can be more finally honed at something. But that doesn't mean we can't get better at tapping into our raw creative ability, this kind of unlimited creative ability. And it also means that if you've ever thought you're not smart enough, creative enough, or resourceful enough? Think again because every single one of us has an unlimited subconscious mind. Mine doesn't operate definitely TR's. They all operate in the same manner and they're connected to all the same stuff. And we have a conscious mind that has the power to take control of the subconscious power for its own means. Essentially, we're riding on the shoulders of a giant. We just need to learn how to whisper in its ear. Because when we understand how to do that, then it will be our backend colon do is We command. It will run faster, elite, higher over any greater obstacles. And it will also go in the direction we want it to go crucially. That's what we mean when we say priming your genius mind. And the tools that tips the techniques we've loaded into this module are designed to help you do just that. Now, the whole point of this module is to get the most out of our natural inner genius. And the key to that is to be in the right mindset, which relies on relaxation. So how do we do that? What are some techniques we can use to do this more? Relaxing into our genius, we can actually use techniques consciously to do this. Here are three ninja tips on how to get out of your own way. An interesting one. Forget about you. Now this goes back to the module where we were talking about, I'm seeing beyond our biases, getting into the mindset of the audience. This is super important here. And if we've done that earlier work will be better at doing this. So a lot of people are thinking from this perspective. I've been here before. Most of us who've done prey of work probably have at some stage, you lost in your own thoughts. You thinking, What time is it? How long have we got? Like, Why can't think of anything? What will other people think of me as a fail if I don't come up with anything. This idea is crazy. People think I'm a fool. This briefs impossible. We can't crack here, can't I just can't do this. My mind is a blank. I'll forget it. Throw the pen down on the paper. I've certainly been there myself and a lot of it's to do with impostor syndrome where you're thinking, I don't belong here, I'm going to be sourced out. People are gonna realize, I can't do this. Well. It's just our minds running away with themselves really, that's all that's going on. We can put a stop on that. And we can actually flip our mindset consciously so that we can actually get our subconscious minds thinking of a positive and productive things instead. So, thinking from our audience's perspective, whenever it was, coin our own heads thinking like this. But let's just step out of there and into the audience's mind. Because as we mentioned, subconscious mind doesn't know the difference. When you start to do this, it will start to think it's the audience and it'll start to be in their heads. And then I'll start to give you the ideas about how to make their lives better through your product or your service. As opposed to worrying about what's going to happen when it hits five installment got what you need. So you can ask questions such as, what do they want? What does the audience think? What do they feel? Where are they right now? What are they doing? What are they seeing, what they're hearing? What are they struggling with? What are their problems or frustrations or desires, and how would they feel if we improve their lives as a result through this product or service that we're advertising. And how would they describe their interaction with the brand? Which of these thought processes is, do you think is more constructive in the creative process? Obviously, it's the second one. So that's one really quick ninja tip in terms of getting out of our own way. Well, there's no better way than to get into the heads of somebody else. Ninja tip to go to the bathroom. If you're stuck for an idea, go to the bathroom. It's as simple as that. I've done this many a time. It's usually in the afternoon when I've already got some ideas, things are going well, but I'll just hit a wall or maybe like a particularly tough brief. I've still not got anything. And I'm thinking Yeah, I could do is come up with something. Now I've done all the initial Explorer to work. I've got some kind of half ideas but nothing quite right yet. I'd often do is get up and walk to the bathroom, whether I needed the toilet or not, that was kind of irrelevant. Now involves relaxing certain muscles, but not those muscles. Basically a way of not only physically getting yourself away from the job at hand, which gives you a little bit of physical space, but it gives you a bit of mental space, a bit of quiet time, if you like. Now it doesn't have to be going to the bathroom. It can be going for a run, walking the dog, washing the dishes, can be anything really could even be watching TV. The important thing is that it should be something that doesn't require any real contrast. Thor, we're talking about getting out of her own way. Well, we need to turn off our contrast chatter a little bit. We can do that a lot of the time by doing an automatic process. It could Don't forget the subconscious could do multiple things at once. It's working away on the problem we can be sure of that. Just needs you to quiet down a little bit because it's the quiet moments where a lot of the magic happens. When we talk about magic happening. It already happened in, already in the subconscious. But it needs to feed you. But it's almost like try and tap you on the shoulder. Go No, listen a minute listener, it stopped talking so I can tell you the solution. I can give it to you. Once you do that, it thinks are finally I can I can get a word into this conversation and I can give words and pictures and things like that. That's why when a lot of the time when you're in a relaxed state, when you require state, there's not much mental chatter going on. You may be in the shower. I have an Iranian, you may have just woken up in bed. You'll get an idea. And it seems like I've just had an idea consciously. Well, it's just that in a nice relaxed, quiet stay, the subconscious man has gone on. Now's the time to share this. It's almost like having a boss who's really busy. You wait for the moment in the day where no one's in their office and maybe the doors open a little bit in the clearly not too busy and then you walk in to have the conversation with them because you know, that's the right time to do it. So doing something like this, it frees up your mind to wander. When your mind wanders, it relaxes and releases new ideas. Now ninja tip three is talk it through now. When I've been into places, integrative advertising agencies as a freelancer with Chris on by myself, with other people. If you go into a quiet environment, a lot of creative freelancers would agree. If it's really quiet in there. And especially around the creative team, it's not usually a good sign for their creative output. And no wonder they're getting us in as freelancers to help because everyone's working in silence. Not good for the creative process. Talking is really important. Now, this is easier to talk through a job. If you're part of a creative team, what you can do on your own as well. You can talk to your pat, your plant yourself. People might think you're mad boat. So while there's no one around, it doesn't matter, your dog is not going to judge him. Now that he's your plan. You can even have an imaginary conversation with your audience. As long as you are talking out loud, it doesn't matter. You can be asking them what they think and then you can even be given the answers. Do their own voice if you want to be where you're gonna get some funny looks. Point a is talking sparks images and ideas because the left and the right brain have to work together. And the great thing about talking through in a creative team, particularly, is that what others say can trigger new ideas and new. And also when you've got breaks in conversation because you're not always necessarily going to be talking about the jobs. Sometimes you might wonder into all the topics. You may share a joke and have a laugh. Now, the magic can happen in the gaps between one-year talking about the job and when you're talking about other things, again, as we've already covered, is because you are in a relaxed state. You're in a state where you're not holding onto tight. You've forgotten about the job for a minute. You've forgotten about your worries about it. And the subconscious mind can feed you an idea. If possible, when you're sitting down to do creative work, see if you can get away to a meeting room or a breakout space where you can talk freely about the job. Now if you're working from home, then that's no problem. You can do that anytime you want to. But talking it through it will really help. But it's the old adage. Two heads are better than one mile, two miles above them, one as well. 35. Boost Your Brainpower: Now we've shared some tips on how to get into a relaxed state. But how do we actually boost our brainpower? Because it's fine having the right conditions for creativity. But how do we increase our capacity to actually be more creative? And what does that mean being creative as well? You know what, mechanically, what's going on? First of all, we need to understand that as we mentioned earlier, the brain is not the mind. And the brain is not where ideas come from. The brain is essentially is an incredible tool. But in essence it's an antenna or an electric switching station in the brain isn't doing the thinking. The brain, as we already mentioned, is the hardware upon which the operating system is running, in which you're using to actually import instructions. But we can increase our creative capacity by upgrading this hardware, upgrading our actual brain. When we upgrade our neural hardware, the software of our mind can run faster and can run fast mover. If you've ever done this, if you've ever graded the hardware in your computer or just traded up to a better computer, you'll know how much faster on how much smoother it runs and therefore how much easier it is to do what you wanted to do. Now, there are a few interesting ways we can do this. Some may seem silly, but they are proven to work and they don't take long. Deceptively simple, it's almost like childlike, but they can make a huge, huge difference to your actual, a capacity to have lateral thoughts. Because that's what creativity is really. It's making connections between networks of neurons essentially. And we'll get to this a little bit more when we talk about mind-mapping. Now let's look at a couple of exercises. In fact, three exercises or approaches we can use to increase our brain capacity. The first one is called the Einstein method. Don't worry, it's a lot easier than it sounds. And naturally, it can be quite fun for you to do. It's almost like a little bit childlike rarely. But that's kind of why it works, is taken from the book the Einstein factor by Vin Vanguard and Richard PO. Whether I've pronounced when van Gogh his name, right, who knows? But it helps to combine creative and analytical thinking. In other words, it makes you more creative and raises your IQ at the same time. It's a very simple process. The first step is to just sit somewhere quiet, somewhere private where you can talk out loud. Again when no one's watching you and you don't feel stupid or silly. Just close your eyes and get to a relaxed position. And then just empty your mind of thoughts, whatever is happening in the day, just give yourself permission to have a few minutes to yourself, just to relax with your eyes closed. Now, wherever images come to mind, described them out loud. Now, the will be images that come to mind even if they don't come initially and even if they're really vague, even if you don't see anything just described, the dark space and images will start to come because the mind sees in pictures and when you close your eyes, you still continue to see. It's just that it's not the world around you as to your inner world. So whatever comes to mind, no matter how random, no matter how silly it may seem or how banal it may seem, just describe whatever comes to mind, but do it out loud. Speaker outlined, there's a good reason for this and we'll get to that in a second and into the science of it. But just let your mind roam free, describe what you see, and just let one image flow into the other, almost like a stream of consciousness. And do this if he can for five-minutes, keep seeing things, keep talking, then my five minutes is up. Just open your eyes and you don't. It's as simple as that. Now how can do in this helped you to create better results embouchure brain capacity. It's been actually proven to help, like tiny little children become prodigies overnight. Because when you're a little child, your brain is super plastic, is a point where it's much easier to change. And so therefore it's much easier to upgrade because it's still growing at the end of the day. And up until the age of, I think six, a child doesn't actually have a conscious mind. It's purely subconscious. So wherever you put in, it takes them on board and does it, it doesn't have a conscious mind that resists. This process has been used to upgrade the minds of small children. In fact, the guy who created it in the first place, I seem to remember from the book, did this with his own child book. We can use this as adults as well to boost our ability to come up with really good concepts. Because what it does is it pass the left brain, the analytical brain, through the commentary that you're giving out loud with the right-brain, with the more image-based, creative side of the brain with images. And it creates harmony. I mean, if you've ever been to see a play or a musical, and you'll hear them warm enough at the star and all the different sections. Brush section, the wind section, and the percussion section. They're all going through your own warm-up routines and it sounds like a cacophony is surrenders. But then when the conductor steps up, he or she gives the instructions with the button. And suddenly they all start to play together. All these sections start to work together. Now this is how the Einstein method works by creating harmony or coherence between the left side and the right side. Suddenly they're starting to play together. That makes for a much better brain. And also because it's building up the left side and the right side, it's actually building new brain cells as well. So for maximum effect, repeat every day on a regular basis. And it's not like your brain is going to tap you on the shoulder and say, Oh, you're more intelligent now, well done. It's not something you'll notice that it is proven to work scientifically so you can relax knowing that it's having an impact now. In exercise number two is actually a lot quicker than this and in many ways a lot easier. It's slightly more physical and actually believe it or not, it's going to make you look even cilia, but can be very, very effective for maximizing your powers, not only of creativity, but also concentration as well. And it's called super brain yoga. If you've not heard of it already, is very, very easy. I do it myself. And it's a little bit like doing squats. In fact, you are doing a squat like you would do at the gym or a workout at home. But it's not too challenging. You just squat as far as you can go and then come up again. And you're not doing enough to cause yourself any real physical strain, if you like. But it is a quicker alternative to the Einstein method. It enhances cognitive function by moving energy from the base chakra to the ground. Now this might sound a little bit woo-woo, but it is a scientific thing. The chakras in the body, they're just energy centers. It's actually improves blood flow. And when you have more blood flowing to your brain, it improves the creativity, improves focus and it improves your attention. First of all, stand with some space or a little bit of space around. You stand straight up with your feet, shoulder width apart, stamp with the adult and your knees just slightly bands. Now reach your left arm across your chest. Then when you've done that, gently pinch your right ear lobe between your fourth finger and your thumb. Then do the opposite. Reach your right arm across your left arm. Your left arm is already against your chest and you pinch in your right ear lobe. Now, reach your right arm over your left arm. And then pinch your left ear lobe, just like you did before with your fourth finger and thumb. As we mentioned, make sure your left arm is on the inside against your heart. Again, this is to do with energy flow. Now, place your tongue on the roof of your mouth and keep it there for the duration of the entire exercise. Then squat down as far as your body will naturally allow. It doesn't matter if you go all the way down. It doesn't matter if you go halfway or a third. It really doesn't matter. But as you do so take a deep breath in as you go down. Now straight away, you don't need to sit in a squat position. You can raise straight back up. And as you rise up, exhale fully as you return to a standing position. So you're exhaling as you rise up and then by the time you get into a standing position, you breathe all of the air out. Now you're ready to take another breath and go down again. Repeat the movement of breathing in as you go down and then breathing out as you come up and just repeat it in a steady movement at your own pace, whatever's comfortable. And then maintain the same rhythm of breathing with the tongue on the roof of your mouth in your ear lobes being pinched. And the ideal number for this is 21. If you can't do 21, tried 14 to begin with. Again, just do them at your own pace and you'll soon be able to do 21 anyway. Nuts it, but just try and if he can repeat it every day if possible, is I found is best on in the morning. I mean, you could do it in work if you like. I mean, if you're comfortable with people watching, that's fine. If in fact you could get your colleagues involved if you work on a creative team, for instance. And you can do with the children and be like if you have children who used her with children in schools and all kinds of places to found that the children know and become smarter and get better grades at school, they start to become more relaxed. And if they've had behavior problems, this behavior problems go away. 36. Map Out Your Mind: Moving on to the third approach here, the third exercise, this is called mind-mapping. Now you might have heard of this before. Again, it's a simple technique and don't worry, you don't have to look silly or do only some physical for this one is basically just a way of looking at a brief or challenge visually. And it depends how you like to visualize things. The rule is here. There are no rules. You can make this look however you want to. Layout, however you want to. As long as you're getting your thoughts down in some kind of visual way, thoughts may seem jumbled or disconnected at first and how often have you thought of an idea and then it's gone because you didn't write it down or you've got a jumble of thoughts and your brains were and he can't sleep at night. You wake up early still thinking about a problem. Well, one of the ways to improve your thought process is to actually get your thoughts down on paper. It's almost like empty in your own head, really, with a mind-map, it's much easier to make these connections. And that's because when we write down the aim or the problem or the proposition in the middle of a blank page. It gives them a more focused, but also when we start to build this mind map out, we can actually mimic the way the brain works. For instance, you take a piece of paper, you write down the problem, then you, despite your thoughts out from there. By spider, we mean drawing a line, then Ryan and other thought, drawing a line and then Ryan and all the thought. And next to that you may do it in circle, speech bubbles, whatever it looks like to you, it really doesn't matter however you like to do it you could do by sticking images to a board wherever you can imagine, however you like to work through it that way. The point here is that when we do this mind-map, the way the brain works is it doesn't work linearly. It radiates outwards across neural networks. What my map it does, it makes connections between these neural networks that allows us to have different lateral thoughts. If you think of it like dropping a pebble and upon it ripples outwards or the way the sun works. The rays of the sun, they radiate outwards. So just like the brain radiates outwards, where actually Radio in our thoughts outwards. But we're doing it through a conscious exercise. And that allows us to make better connections. So he's words use images, scribbles, doodles, it really is up to you. You can even use an Excel spreadsheet if you like. Just get the information down and have it out there in a visual way.