Faster Ad Ideas: Speed Up Your Creative Thinking as a Designer, Copywriter or Brand Marketer

1. Faster Ad Ideas Introduction: Advertising concepts are hard. They take a long time, a lot of work, and the deadlines to produce them are always far too tight, certainly, to produce anything good. And especially when you're working off a tough brief, at least that's what many people think. But in faster iodide is, we're not only going to make ideas easier, we're going to generate them in a fraction of the time and produce big ideas for your agency, client or business without any of the usual blood, sweat, and tears. In this course, I'm going to share some original creative tactics that will make those blank pages a thing of the past, produce fresh new concepts in far less time with far less effort for far more success. First, we'll learn how to hack into human emotions not only to bypass your critical mind, books are great original campaigns that connect emotionally with your audience. From there, we'll play the association game of brand new spin on a classic brainstorming technique only rather than filling a pad with scribbles and sifting randomly through the chaos. I'll show you how to focus your thinking and certainly even the sketchiest of thoughts. It's a quick campaign ideas. Then finally, I'll leave you with a couple of easy exercises so you can put your skills straight into practice. So I'm good. Then join me, Rob Aspinall and faster at ideas. Learn from my 16 plus years working as a conceptual specialist on the biggest brands, the tiniest startups, and everything in between. And by the way, if you've ever struggled with concepts before, you can relax, faster. Iodide is, is designed to work for you, whether you're a copywriter or designer. Well, this is your first time doing concepts. Together. We're going to speed up your thinking and get you producing ideas without really thinking of an idea at all. Ready to get started. Then I'll see you on the course. 2. MODULE 1: SPEED: Emotion Hacking: Now, how do we speed up the rate at which we put concepts out? And in an ideal world, we'd have weights to come up with our ideas. But that world doesn't exist anymore. And it rarely happens if at all. Well here we are going to look at how to come up with more ideas much, much faster, doing some speed drills that are really going to enhance your ability to do that. The first one is emotion hacking. It's a great way to start generating ideas really fast. And it's achieved by just focusing solely on emotion. Emotion is the language of the subconscious, the part of the mind we want to tap into to get the Gaudi's. Now we're going to stick to the basic human emotions as part of this exercise. There were obviously far, far more emotions. Feel free to use whatever emotions you want. Focus in on R4 emotions like diving deep into the depths of your subconscious mind. But for a reason, we're looking to resurface with some early abstract thoughts that we can use. So that like these little precious pearls that we can make into something once you've resurface, we can turn them into some something of value creatively. 3. Emotion Hacks: Step One: So first we're going to mine the emotion. This is step one in the process, we're gonna take a blank sheet of paper and write down these basic emotions. So stop this video. If you need to grab a piece of paper and just write down these emotions. First of all, fear, love, anger, excitement, worry, wonder. So fears, negative loves positive angles, negative excitements, positive worries, negative. Wonder is positive. So under each one, I want you to note down what springs to mind. Words, images, feelings, taste, touch, a memory or a scene, whatever it is, get it down while it's hot. Now, don't censor. Disney has a process. And when they did the creative process, the stuff separate stages to it. In each stage, they had a different mindset for each day. So the pure creativity, what we're in here, it will be the dreamer. And then the later on down the line you would have the critic. So don't pre-judge, just simply capture whatever comes out. It doesn't matter. You can capture them as words, if you like, as sentences or drawings or sketches or doodles, it's really up to you. It doesn't matter. We'll stick with words for our example just to show you how this works. Now, what did we get when we did this exercise? And again, we didn't spend long on this. It was like a minute Brian down some words because that's the whole point. We don't know anything that's contrived. We want to just be able to go through these exercises as you want. So we got these for fear. We got panic, monster, ghost, dark, can't see on known cave, demonize, evil, disease, grim reaper, being chased, getting lost, something hiding around the corner. Bogeyman, Halloween horror movie, hiding behind the sofa and worst nightmare. Lovely, lovely images spring into mind. How about love? Light, joy, hearts and flowers? Teddy bears holding hands, kissing massive smiles, love songs, serenade, cuddles, dogs, cats, pets, family and friends, food, cake, chocolate, wedding bells, weak at the knees, and very cell that's much lighter and nicer. Now anger, hate, exploiters, rage, phase going red boiling point, getting mad, going nuts, road rage. People in a way. Laying out a screen, shaking fist on fire meltdown, nuclear warning, allowing top volcano erupting volcano head. Excitement. We've got thrills. Thriller, rollercoaster, fast, Wow, scream, unexpected, surprise, action, holiday adventure. Pulse, fast car, Rockstar, private jet, speed boats. Heartbeat, physical attraction, spark, chemistry, spies, running, chase through the streets. Secret mission, risk-taking in, gambling. Again, more raw thoughts coming out. Now. Worry, nervous, doubts running light. What if imagining disaster, everything we're doing, losing everything, losing mist, mist, chances up in flames, sweating, heartbeating, can't sleep, toss and turn and capillary drowning, even just reading them and breathing shallow. Because my subconscious thinks it's in this situation. Wonder big planets, stars back in time, seeing the future city lights, Mountain View, amazing hotel, dinosaurs, magic wizards and castles, flying carpet, Jeannie and the lamb, fairytale, spellbound fireworks like a child, kids entertained adults acting like kids, bedtime story. Now, to recap what we've just done. Well, we've just identified the emotional benefit of our offer. We've isolated that emotion and we've just scribbled down whatever came to mind, not thinking about it all. 4. Emotion Hacks: Step Two: Now that we've got those, we can use these just these raw thoughts to act as a launch pad of v, like for new ideas. And these ideas that will stir up the desired feelings, feelings we want to elicit in our audience. Because at the end of the day we're all human beings. It doesn't matter really what words or images you use. They're all going to be tied into that same roar emotion. So the next step is to turn our thoughts into ideas. This is a step that's really going to add value. This is where we turn those pearls into something that we can use. So we need to take a look through what the emotion conjured for you in words, in images or both. Pick out any words or images that look or sound interesting. And let's say you've drawn something. Maybe you can write down what you've drawn because these are going to spark ideas that will stir the same feeling in the audience. So what can we work with? We've looked at what we came up with and picked out what was interesting to us. Well, the fear we have getting lost and worst nightmare, that's something we can imagine, might be able to turn in something, love, love songs, and weak at the knees. Again, that's something we can work on. You can visualize that. You can imagine it. You can imagine it as a scenario with a bit of drama to anger going not some volcano ad that sounds quite interesting, especially volcano had it sounds, it sounds like it's got something that excitement risk-taking and Rockstar. Again, risk-taking is very, very palpable. And Rockstar is something we can all imagine and connects to. Worry. We are imagining disaster and can't sleep. Again, two things that you can instantly start to think about in your head. You can picture those scenarios. We've all been there imagining disaster and we've all been there not being able to sleep. And finally wonder, big eyes and spellbound base sounded interesting. They sound like they've got something to them, either visually or verbally that we can work with. So let's take a quick example here. The product is our NPV. How can we get to an idea? We've got to a key thoughts. How can we get from a key thought to an idea? Again, the feature, let's just remind ourselves it's the panoramic glass roof. So the benefit therefore, is that it turns every journey into more of an adventure. So what's the emotion? Well, it's Wonder here. It's quite simple. As we've already touched on. Wanda is the thing we're looking to capture. We've got that focus now and we've also got the key thoughts, big eyes and spellbound. Or what can we make our those? Well, what about spellbound ice? But about big spellbound eyes, kids and adults alike with these larger than life eyes, it's almost like CGI, if you will. And you can imagine a huge billboard or a TV ad with kids and adults sign this car. Whether you show them in the car or not, doesn't really matter. The main thing is they've got these big eyes and these huge eyes and like magical, if you like, you don't wanna go too scary or freaky. But that's later on. That's in the execution. For now, all you need to do is picture this spellbound eyes. You're just in a place of wonder. Now, would we have got that idea without this exercise? Probably not. We just followed this process and we can't have landed there really. When you've got big eyes and spellbound, it's not too much of a leap to put them together. And imagine that as a creative. 5. The Association Game:: Now let's play the association came. This is just like word association. If you've ever played that game, one word leads to another. So you may say pickle, I may say Cucumber, I may say read, you may say herring. It's obviously we're not doing that going back and forth. But what we are doing is mimicking that process here. And it's very much the same as emotion hacking. It's the same kind of thing. So what we do here is we take a real product or service that we're in the midst of promoting. Or we can choose something at random. We can make something go up as we did before. So what I want to do is write down what that product or services, even if it's just made up, it doesn't matter. Then just the same as the emotion hacking, scribble or sketch every thought, every word, every image that comes to mind. Just let one thought flow into another, just like we did in emotion hacking. But we're just changing things around a little bit so we're no longer focusing on the raw emotion. We're actually starting to focus on either the benefit, the problem, or the proposition that you may have already. So once again, we're gonna get our thoughts down. First of all, we're going to mine our subconscious. We're going to dive deep in there. Then we're gonna get the raw materials and then see what we can turn them into in terms of key thoughts and then ideas. And then at the end we're gonna flip it the other way actually. And we'll get to that as we go through. 6. Benefit Associations: So first of all, where do we start? Well, we could start by focusing on the benefits of the offer. That's probably the most obvious place to start because you may or may not have a proposition that the stage, hopefully, well, you can always use this actually the star o when you come to sit down and work on a creative brief, just to get things going. Now, let's look at it again. This is the same process as before. We'll pick acne cleanser. Now we're focusing on the benefit here rather than the problem. So ZAP, clear, disappear. Popular again. In time for date, financing someone may again, relief. Yes, Just In Time, overnight, gone in no time. Poof, like magic, attractive, ready to party. Just in time for prompt. What did we do there? All that we did there was we thought about the benefits of the admin cleanser. That's what we did and we wrote down what came to mind. Let's look at chewing gum. Clean, fresh, mentee, tasty, Chu sticky flavor, hot date, rescue, kissing, smile, sparkle, launch work important meeting. Now where all of those benefits per se or not very powerful emotional benefits. But they just get the mind working like rescue, hot date, kissing, those kinds of things that can set those up. In terms of ideas. Let's look at a cordless drill. Not particularly exciting unless urines DIY. Well, how about this smooth, easy, perfect job dawn, safe, clean, no roughages, freedom, battery, life, grip. Look like a PRO. Does any job done in seconds, power accurate straight through. Now, we're just kind of spit balling, if you like, of what a cordless drill might involve. Obviously, if you've got a specific products, we're going to be more laser focused in terms of what comes out. We're going to know the exact benefits and we're gonna be able to riff off those when we come to do this association, Let's look at another. We could actually focus on the problem our products is solving. Instead, we did benefits. There were kind of positive, if you like, here we can look at the negative of the problem. So we're not really focusing on the product itself. We're actually looking at the situation the costumer might be in and the frustrations they may face. Let's look at the acne. You'll notice we put acne rather than cleanser because we're just focusing on the issue and embarrassment, ugly, loneliness, rejection, shame, pizza, face, bag over their head. High school, alien, big event, worried, party, what will they think? But timing, size of a planet. Typical. Why now? For chewing gum, hog breath, food in teeth decay, or ugly, bad taste in mouth. Nervous board, handover mouth are no shock and horror. Shouldn't have had the onions, evil onions on him breath. Notice how these are quite emotive. In the negative. Cordless drill, tangled chord, low battery frustration, vibration, holes, not right, difficult shoddy workmanship can't plug it in. Cord won't reach all these potential frustrations. You get with a drill. And we'll add another here. Cough syrup, cosph, throat, cos, loss, spell but different. Pain, voice, lump, swollen, cold. Wes blockage, thorns in throw typically feeling can't speak, perusing voice. Spring. See, you notice horse and horsehair. That's just, just go into my mind as we're doing it and go with it, write anything down, draw anything down no matter how silly MAC more, how wrong it may seem, or even unrelated, It doesn't matter. 7. Benefits into Ideas: So let's look at how we turn some of these key thoughts of ours into an idea. What can we turn these thoughts into? Well, let's take the ACT cleanser. We'll give it a name, zap P10, acne cleanser. And the feature is that it's a kind of Zappa sticks. So it's like an undergo thing you can keep in your bag or you pocket. And when you feel big pimple or a sporozoite come in on ICA, dot it with this thing are you rub it on. So this is epistatic with fast acting formula to nip it in the bud. Well, the benefit is that it clears out me fast before pimples go nuclear. We use in a little bit of emotive terminology there because we want to magnify the benefit. So the last thing anybody wants, massive home dinner of a pimple on the end of the nose. If you get this upper state, you may not stop yourself having a little spot for a while, but it will stop becoming a nightmare. So what's the problem? Well, the problem is social embarrassment, fear of rejection. That's the pain point and that's a fair point. Everybody wants to avoid. You. Remember what it was like as a teen? I certainly do. I used to get these huge spots in between my eyes. It was almost like I want a third eye. And it does call social embarrassment. And all these fit, all these kind of primal fears of rejection and disconnection and everything we've been talking about. These comments apply especially as a teen when everything seems huge because you've just not experienced much of life. And also as a t naturally, you don't have a fully developed near frontal cortex. I think it's called basically the seat of the conscious mind is not fully developed, so you don't have as much emotional control. So if you ever look at teenagers and why did they outline that? Well, that, that's the reason the rational part of the mind, the reason in part of the mind isn't as fully developed. Now, let's take some key thoughts. High school, alien, shame, rejection. They're the things that kind of stood out when we did this exercise. Now, what's interesting out of those, what can we look out? Well, shaman rejection is the much we can do with that. That's more of a feel and that's more of a mood for the advert, I think, really there, but highschool. Yeah. Okay. We're in the right situation. Alien is highschool alien. That's got a ring to it. Maybe that's something we can play with and we can turn into an idea. Or actually, if you think of a high school early and well, what's that? Well, Here's an idea. What if it's a teenage alien who goes into a human school, standing out in a bad way, not fit in in, you know, when everyone else is human in urine alien, that's the worst thing possible really. And he goes into school and he's feeling ashamed, he's failed and embarrassed. He doesn't know what to do with themselves. People are laughing at him. Maybe he's getting bullied. Teenager is going to be familiar with these kind of scenarios. You know, maybe he's getting left out by the the girls, et cetera, et cetera, and easing class. All of a sudden, a really attractive girl who he is clearly enamored with. She's been there before. She's experienced what he's experienced. As we're gonna get to in a moment. She hands him the supper stick. This apneic McKenzie. And her why she handed him a stick one nice. He's an alien. Doesn't appear to have any acne. Well, when he ropes or stick on, let's say his forehead, for example, he actually, he turns into a human. And it turns out he's not alien at all. He was a human with a giant zip that made him feel like an alien, made in his mind like an alien. But now it's gone like magic and oh, and subway ever after you get with the girl because she knows how it feels and they have a connection. So that's just a simple idea that came from some key thoughts, that came from some benefit association. And again, it's, it's thinking of an idea without thinking of an idea, as we keep saying in this course, it's not about trying to force, it is just about letting your subconscious mind do the work. But also what we're doing in all these exercises is given it a bit more direction. That's all very simple. 8. Problem Associations: So let's look at how we can use the problem through association. What can we turn our thoughts into? Let's look at the key thoughts that we had from cordless drill X. We'll call it our image in a server. We well, the feature was that it has let's say it has a rechargeable battery without cold. Obviously, all these cordless drills, dude, there's nothing special about that. But what we can do, if we can't say something different, we can say the same thing in a different and hopefully bat away. Well, what's the benefit? Well, freedom of movement, and it avoids a mess of wires as well. So it's freedom of something. It's moved towards something that's desired. And it's a move away from something, something that's potentially painful. Obviously it's only a little bit of pain, but we can tap into that and magnify that a little bit. So let's look at the problem. Ok, we had from associations we have chords that won't reach and get tangled, causing hassle, Sloan work and generally unsafe. Now, the key thoughts from the associations were very closely matched. There were tangled cord and cold won't reach there. The two major things that we thought, well, those are probably the two problems that have an a cordless drills gynecology. And they were the kind of interest in things that we picked out, the associations we didn't have a great deal of money to work with, but we can show you that here, that this still works if you don't have anything that leaps out, those exciting. So let's look the second 1 first. And just to be different, we will look at colder and reach it kind of so near yet so far, you know what it's like when you've got a chord that's almost as long as you need it put, it's just not quiet and then you have to get some big extension to just to get it in extra fought. Well, we can take that to extremes a little bit and we can get it to where it's almost like an inch to shore. So caught shots. The idea where, let's say DIY enthusiasts, maybe in slow motion to some sort of humorous or classical music. And the get within an inch of the Ploeg and yet the not quite there. And at the last second maybe the getting yank back a little bit. And it's all just, just a little bit of humor. People will recognize that sense of so close yet so far. And by contrast, the cordless drill then is seen as a completely different world of freedom. And at the end we just show one person with drill with full freedom of movement. And what we're doing is showing, not telling, we're able to show the product in action at the end, but it's not boring. It's not just going, oh, here's a drilling it towards this. We've lived with a bit of a creative narrative at the start. But let's look at another really simple idea that we can get from this tangled chord. Well, essentially it's one less mass. I mean, if you think of all the mess that you have to clear an open because the home improvement and all the things you have to do just to start work on a job. This is one less thing you have to do. So it's like basically no hassle is what we're saying. But what we do here is because we're going problem into idea. We don't show, oh, It's hassle-free and lock isn't smooth and wonderful. We're gonna show that at the end. By contrast. Well, what we're gonna do first is we're going to show something humorous again, where we show Home improve as tangled in a ridiculous mass of drill cores. And it's to an extreme extent, it's the advertising truth. Again, it's the best or worst version of the truth in order to magnify the problem and then the benefit as well. 9. Proposition Associations: So let's look next at Proposition association. Rather than benefit or problem. Let's say we've got a proposition already. How do we turn that into an idea using this same exercise? Well, what if we have a proposition to work with this, not even in strap line form yet, what have we've just got something roar and maybe we can turn it into an idea and get strap line. Or we can just apply the strap line that we've already got. It doesn't really matter. Now, let's take a product, self-cleaning cloth. The proposition is, it's the one thing you won't need to clean. It will just take in the proposition. We're not gonna focus on the strap line. Here. We're gonna just focus on the core message. So we've got clean, we've got sparkling, we've got easy, no hassle, ready by morning, overnight, vanish, magic, pumpkin, Cinderella. Wow, can't be true. Alien technology, future space age, nanobots, robots. So got quite a bit to work with there. And quite a few interesting thoughts coming out from what is essentially quiet banal product to sell, you might think, yeah, OK, we can show it working in. It is easy to show that. Give me no problem. But how can we turn it into a more engaging idea and create some emotion around this product? Well, key thoughts, too good to be true. Cinderella, space-age nanobots, they, for us were the most interested in sound in words and phrases that came out of that and things that we think maybe the same mileage in that. So let's explore, well, let's take too good to be true. For instance, here we can have what might seem like not that creative and idea. It's not fantastical, but it can be really effective. So it's a little bit of a twist in terms of the, you know, you've seen the ads before where people, it's a demonstration at, let's say, people who are in a mall or a shopping center and this product is being displayed to them, so they see it working. Now, we've thought of here, what if they can't believe their eyes? What if looking out there go, wow, how does that work? It's almost like magic. I think we have the word magic in the associations. To the extent that some people think it's a trick. Now you can be recorded in this people interacting with the product and you're going to probably get some naturally cool stuff coming out of it. And maybe, maybe we have kids. They're trying to see the invisible robots, the TLD or in the fibers, whether they're real, whether act as we could tell them that their little invisible robots in there and you probably get some really cool footage of that. And then you can spin that into a campaign quite easily. But let's look at another one. Let's look at something a bit different. It is fantastical, it is magic, and it doesn't rely on real people in a shopping center or mall. Well, let's not forget the cloth that cleans itself. So after you've done the dishes or the scrubbing or whatever, you don't have to then go, I've got to clean this cloth. Now, what would have happened in Cinderella WS day? If she was real way, she would have probably had to clean the cloth and take ages doing it well, let's, let's fast-forward and modernize the Cinderella tail. Let's put a modern spin on it. And let's think about who the audience might be or one member of the audience who we can highlight. Now let's take single mom, Cinderella. She's going to be really busy and she's probably going to be up against it in terms of juggling all the things going on in life and looking after kids and everything else. So this cloth is just going to help her and it's going to help her. It's one little way that's going to improve her life. So the cloth that cleans itself allows a modern-day Cinderella to go to a modern version of the ball. She might be going out to a party, she might be going out on a date and that's, you know, maybe she's not being able to go out on a date for awhile. This allows it to do that. She goes to me, a friends, all this kinda stuff and gives her she gets a little bit of a life back. It's not an oversell. It's not saying this is going to revolutionize and change your life. It's just that little bit of an emotional self. Other people can watch this and then they can empathize with that character. Even if the null single mother, they can put themselves in their shoes and relate to them and say, oh yeah, OK, it's got a bit of that benefit and it's going to help me as well. Let's look at time travelers. Let's assume that time travel is from the future, comeback travel back and the marveling this technology that's actually way beyond this. They can't understand how it works. Again, that's just a semi create, quite a creative idea. You do it well from what is essentially not an exciting proposition. And then finally, we'll look at nanobot Army. We've got an army of friendly none about helpers to the rescue. And they could feature in every single ad. You could give them little personalities. And it gives a face to something that's faceless and just helps to bring it to life now, therefore, different ideas that you could present. If you were say, presenting to a client, you could present them to the client and you have a nice spread of ideas that are just from doing some associations. Alternatively, you could test them with the audience and see which they responded to more. Or you could even run off or campaigns over a long period of time. The point is, this exercise has given you options because you get different phrases coming out and then you can build off the back of them. All you have to do is take your key thoughts and just experiment a bit, see what could come out, and then you'll find you first thought may not be all that spectacular. But if you just keep probing and pushing like we did with the Cinderella, we started off with an old-style Cinderella type idea, but then we thought, well, the problem with that is that Cinderella went to the ball anyway, regardless of the cloth or whatever, she was going into the bowl and she was oven this mad adventure with the pumpkin and everything else and the shoot. So we thought that doesn't really quite work, doesn't quite fit. But we didn't stop there. We just thought, well what if it was a modern day version where she doesn't get to the ball because she's a single moment. This that and the other and we don't need, we don't need the ugly systems almost maybe they can play a role in some other way. But that led us to that idea, that lead us to that twist and that interest that you've just gotta keep probing and pushing it a little bit. 10. Ideas into Propositions: So what about if we go from idea into proposition? Well, let's take vocalise, cough syrup. For instance. We're giving it a name vocalise. So the feature is that cures a sore throat fast now, that's now a great feature by any means in terms of its translation into a USP. There's nothing unique about that, but we can say this in a unique way if you think about what people are used to seeing a lot of the time ads for medicines and stuff. It's fairly predictable for obvious reasons. They just want to show the problem and the cure and most likely sticks in people's mind when it's relevant. But I think we can do more than that. I think we can disrupt the marketplace a little bit more, especially as greater than it's our job to think a bit differently and push. And also we can build a brand that's really, really recognizable. So when people think about, oh, I need some cough syrup in there at the store, they'll really remember our brand and our out. So what we're gonna do here is to, essentially we're going to use associations to produce an idea, to produce a strap line. We're gonna kinda bypass the back of house proposition. Here. We're going to turn it into a front of house proposition. So we're gonna go straight into the strap line version of the proposition of the light. So let's look at associations. Obviously, here we're looking at the problem. These are the associations we have before. Cough throughout, pause, pause, pain, voice, lump, swollen, cold, WES, blockage, thorns in throat, tickling, feeling cat speak. What were the key thoughts to come out with their thorns and throat? Can't speak, pause and horse. Because that was interesting. That came out and it looks difference that stood out. So we've picked it out. Now. We could go with thorns and throat, but that's kinda been done before. Can't speak. This potential idea there in terms of maybe shows people crucial times when they need to speak and they can't speak and then maybe they get handed a bottle of vocally isn't and that sorts the problem out. That will be all right. But I think there's more interesting idea here in this word horse. It's just different and it sounds silly. So use the word here. So silly sometimes is good. If you've got something silly, explore it. And that's why I've chosen this as an example because it can often lead to a really cool idea you'd never thought of before. So let's take this idea we had of horses had very simple idea. It's a person suffering from a sore throat except their head is being replaced by that of a horse. And all we did was we thought how does the word horse HRSA, How could that fit in to the cuffs, her iPad without well, okay. If you feel in horse as in HR, a RSC, maybe you've got a horse is at. It's just as simple as that. We just changed this bell in. We're failing horses in the animal and suddenly you've got a person with a horse it's had. So a hand comes out the advert and offers them syrup, and next minute occured. So what scenarios could we have? Well, maybe they're in a meeting and they need a key presentation. They've got a sore throat, can't deliver the presentation. Remember we a moment ago we talked about can't speak, we can fold that in here. So they've got the sources, had the tape vocalise, the horses had goes and they're able to do the presentation. And maybe as a little twist at the end, everybody else has a horse is said in the meeting room when they get in. Well, maybe UC alotta people q and outside the pharmacy with horses ads, or riding on the bus the same. So this kind of captures the attention. And it also connects to the kind of painful emotion of having a sore throat and not being able to speak. But it does it in a humorous way. So we're kind of almost slipping silica, Trojan horse UV light. So what if this idea was taken further once you've got the initial idea, explore in more. Because we could make this really wacky. And we could have a tiny human might cause is hooked. And it's basically when it gets on the subway or tube for instance, people wanna hug it, but it's annoyed by this. It just wants to go about its business. Maybe it's trying to read the paper or a novel or something like that. And in a half it has to get out this butler vocalise and give it to them so they stop organ it and all this kind of thing. Slightly weird campaign really, but I think it could stand out. You've got a really cool little CGI horse, could almost become a character. And it could be a bit like when they make these cuddly toys to do with brands and people really want one and it becomes in-demand and then that gets visibility and connection with people. So what are we talking about here is a campaign. What on earth is the strap line or proposition going to be? Well, feeling a little hoarse, take a little vote. Please. Just change the spelling of horse HLA SE, so people have to figure out the after match the strap line to the mad, crazy things that we're showing in the adverb. But we also have to match the horse as in feeling horse in your throat to horse the animal. You have to make those connections. And that's where you get connection in terms of engagement. And it's just a bit silly. But silliness can be really good if you use it in the right way. And that's how you can turn an idea into a proposition or a strap line. And this is one of the ways if you've got a proposition or even if you've not yet and you want to get to one, or if you've got a proposition, you can't turn it into a strap line the way you want to. You can play with associations. You can come up with an idea and then you can get strap line that you probably wouldn't otherwise. 11. Class Project: Emotion Hacking: So it's project time. Now that we've been through how emotion hacking and the association game works, I'm going to hand over to you. You can have a go at these just out of practice, or you can apply them direct to a live job. Either way, be sure to download the project worksheets provided and by all means, feel free to share your results. But first, let's recap. The instructions for each exercise will start off with emotion hacking. Step 1. First, we capture the sense of an emotion. So think of the Emotion most relevant to the product, service proposition, or circumstance in which your customers engage with the branding question. Now, take a deep breath, get yourself in a relaxed state, and just see what words and images come to mind. Then all you have to do is write or sketch the answers. No matter how strange, mundane, or unrelated they may see. You can use the following primary emotions as a guide or come up with some more by all means. So let's just, for example, start with fear, love, anger, excitement, worry, wonder. And really, they're just a few you might want to use. But the main thing is to use the emotion that's most relevant to what you're looking to promote. Whether it's real or whether it's just for practice. Now step to turn your words and phrases into ideas. So ask yourself what the words and phrases you've written down or the images you've sketched out. What would they look like as an idea for an advertising campaign, just as we did before in the example videos. For example, the emotion of fear might conjure the word monster. A scary-looking monster could then become the basis for a brand new concept and ultimately a much larger campaign. The emotion of love, on the other hand, might conjure the word butterflies. Also, flies could become an eye-catching visual motif that supports a campaign or offer and maybe even the entire identity of the brand. So just something simple like that could become the basis for a brand to run and run and run if you're creating one. Likewise, the monster go become a kind of familiar face for their campaign. And also, you know, you could even do the cuddly toy option as well. If you sign up for this product, get one of these monsters who knows. The main thing is that you've got to an idea pretty quickly, just by doing a little bit of emotion hacking, identifying the emotion, seeing what comes up AFI subconscious, which often is familiar words and phrases such as Monster and butterflies. We don't just think, oh, fear. We don't think the word fear, fear, fear, fear. We, we think of images and we think of words connected to that fear. They may be individual to you. They may be just generic stuff that everybody kind of associates. But what you will do is you'll get some new creative ideas simply by bypassing the logical mind. See you not, you no longer stuck on the loop. If thinking, well, what can we say for this product, you kind of bypassing the whole all benefits or features or anything like that. And you just connect in straight to the emotion of, well, the problem is, or what solving the problem might give the customer. So the Munster in butterflies could then also work in reverse. So they would then conjure the corresponding emotion of fear or love in your audience, which will then get them engaged with your message and have them connect emotionally with the product or brand. So by you connecting emotionally through this exercise, it allows you to connect with them. And it allows them to connect emotionally to the product or brand. And at the same time, it helps you communicate the offer in a creative way as we've just touched on. So more commonly known as an idea. 12. Class Project The Association Game: So once you've done that, once you've had a go at that and highly recommend having a go at the association game, whether it's just for practice again, whether it's applying it to your work. So step one, we capture the sense of the benefit or the problem rather than the emotion. We're focusing more on the product itself now and the circumstances in which it's consumed and it may be of service. It could be anything really, but it's always in relation to what's the benefit of the customer engaging with it, and what's the problem they're looking to solve and why might be used it. So take a real product or a service you want to promote, pick a benefit or problem at random for the sake of practice in the exercise. Again, right off sketch every word, phrase, or image that comes to mind. Let one thought flow into another in a stream of consciousness. We can apply any logic at the latest stage, step to turn your words and phrases into ideas. So take a look at what you wrote down. Pick out any words and phrases as before that grab you and use them as starting points for concepts. For example, let's assume you were selling painkillers and you'd written down pounding headache as the problem, say that's come out of your associations, that's come out of your mind when you've been thinking about this word pounding, inspire an idea whether, let's say there's a nightclub inside an office workers. Had there been out for an office party the night before that have come into work and the hunger over and the nightclub is still going on in their head. So it's kind of allowed bass drum music, pounding a rhythm inside the skull. So rather than just thinking, oh, this person's got a headache to word pounding inspires some kind of imagery now, but we can work with, and that's the key here really is looking at those keywords or key sketches if you like, and thinking, OK, well, what can this pounding relate to? Well, straight away, in my mind, it came with the thought of the music and the night club and the bass drum. And then you can make that link back to the product. So let's say this person day fix the problem with our pain killing pill. Only for a colleague to walk into the office with their own nightclub banging away in the head. The first office worker then passes the bill's, I'm with a knowing smile. And however you want to imagine this, I mean, we can see inside the skull, it could be that the schools kind of throbbing, you know, you could do it however you wanted to. You could just see this imaginary picture, this nightclub. And then we zoom out to the person. But just like emotion hacks, this exercise taps our subconscious mind for raw thoughts and words and images, then conjure ideas we can use to turn into campaigns. And at the end of the day and more original, engaging way of communicating and otherwise dole message. For instance, if the pills were the can-do swallow, you might have a lines such as sharp hanging over, you know, which is more crave wave, say stop your headache or a hangover. On the other hand, if they were say let's say they were dissolved in water, that kind of thing. Maybe this strap line could be stopped the DOM domes with the plink, plink or with a plain pink phase, whatever. In both cases, it's about conveying the basic message that if you take these pills, they'll get rid of your headache or a hangover. But it's just in a far more memorable and original way. So you can not only get campaign ideas, but you can get some cool strap lines from there as well. There are probably a little bit unexpected. And again, the taken away, the logical work where you're really trying to sweat out allying or sweat our campaign. There's no need for that really. This is how both these exercises in this course work. They bypass the logical mind and lead to more lateral, unexpected ideas. Because you no longer waiting for lightning to strike. Or Rockne brains for an idea or fill in a pad, follow doodles and none of it makes any sense or stitches together. You're essentially giving you subconscious mind, one thing to focus on and one thing to play around with. The rather than it being like a kid at Christmas with too many toys and they don't know which to play with. You just given them want, given it one to play with. And it'll be happy playing with that toy and, or get the most out of it. This is when the ideas tend to come looking for you rather than Hugo and looking for the ideas. And even if you don't end up using words in your campaign, let's say you're a designer or an art director, you can still use any associations you write down as a leaping off point for a visual idea or theme. So have a go at these, apply them to future creative work and let me know how they work for you. Good luck. 13. MODULE 2: AGILITY: In Their Shoes: While conceptual strength and speed of vital, just as important to work on our flexibility of mind if we're to be really good, high-performing creatives and to help us become more agile in our thinking, what we're gonna do here is we're going to stretch our conceptual muscles in this workout. The first exercise seems really on creative in a way, but it's deceptively useful, especially when we get into the exercise after this. But as you'll see later in this module, it really can come into its own as well. Especially when combined with all the other exercises that we're going to show is called in their shoes. Take a brand or offer. That's real, that's imagined, and picked your ideal audience. Now you may have a lot of information on them already and you may be able to bypass some of this if you've got a really good brief, but if you don't, this is a really good way to compensate. Let's say you've been given an info dump, maybe there's a ton of information and you need to shrink it down. What's relevant. Maybe you've got really sketchy information on who your audiences and you want to give yourself more of an idea. It can get into their mindset and therefore position your ideas in response to the audience in terms of who they are, what they think and what they're doing with their lives. Pitch your audience and ask yourself some or all of these questions. First of all, what's their age, gender? Under other demographics? What's their environment like, and what might be their typical day. They're a student or an office worker, or a mom or a child or whatever, The day is gonna be very different. What do they think of us? And when we say ours, we mean was as a company, you may be represented as a creative. And what do they think of the brand? Are they aware of the brand or the product or the service? Do they care of a cynical or, you know, where they think they don't really trust them or are they fans? Because that's going to affect the way we go about creating adverse market into a cynical person is much different and in a way more difficult to market to a fun news already convinced, if no convincing to do, you just need to put something in front of them in a way that engages them. What do they think of our competitors? Do they think that the competitors are really good? Or are they frustrated with the competition? What does their ideal outcome look like? Now when we talk about outcome, we mean desired outcome in relation to this product or service they were promoting. And while the biggest challenges in life, What are they up against? Because that could really inform what we do. We know what they've got a particular challenge that is relevant to us in some way. We can tap into that and we can find rapport and connection through them. What are their pains or frustrations? What's their idea? Pleasure of fonts? Remember, we were talking a lot about pains and pleasures. We really need to know where those are in order to tap into them, in order to magnify them. What else do they consume other than our offer? You may remember an earlier example where we took Rolls Royce and Rolex. There were similar things. We can do the same here, we can look at while, so they consuming postulates the creative for those brands look like, can we mimic them? Can we work in the same spirit as them? Success leaves clues. If another brand's being successful in marketing their products, and they're kind of in the same ballpark in terms of the level or the type, then we can look at what they've done that's been successful and look at how we can build on that. We can also ask what's the bank balance like? Obviously it's not what's in right now. But what generally do they earn, what kind of visit their income level because of that, again, that's going to affect the way we talked in or it could do potentially. We could also ask what's their education level applies in society? Again, just asking simple questions like that, we can start to think about who they are and what matters to them, and therefore, what matters in terms of what we put in our campaigns. What do they spend their time learning? What knowledge or solutions are they seeking? This is a big deal with you're providing a solution to something somebody seeking. And it's a no brainer, it's an easy sell. What are they browsing for on the Internet? Got to be careful. But generally speaking, safe. Things that they browsing for on the Internet that might be relevant to us. It may seem like an oddball question, but you never know it could, it could come into play and it could spark an idea. What stage of life are they at? This is crucial really. The stage of life determines what their priorities are gonna be and also what the pleasures are gonna be, whether frustrations are gonna be and these are all things we can tap into and compare with when we do in our creative ideas. One last question here. What's their level of confidence or self-esteem? Again, that's just going to help you pitch it at the right level. Because if they're not confident people, if they're not extroverts, It's just going to affect your tone a little bit within reason, you still got to kind of fit the tone of your brand. But it might just influence the way you speak a little bit. And the images you show. What this exercise does is by answering these questions, we pull ourselves outside of our own views and biases. And it helps us to think in new ways. So we're no longer thinking from our point of view. We're thinking from the audience's point of view. That helps us to kind of create more focused when it comes to the creative process. What it also does is it bypasses any sense of loyalty. So a brand, you can assume your audience's thinking gonna do one way. And actually the not, you might think your brand is the best thing since sliced bread, but the audience might not do. If you remember in one of the questions earlier we asked in their shoes, is cynical ave a fan? Do they care? Do they even know we exist because we don't know we exist. We've got a job to do is tell them we exist. It's gonna be a brand awareness campaign. If they're already a superfan, it's going to be, Hey, look at this, this is the lightest thing from us. It's what you love, blah, blah, blah. If the cynical, it's gonna be a case of welcome, I change your mind campaign asking the simple questions is it just starts to push us down avenues and they were gonna be hitting the right mark in terms of message book B were not going well, where do we start? In their shoes? Will do this for you. Also, as we mentioned, this is a warm-up exercise for the next exercise in our agility work out a bit more of a fun one as well. 14. Fresh Take on Familiar Pt. 1: This next one is a really interesting thing, is called the fresh take on familiar. This is the name we've given it. Now. A lot of things can be put in this bracket, and it's kind of a key to success really and advertising. So I want you to make the following phrase, your mantra. And if you do this, you'll just never go too far wrong. If he keeps like a little thing is keeping you on track. The fresh take on familiar is a very simple way of summing up the whole conceptual game. It does two things brilliantly together and it overcomes a major problem. Now, the fresh stay calm, familiar is essentially based around the fact that there's nothing that's on the percent original anymore. So creativity is about looking at what's gone before and giving it a new twist. For instance, brad became sliced bread. That was a fresh take on a familiar thing. The patrol car is now evolving gradually into the electric car. The computer became the laptop. Point break the movie with Keanu Reeves about surfing bank robbers was turned into Fast and Furious. The CD Walkman eventually became the iPod. The wrong column in recent years has become the Zhan Kong or romantic zombie comedy and Blockbuster, which used to have a dominant chain of video rental stores, eventually went bolster. Now it's being replaced by Netflix, on-demand streaming service, stray onto your TV. These are just, it's essentially the same thing, but it's just done a little bit different twist on all these things. And we can mimic that in the advertising world as well. We can take something that's familiar to the audience, give it a fresh twist, and we create that kind of engagement. We will look at that in a bit more detail here. So as humans, we have two conflicting needs, and this is a problem for us in general and in advertising. We have the need for certainty versus the need for variety. And this creates an internal conflict that's ongoing. His constant, everyone has it. There's no solving it outside of the advertising world. Now we have the need for certainty because the familiar, the certain. It means support. It means safety. And essentially it means the survival of the species were kept safe enough, long enough to procreate and raise children and do our bit as humans. The need for variety, on the other hand, is all about the familiar. We actually need the unfamiliar as well. Because this means challenge. It means adaptation, and it means evolution. Now if you don't challenge yourself enough, say physically through your muscles. On some level, we're gonna wither and die. If you go to the gym and work out, you're actually creating by challenging them. Ukraine adaptation and then you're getting stronger as a result is think about generally genetically, you want to avoid a stagnant gene pool and then you do that through variety. So what's the problem here? Why is this a problem in advertising? And why does the fresh taken familiar work so well? Well, well the problem is if you have too much certainty, it's boring. If you have too much variety is cause for worry. The needs to be this balance between the two. But because there are direct opposites, There's always going to be this struggle between the two. And it can also be a problem in terms of advertising, except we can resolve this conflict. So let's say you had an idea where there was no variety. That's gonna be boring and it's gonna be invisible wallpaper. But let's say you had a campaign that was too abstract. It's almost like modern art and he's thinking, get it. Well, if there's too much variety, there's too much abstractness. Again, the audience can relate to it. The fresh take on familiar gets around that. It kind of resolve the conflict in a way, something that we're used to seeing with something that we're not used to seeing the familiar therefore is the anchor point. It brings contexts and certainty to the fresh path, whereas the fresh part brings intrigue and excitement to the familiar part. It's the best of both worlds. Essentially. It's the safe and it's the party together. It's kind of the boring bits that you need with the XI embed that you need as well. Now, here we have the engagement ring. We have the familiar on one side, we have the fresh on the other. There's a little gap in the audience. Put 22 together. They make the connection and the closed-loop. It's just a really easy way of thinking about how to do this. We have an exercise on how to actually put this principle into play. What we're gonna do first is we're going to turn our answers from the in their shoes exercise into ideas. All by stretching our thinking a little bit more. Let's assume you've got a good understanding of the audience here in terms of coming up with creative ideas, we're just going to ask three more questions. So question one, what is our audience used to seeing and experiencing in their usual everyday environment? During a typical day at home, at work or at play. They're playing some sport or they're out socializing or whatever that might be. What is our audience used to seeing and experiencing? This will be our familiar frame of reference, the safe anchor point. Now, number two, what is our audience not used to seeing, doing, or engaging with in the usual, typical everyday environment. This will be our fresh twist on that familiar experience that they used to. They're gonna get certainty and they're gonna get variety. What we can push it a little bit further in order to really ramp up the engagement levels and the disruption in our ideas. And we can ask a third question. What would look totally out of place in the audiences familiar environment? So essentially we're taking number two and we're ramping up a little bit. You can say something different or you can look purposely out of place. And that's what we'll be doing here. We'll be creating the disruption by just dropping something, then you go, what's that doing here? And therefore, I'm interested enough to engage with it and figure out what it is and then give myself a pat on the back. 15. Fresh Take on Familiar Pt. 2: Let's take an example. You can't get drier than construction supplies. Business-to-business. It's not sexy cell. How can we make it interesting while a fresh take on familiar can do this for us. What are they used to seeing? And let's assume we've done some in their shoes work. And we know that if you've ever seen these kind of adverts that usually dominate the landscape for construction and things like that. It's very dry, it's very slight. People in hard hearts pointing at things. Models in male models are like of a certain age. In hard hearts going through and look at that over there. It's not the most exciting thing, but that's to our advantage because we can stand out and mild just by doing something a little bit kind of kooky. Not just for the sake of going out. Who aren't we clever and creative? We're doing this for the reason of standing out and causing disruption. We do this through the fresh take on familiar, what are they used to seeing? In a few words, people in hard hats. Let's sum it up in just those, in those few words. Now, what are they not used to seeing? What would you not see on a construction site or in their familiar environment? And what is nobody doing in the current advertising? Well, it's unlikely they're doing. Let's just say that I haven't checked through whole construction supply, B2B adverts. But I think we can safely assume that we're going to have something that they're not used to seeing here. The answer, performance art. We just chose this at random. You don't tend to see much performance are when it comes to construction supplies, either in the environment or in the marketing. What would look totally out of place in this familiar environment? Well, how about this? How about we put the two things together? We put there fresh together with the familiar. The answer. Well, if you think about it, you've got the performance art, the dancers, and then you've got these hardhats. Well, what about if you had dancers in black Lycra running around a construction site, that would look totally out of place. Now you've got hardhats. We've narrowed number two down. Two dancers in block-like are running around construction site. How can we combine the two as a fresh and familiar idea? Well, how about this giant yellow hardhats with plaque-like or legs running around a construction site, dancing, jumping, running. And you could do this either just completely fictional or you could create a little flashmob thing where you get a bunch of people, dancers, performers who just suddenly appear and then just start running around. But the idea is that rather than the people just doing that, we've combined the two. We've got the giant yellow hardhats in which they use to see and they belong. The legs running around and do math stuff that doesn't belong. But you've got a familiar anchor to it that when you deliver your punchline, they're gonna get it. Otherwise it would be totally abstract. And it also gives the campaign more attraction as well because it just stands out and you remember it. Potential strap line or campaign line we could have is don't get the run around. Get a supply. You can trust. There you go. This is just anchor nine explaining the idea. This was gonna look completely different to everything else. And they're gonna get it as well. And it'll be a little bit humorous and challenging them a little bit. You know, you've got the construction world and now you've got this artsy foxy if you'd like to use that expression. And it's going to stand out and mail now the client may go, well, okay, we've not seen anything like it before, but it's given you an idea that you wouldn't otherwise have had. And it's giving you something that you can explain as well. You can say to a client block, this is doing this job. It's given them something familiar and it's given them something that's fresh, is combining the two is going to stand out and it's gonna do on purpose, purposely out of place. If you remember that phrase, a lot of the stuff we're talking about in this course, you can actually parrot it back to people and they will find it very hard to argue with the, and you'll get more creative concepts through as a result. But what if we add another line? We could say, sick of the new supplier, dance, try a supply you can trust. So if you get X supplier, you can't rely on, you're going to have to get a new one now, that involves, especially if you're a big company and especially for something like construction, that involves a **** of a lot of procurement. It's red tape is paperwork. It's a long process where everyone has to apply and go through this procurement process. Nobody wants that. You want to supply. You can trust that you can work with long-term. It's going to cut the costs and the time and the hassle. If you work in procurement. So this is quite a powerful cell and it's a down-to-earth, robust business sell delivered in a non-business the way, if you will, through the fresh take on familiar. That's really simple way of putting ideas together. And you can try that and experiment with that in all kinds of different ways. 16. What If? Pt. 1: The third exercise here, that's actually probably in some ways maybe it's a bit simpler and it's a lot of fun is called the what if exercise. Because asking what if is what's the most creative, inventive people on the planet and do almost every day. You think about some of the most creative thinkers out there. And you think, how did they come up with that? How did they think of that? Will constantly thinking of, well, what if we did this? What if we did that? What if the world was like this? What if this was possible? This is what they're doing almost every day of their lives. And we can mimic that. We can do the same here and apply it to creative thinking and advertising and concepts and branding. So there are no right or wrong versions of this question to ask yourself. That's the most important point here. Our job is not to self-censor here, as we mentioned, we need to separate the dreamer from the critic. This is complete enough to dream it. This is the kid. The adult isn't in the room where a kid with a bunch of toys asking some mad questions. If you have eradicate hazmat questions that the dinner table or wherever else that we're gonna be that kid. Rather than asking why, we're asking why. Now the cilia, the more random or unrelated the question, it's almost the better because it's going to take you in a new direction that consciously you just wouldn't have gone. And your rational mind, we'll put the brakes on and go. What the **** are you talking about? Just suspend your disbelief for this moment. Just treated as a game. It's just an exercise in whatever. Just give yourself permission if you'd like to be a little bit silly. Because zillion random can just lead to creative leaps that if you're doing this and other people aren't working in this way, you can probably make a **** of a lot more leaps than the next person. We're going to think, how did they come up with this? Will all we're doing is just asking questions. Because if you ask a question of your subconscious mind, it will treat it seriously. You said, how can we invade Jupiter at so on some level is thinking, well, how can we do come back with an answer? But if he kept asking that question, it's going to think, well, that's important. I'm going to come up with some sort of answer. And the thing is when we do cilia and random, it's likely to lead to far more entertaining and disrupting ideas for our audience. So it's going to increase levels of engagement with our message and our offer. And it's just like some of these videos that you see online, like cats versus cucumbers. Who in the world thought of that? Whatever we put a cucumber down and scare account filament. But it's really entertaining and it's really engaged in and you remember it. And we want to do the same thing with our ideas. Obviously for a purpose, obviously robust delivers in terms of return on investment. It's not just their facility in a sake, but it just gives us that Launchpad into a different idea. So let's look at the exercise. I want you to take a blank piece of paper or a blank Word document and start writing or typing. What if questions want you to write or type anything that comes to mind that you think might be interesting. If you can, it's even better to do this exercise with a friend or colleague, review work as part of a creative team because just two or more imaginations about them. One, it's just as simple as that. You're gonna get more questions. Are you going to get more answers out? You're gonna get more ideas out of this. But let's give you some examples. First of all, you can use these questions we're gonna show you here directly. You don't even have to think of your own, and you'll find a longer list of these in the course book. Now, here are just ten stars for ten, you can think of countless, endless, infinite number of questions, but these will just give you a sense of what we're talking about here. What if it was a movie and buy it? If we say this or it, we mean the campaign or the idea. What kind of movie would our campaign be? Or what kind of movie, what our product or service B. We could also ask, what kind of genre would it be if you can't think of a movie or nothing springs to mind. Is it a Western, is a thriller, a horror as a romance? What if it was a famous person? Who would it be? When you think about what you selling, who might summit up well in terms of a famous person, in terms of their traits, in terms of the personality, what they do while they're famous for. What you find is actually that could lead to a campaign idea where you're actually able to say, okay, well, I'm going to take this person and we're going to have them be the face of our brand. What if it was an animal? What will be its attributes or traits? For instance, a rhino is tough, a bear is stronger, cheater is fast. An eagle has really good eyesight, is sharpened, can see things and hours wise, you know, all these animals all have attributes and you can tie them in. And if you look in creative rescue, you will find an idea template that you can rip off using some of these traits. What if we could only use images? We've already covered this obviously, but this is another way to think of it. What if we could only use sounds? Again, we've looked at this, you can do that through copy only. What if it was a song? What would the song be? What would maybe the music genre be? Maybe this can lead to the idea of building a campaign around a single song Gora or a number of songs. Or again, using tying it into an artist if it's relevant. What if what was selling was the key to saving the world? Again, you can think of an idea from now, let's say it's an alien invasion in your product is the key to saving that, for instance, what if our audiences wildest dreams came true? What if our audience were monsters are aliens? It sounds a bit strange book. Let's just ask the question, why have they were? What, Who would they be? What would they look like? Where would they live? Would they be friendly? Would they be unfriendly? Just think about that. What if we had to sell this in just three words? What would those words be? Now they don't need to be in the form of a sentence. You can just pick three random unrelated words out. But they may just give you, when we talk about associations, they may just give you something to spring off. 17. What If? Pat. 2: Let's look at how we can turn some of these questions into ideas. While here we've taken an example that we've taken a question. We've turned it into a little idea. It didn't take very long at all. Actually. We just use one of our products already that we've already got. We ask the question, if our audience were monsters or aliens. The products. You remember our core plan x, which I probably miss titled this coal plant x was more von contracts and probably includes all kinds of data and things like that. Well, we've turned it into a phone and broadband deal. So you get this phone or cell contract maybe includes mobile broadband as well. And it's really great plan. And there's a family plan which loads of data unlimited streaming, blob, R-bar, you know the drill. So the proposition is stay connected to the things you love. Well, if our audience were monsters are aliens, well, because we've already done the in their shoes exercise all we've already got the information in the brief. We've got an idea of who our audiences are. We know in this case it's a family. The product name gives it away. Anyway. Let's take the typical average family mom, dad, daughter, son, the 2.4 children model. And they've all got slightly different needs. They all want to connect two slightly different things. They all have different things that they love. The village got different priorities, and let's assume they're living in their own alien world. Everything's then the brown colors and it's cool and funky and maybe it's cute and whatever else, it doesn't matter. However we bring it to life, animation and CGI, whatever. It doesn't really matter at this stage. This is just the idea. Let's say Mom, what's important to mom? She wants to chat to our friends on the other side of the galaxy. Dad wants to stream live sport on maybe his phone, maybe the TV or the laptop. He wants to watch, let's say the bug, a bug. What's a boggle bug? I've no idea. Maybe it's some alien creature that is a bit like a ball that they toss around and get through hoop. He wants to watch his life sport. Mom wants a good connection to the person across the galaxy. And once all these coal time and takt time that she's not going to run out of. So she can laugh and talk to her house content. Dad, he wants an unbroken, unfettered stream. And when he watches it, it's just going to work and it's not going to cut out the moment that the just about to score the winner in the final. The daughter. Meanwhile, she wants to find a way to a date. Maybe she's navigating away across the city for a first date with this guy she's met online who she she really likes being chatting. And she's using a version of Google Maps or whatever to find our way. But it's really important that her phone connection works so that she can find this play social combined, a dance. She can meet this guy. We've got the sun, he wants to watch movies in his room and horror movies. And maybe one of these movies is the human invasion. And so he needs a good strong broadband signal so that you can watch these movies and download them and things like that. They all want to stay connected to the things they love. And it's just a different way of rather than just showing a normal family doing it, we're doing something different. We're making them aliens instead. And these aliens can be a common face for our brand. It can become a huge, big, massive campaign if we like. They have viral potential as well. And we can spin all these familiar human scenarios into a high-level concept. We recognize all these scenarios, but they're a bit different and weird and wonderful because they're alien and that's the joke. The importance with this is that it's campaigns. You can spin this out for ages, become really familiar. And it'll get your message out there in the mind of the audience. Every touch point. They're gonna be reminded of this element of connection, staying connected to the things you love. What we've done there is we've asked ourselves the simple question, who were the audience and what if they were monsters are aliens. We've picked aliens and we've got an idea. 18. More If Questions: Let's look at a product we've called dazzle toothpaste. Again, we're just focused on stuff where we haven't got amazing USPS to work with because a lot of the time you will have amazing USPS. And we need to show that it works no matter what. No good saying, Oh, do this cool thing where the USP and then your product hasn't got one. What do you do then? Let's see, our feature is healthier gums and cleaner whiter teeth. What can we do with that? And not relying on quirky ideas? Because it's not always about doing quirky, funky stuff. It's about doing what's right for the brand. So let's take a question as an example. What if we used our brand or campaign to make the world a better place? The answer could be, well, we're making more people smile and smile with confidence around the world. It's a little bit like the Dove campaign where they're making ordinary women feel better about themselves rather than worse in order to sell them a product. This will count as the mission type proposition. So this exercise is good because it funnels down a certain road. We go, Oh, well, we're going into mission. So we know what to do with the proposition just by asking questions that seem random but don't lead to random ideas. So let's say this is the proposition. Does all toothpaste is on a mission to make more people smile around the world as a really strong proposition. And it gives you instant direction in terms of you as a creative and you as a brand new as accompany, all the employees know what it's all about. It cannot untold brand value and help to differentiate your products because it's not differentiated by what actually does by feature, but it's differentiated by the perception of the brand. A brand strap line, Let's say this is what we did initially, making the world a smiley, a place. However, this is a little bit passive. We want to kind of make it a bit more active because at the moment the problem with this line is it, it sounds fine, but it's a company over here doing this. Great. But how am I involved with customer? We've refined the brand struck line. I think it could work if it's the right kind of campaign, if it's got the kind of down-to-earth brand behind it, then we can get away with a tiny bit of upon smiles better, Simple as that. Basically this is smiles better for everyone. You're included, the companies included. And as we'll see in a moment, the people can be included as well. As a result of you buying this toothpaste. Everything is smiles better. Well that does, it can anchor absolutely everything. Whatever we do as a campaign as great as we know, we have to get that message across smiles better. That's our approach and we know we're gonna be focusing on the positive as well. But what do we combine questions we don't need to just relegate ourselves to, okay, we're gonna do one question and get an idea of one question. Once we've gotten up and basic idea and a basic identity or a proposition, we can probe it further. We can actually add other questions to take in new directions. We can ask this question. What if we aligned our offer to a noble, charitable, or philanthropic cause? Well, the answer could be, we could align it with a charity that puts smiles on people's faces. Obese, kids, it could be adults, it could be a mix. And there's all kinds of charities put in smiles on faces in all kinds of ways. You've got a lot to choose from. So the idea is you as the customer buying and choosing dazzled toothpaste, put a smile on your face. And there's a campaign that shows when a customer chooses dazzle, someone else benefits too. Because for every purchase of ductile toothpaste, whatever the product might be, the company make a donation on power for the brand. This point in strap line is, again, smiles better, smiles better for everyone. Smiles better all around. Just by making this one purchase. You've got the double benefit. Healthier gums, whiter teeth, etc, etc. With the good feeling that comes with the doing, you're making a difference. And potentially a small donation for the company per product, but potentially a huge increase in sales as a result. It also gives you something specific to play off real tangible differentiator as well. Just by asking a couple of wife questions. Again, we don't need to go wacky here. Wacky isn't the right tone. What the right tone is here is for us to be serious about making a difference in the world. Serious about putting a smile on people's faces. It doesn't mean that tone needs to be serious, but we can't be. We're not going to play fast and loose with the creative. It is not the right tone. Some of the questions that we can ask, it's not just limited to what if we can ask other if questions to get ideas are of ourselves? Wouldn't it be disastrous? If, Wouldn't it be cool? If Wouldn't it be funny? Wouldn't it be weird IV? Wouldn't it be epic? If Wouldn't it be thrilling? If Wouldn't it be ridiculous? Iv, wouldn't it be amazing? If Wouldn't it be scary? If Wouldn't it be annoying? If finally, wouldn't it be cringe worthy F? Now, let's say I'm finally, there's all kinds of questions you can ask yourself. But it just shows that you can spin it in a different way. If you can't think of what if questions, you can think of it in these terms that will help direct your thoughts a little bit. And these are great scenarios for ideas. Cool things, funny things, weird things, epic things thrilling things disastrous, ridiculous, amazing, scary, annoying, cringe worthy. Straightaway. You can think of scenarios. Just think of cool scenarios, phony scenarios. Think of weird scenarios, disastrous, ridiculous. What's cringe worthy to you and see if it can be applied to your product or service. 19. MODULE 3: POWER: The Polarity Switch: Myself and Chris colas, the polarity switch. Here, what we do is use the contrast between positive and negative to ramp up the power of our campaigns and comparison between the two. So if you show the positive, the benefit against something negative against the problem, it's always gonna seem more desirable. And if you switch the polarity and you show the problem or the negative in the face of a possible potential opposite, that they could solve this problem and have this improved life than obviously, the negative is gonna look worse as well. So it's the same principle as a thunderstorm. Essentially, this polarity switch technique, when enough positive and negative charges glide, you get lightening. Well, in the same way, we can collide positive and negative emotional charges to create flushes of creative inspiration. And we can do it on demand and on every single job just by playing with polarities, what's more, we can do it at any stage of the creative process. We can do it early on and we can do it towards the end. We've done our strategic work and we're coming up with the ideas. But we can do it early on as well for benefits and for strategy. And we're going to show you how that works later on in the module, in this module. But first of all, the polarity switch, what is it and what do we do with it? Well, it's going to help you spark new ideas through the extreme contrast of positive and negative as we just touched on. And it can be applied to every job at almost every stage of creative thinking. And it's just another way to think of ideas without thinking of an idea. That's what it was all about. Not hard work. It's not scratching your head, it's not doing any smoke and mirrors magic. It's very simple. Linear waste come up with an idea. And the great thing is that it's got endless possibilities and actually has eight variations on the same exercise. We'll be getting into that later. What is it? Think of it as the dream and the nightmare, these two extreme things, and generally speaking, advertising and sales comes down to comparing the two. But we want to dial back a little bit and start with a simple question. Because this is the fundamental question at the root of all these polarity switches, we're gonna be doing. The first question to ask ourselves is, if the offer is the answer, What's the question? And then number two, we reverse the polarity. If the problem is the question, What's the answer? So that can be applied at a really early stage in the process to say, okay, how do we position our offer against the problem? And then how do we position the problem against the offer? It just gives us the polar opposite contrast so that we can get into, okay, how will we sell in this offer? We're just positioned in it for ourselves really. But when it comes to the actually coming up with ideas, because that's a fairly flat question. If the offer is the answer, What's the question we're gonna say? Well, the question is this issue, bla, bla, bla, but it's not very creative. If we say, if the problem is the question, what's the answer? Oh, well, it's our offer. It offers XYZ. When we start off we go, okay, we've got the offer in the context of a problem. We've got the problem in the context and often we've got a good overview of what we're doing. We know the fundamental message that we need to deliver. And therefore then we can build off a good proposition and good benefits. And we can position those benefits against the problems and magnify that energy balance, as we said. But when we get to creative ideas, That's not enough. We need to do more. We need to have a shortcut into some really unique and lateral ways of thinking. And this is what the polarity switch will do for you. So assuming you know what the problem is and you know what they offer is what it's offering. In contrast to that, then you can run it through a creative lens, if you will. Step two, what we do is we actually re-frame these opposite questions through the lens of polarized scenarios. One, earth, do I mean by that? Well, we're not asking those same questions. We're asking different questions that work on the same basis. So let's give you an example of the dream and the nightmare. Just as we had answered the question before. If the author is the answer, What's the question? Now, we run it through the lens of a polarized scenario, of a creative scenario, if you will, dream to nightmare is first, the offer represents the dream for the audience. What is the nightmare? So if you see what we're doing here, we're ramping up the contrast between the two. We're not talking about answering question anymore. We're talking about dream nightmare. Now that conjures up more emotive imagery, imagery, sounds, etc. etc. If you think back about associations, were pulling these emotional thoughts and reactions to the surface when you think dream anything nightmare, you automatically think of certain things, what it means to you. We can think about what it means to our audience as well. Number two, what we want to do to get that contrast, we want to flip it. We say nightmare to dream. We've, we say, if the problem represents the nightmare for our audience, what is the dream? Now we've got this much darker issue. We've blown up the issue and we've blown up the solution, then we can explore the potential of that. Let's have a really simple example. We'll go back to the first two fundamental questions, okay? So if the offer is the answer, What's the question? So let's say the offer is an umbrella. They offer is keeping yourself drive when you're outside. What's the question? Well, it's rain, heavy enough rain for you to get wet. Now, question to answer. If the problem is the question, what's the answer? Well, if the problem is rain and buy an umbrella, fairly simple. Answer is umbrella for the question, That's right. But obviously, that's pretty boring on its own. You wouldn't go off with an advert and go if it rains by this umbrella. Now what you do is say, what's the nightmare? Well, it's getting wet through on your way to a job interview or a first date gained absolutely drenched. Say you're a woman, you go out and get it ready. You spend two hours getting ready than that and you get absolutely soaked and you look like something in the cat dragged him. Then suddenly the nightmare turns into the nightmare scenarios and it's no longer rain. It's what's the effect of the rain and we'll turn it into torrential rain. No longer average rain, it's torrential rain and we can throw in other things like it's raining but it's windy so the umbrella keeps snapping or flying out of your hand or things like that and suddenly you ghost. But at the same time we can show the dream. Before we said, if the problem is the question, if the problem is rain, What's the answer where you say umbrella? But now, it's up to us to show the umbrella as the solution. So all the other umbrellas are snapping or blown out of a hand. For the umbrellas, you might still get wet because it's just raining so hard and so heavy. Well, this umbrella, this umbrella is big enough, it strongly enough with sturdy enough, it won't let you down. So we use something really basic edits to show this. Obviously you're going to probably have something to sell than an umbrella in terms of going umbrella kind of sells itself. What we can do though, is distinguished this umbrella from other umbrellas. Just by showing the nightmare and the dream, we can make our umbrella more memorable, even if it's the same as every other umbrella outlet. What we do is explore the potential. We write our sketch out words and images that come to mind. What might happen in a campaign that compared the audience nightmare to the audience dream, as we've just said, we'd show all these nightmare scenarios. And then the dream scenario, even though it's just simply an umbrella that works and doesn't blow out of your hand and keeps you properly dry. Not one of those little umbrellas where the bottom half you still gets worse. Even though it's just that suddenly it looks like more of a dream. It looks like more desirable than before because we showed the nightmare. We showed the polarities. And obviously what you do give you a doing a campaign for this umbrella. You would show the happy ending rather than the disaster. So rather than them up to the date or a job interview soak through the whole experience being ribbing that actually turn up dry as anything while everyone else who's getting wet, maybe the job interviewer or the other date would turn it wet because they haven't got this umbrella. You can flip it that way as well. But the point is, suddenly it sells itself. This umbrella. 20. Polarity Switch Examples: Let's look at how it works with coal plant x, our cell phone contracts. Step one again, Let's ask the two opposite questions. The fundamental ones, answer to question. If the plan is the answer, What's the question? What's the problem? Well, the question for the audiences, what will give me everything I need? So I'm not left frustrated, disconnected, and tied into a bad contract. Now let's ask the next question. If the anxiety that I'm feeling when I look at these contracts is the question as in how do I resolve it? What's the answer? Well, it must then be bearing in mind. We came up with this question, what will give me everything I need that I'm not frustrated, disconnected, and tied into a bad contract. We know how to position our answer. It's not just about saying, Oh, well, we answered the phone contract. Well, the answer is an umbrella. It's saying the answer is an umbrella that does XYZ add and doesn't do that. It doesn't fly out of hand, doesn't break, doesn't let in the water underneath it. And the answer in the terms of the phone contract is that it's a flexible phone contract. So you're not tied in. That keeps you connected so that you don't get disconnected and keeps you up to speed all day and all night long with 0 fear of missing out. So you're not getting disconnected, you're not getting frustrated. There's no anxiety because you're not tied into this bad contract. So we can straight away, we can get an idea out of that. We talked about no fear of missing out. Well, hashtags 0, FOMO, fear of missing out is referred to as FOMO. Straightaway. We've got some kind of idea from that. What we can do a lot on, that, we can be a lot more creative. We can do this by running it through another one of our polarity switches, another one of our creative scenarios. So let's look at if we do that. Step two, we reframe these opposite questions that we've just asked and answered through the lens of polarized scenarios. So we'll use the dream and we'll use the nightmare together. Dream to nightmare. If our author represents the dream for our audience. What is the nightmare? Well, how about being stranded with no signal, unable to contact all of ones. And then you've got mobile Internet buffering riches were the worst possible time all while being trapped by a long contracts. So it's nightmarish rather than just an inconvenience. And then let's look at it the other way. If the problem represents the nightmare for our audience, what is the dream? What's the opposite? Well, because we know the nightmare, we can position the dream, a strong signal coming to the rescue in constant touch with loved ones and loved things. And 0 buffering and all the freedom in the world. Suddenly we've dialed up the energy that's coming out. And we've dialed down the energy going in. So we've got all these benefits yet. We're not tied into a long contract. So let's explore the potential of that. Again. Write your sketch, your words and images that come to mind what might happen in a campaign that compared the audience nightmare to the audience dream. We're just working with this scenario now. Well, what's the nightmare for the audience? Being stranded with no signal? Well, whatever they were stuck up a mountain and they can't get a signal when they need to call somebody to get rescued. What about the wife going into labor? And you can't be in contact with what if you're in the military and it's your daughter's birthday, and you've got this video call. You're halfway around the world, you've got this video calls, your only opportunity to speak to, maybe have given her a president She's about to open. Because you get disconnected. Your daughter's birthdays ruined, your experience of it is ruined. Then maybe you're into spore and your support and the team on your own. You're streaming it live on the Internet. And suddenly you miss the winning touchdown or basket. Again, were present in nightmares as opposed to two problems. And it just dials things up. But what we can do is position the dream is the solution. So you could show a low scenarios at the start of, let us say you had a TV ad, for instance, could show all those scenarios at the start. But then we can flip it, we can flip the polarity and everything ends happily ever after. Because the customer chose wisely, they chose this contract. And therefore they can experience the dream. And the dream if you think about it, is things working properly as you would expect, there's nothing spectacular about it. But because we're polarizing against the nightmare, suddenly it's amazing. It's like if you have a near-death experience suddenly all the normal things in life probably seem awesome. You probably think, wow, how lucky am I? But if you don't have that near-death experience, you're not gonna get up in the morning, you go out at home. Everything's amazing. Is coffee's amazing, fresh as amazing, etcetera, etcetera. You need that polarization to experience that as we've already talked about in this course. But that's why it's so powerful. But you can see how that just led to an idea. We explored the scenario when we explored both opposite ends of the same spectrum. And we can repeat that and we can repeat it through a vast array of polarity switches. What do I mean? Well, opposites basically attract ideas. They don't just attract in life in terms of relationships and people and love and all that. They also attract ideas, tools simply by juxtaposing. Just suppose we juxtapose and all kinds of different ways. So let's look at a classic one center in St. Another one, rich and poor, triumph and disaster. Predator and prey. Loved and lonely. Monster, slayer, dirty and clean. Sweet and sour. Order and chaos. Lost, found excitement and boredom. Swipe left and swipe right. Smart, stupid, tortoise and hare. Healthy and sick, opportunity and threat. Now what you'll notice is the not all necessarily, and they don't need to be opposites in terms of light, dark and light absolute polar opposites. They can actually be opposites in terms of well-known cliches and conventions and tropes and sayings. They don't need to be the exact opposite of each other. In reality, they can just be what we see as opposite, what we perceive as being in opposition. If you looked at a tortoise and a hare, would you say they're opposites? No, you wouldn't. But in this story of the tortoise and the hare, the kind of the opposite ones. First one, slow once smart ones, stupid ones, patient, one's in-patient. Again, triumphant disaster. Necessarily opposites, but it's the same of triumph for disaster that gives its opposition. In our mind. We perceive them as being opposites. And again, monster and maybe they're not opposites, but they're both after probably killing each other. So therefore, essentially they are, there are just a few and we can run through all kinds of scenarios with these. You can imagine, if you said, okay, what is a product of its center and what's its a saint? Suddenly that gives you some direction. You're thinking in those terms, may be thinking of halos. Maybe you're thinking of devil horns, all those kinds of things. When you talk about order and chaos, again, maybe a product brings order to a household and maybe the opposite is chaos. And then suddenly you can think, well maybe there's a tornado blowing through, or maybe it's just as simple as a dog is traveling alone in his running around the house and knocking over glasses of wine and everything like that, you can suddenly start to get some ideas into your mind about how things might go. Again, you can turn the problem into a monster and then have the product Slayer. There's just vast potential in these, just by running it through these scenarios. 21. Ninja Switch Tips: Here's a couple of tips that we're gonna go through. The first tip when it comes to using this polarity switch is to use associations just as we've done before. Just as we did in speed based association workouts, we can use association exercises here to mine our subconscious and conjure these scenarios that will help bring your message to the life so we can start to think through, okay, what does the dream and the nightmare mean? What does the tortoise and the hare mean? So let's look at the dream. What associations can we get? Well, how about peaceful, heavenly dream-like sleep with a smile, rainbow pot of gold, clouds, candy, strange, API, lucky Genie, dream ticket, dream partner, Zan. Like we've started to get in some words and imagery here that we can imagine playing with inner creative campaign. And then we've got the opposite. We've got the nightmare. So catastrophe, disaster, closet, monster, dark, scary, Ranvier life, bogeyman, cold sweat, asteroid, end of the world, panic, pain, Torture, horror movie. Again, we've got some starts with Tanja lot from, you can start sketching out ideas around these kind of words and what they bring to mind in these scenarios. Getting chased by a monster, for instance, being unable to sleep, things seeming like at the end of the world, disaster striking just the closet monster stare at you from the dark. And then the opposite. Genies, we've got ones, we've got dreamy things, we've got parts of gold, rainbows. You can go on forever. So let's look at another one, the tortoise, slow, wise, old, shall crawl, get there when the race study marathon, friendly, patient, no rush on its own. That doesn't seem too powerful really. But what if we bring the hair into the equation while fast speeds, stupid, naive spring out of gas, stopped arrest doesn't finish, overtake and fairly big ears hop, jump. We can start to contracts these words and play around with them. And the associations will just help you get into it rarely. And then you can pick out your key thoughts and then you can get her an idea from there. And most likely you'll come up with some original thoughts that you can play off when you've done the associations to get into these polarities to help you bring these scenarios to life. The second injured hip we've got here is to actually think in extremes, this is what this is all about. So to get the most out of the polarity switch exercise, think in terms of the most extreme scenario within two opposites, this will add the entertainment factor TO concepts will help you come up with more easily because it'd be more emotive and more powerful in your mind. But it will also help to entertain the audience while you insert your message, it'll take you in new disruptive directions if you like. Let's look at an example again. We'll take the dream. The basic level of thought will be in the dream. It might be a smooth, pleasant journey where everything goes to plan. Well that's pretty boring. What about instead trying a dreamlike fantasy? Maybe it's on a flying White House to a London make-believe where all your benefits, magical creatures coming true. Straightaway that's more interested in is far more extreme. Maybe rather than in the nightmare scenario, maybe rather than a painful journey full of delays, traffic and disconnections. Try this. What about if it's a journey where everyone's worst nightmares come true from werewolves were aliens to meteor strikes and they're trying to make that journey while that's happening, utter chaos of the nightmare. It seems far, far worse. Then when we position our offer, the solution as a dream. What we can do, what we'll see when we get to the variations on this exercise. We can drop one of the polarities and keeping the other. So we might go for nightmare in terms of showing this chaotic scenario where all the nightmares come true, then we can just position our product as it is. We don't need too big it open anymore. Likewise, we could drop the nightmare and just show the dream that we've gotten contrast. We don't even need to show a bit of a nightmare. It's helped towards to come up with an idea by having the contrast. And we can play around with it both ways and see what works better as well. We've got both ends of the spectrum we can say, which is the best way to sell this. Which makes the stronger idea. Is it the positive on its own? Is it the negative on its own? The dream or the nightmare, or is it a combination of both? Then let's look at air and taught voice. How do we think in extremes of the hare and the tortoise? Well, rather than an everyday taught ice that crawls its way to the finish line and we know where the story. Why don't we try giant electric total, his car driven by a mad professor. As far more extreme and weird and interesting and disruptive. Then rather than with the hair rather than an everyday hair that hops off at speed only to tire and be overtaken by the total is something familiar. Why don't we give it a fresh twist? Why don't we try a jet powered robot that runs out of fuel in under 30 minutes. Here you can use fresh token familiar and whatever we're gonna be getting into that surely and how to combine these things. So that's a more extreme version is jet powered, so it's going at 1000 miles an hour. And in no time at all it runs out of fuel. And it's the opposite of the electric tortoise car. And environmentally friendly smart thing that gets there in the end. 22. 8 Ways to Flip the Switch: We talked about exercise variations, and there are eight ways to flip the polarity switch. Let's start with number 1. First, we can compare and contrast polarities to produce a campaign. For instance, it might be the fear of potential braking where we show that in an advert. Then we show the relief of a new security alarm. You can sleep safely at night because that burglars not getting in and if the trip anything, you're going to know, they're gonna run number to combine both in a way that makes both the positive and the negative and negative. Why on earth would you do this if you are promoting any kind of product? Well, it's a false negative. Rarely is basically something that's so attractive or distracting that it leads to disaster. And the key is to make it comical so that the audience can get the joke. They're not going on godless makes things worse. They're going, Oh yeah, I get it. For instance, it could be food. So more like the contrary note conflicts. The taste so good you just can't stop eating them and therefore things happen in the background. Let's say you're supposed to be driving a forklift truck, runs in some boxes or you are supposed to be monitoring something and you're too busy eating or you're supposed to be doing the voice-over and you can't do it, then it leads to a chemical, but a mess app or disaster or your life is going to suffer in some way for it, but it's very light and comical. Or it could be clothing or skin cream. The negative is that people are walking into lampposts because he turned in so many heads, it doesn't necessarily need to be a negative for you. Or it can be skin cream where maybe you can't get into a nightclub because you're getting asked ID even though you're 40 years old. Or it could be a head turn in car again, people in their ice cream falls off the cone because it's too busy staring at the car going past or maybe there's somebody with a hose pipe watering the plants. And as they turn to watch this car or by, the guy accidentally Walters his wife and he's in trouble. So that's how you can turn something. It's so positive that it almost leads to negative consequences. But in a comical way, it's the advertising truth. The audience can tell the difference. Let's look at number three. You can combine both in a way that makes both the positive and a negative of positive. How do you do that? Well, picture it this way. Let's say you've got low calorie dessert. People get tempted to. The problem is they want to lose weight, but they've got this other opposing thing where they want to eat nice food as well. So let's say you take a low-calorie desert, it gets around that by allowing you to be both Center and Saint at the same time. So sin and B are saying simultaneously, because you've got this, let's say it's chocolate when it's low calorie, low sugar. In this scenario, both the center and the ST or embraced as positive. The center is, you're encouraged to be a center almost they're not saying, don't eat this, don't eat that. He's saying, go ahead, eat this lovely chocolate dessert. You don't have to worry because you can be as saying that the same time you still been healthy and you still being good and you still own UAT or weight-loss journey. Remember the energy in and energy out. In this instance, the energy in for the audience would be the discipline nodes to pick the right option. In this instance, the energy in is almost like a positive. There is no negative in this scenario. By choosing this is no strain at all. This is basically the best of both worlds idea. If you think about it in those terms, you can combine the positive and the negative and make both of them are positive. Let's look at number four. You can actually throw away one of the polarities and former campaign out of the others we already discussed. So you could use economy as a way of positioning a premium upgrade that you're promoting. The premium upgrade is in response to all the stuff that you don't like in the economy. So by exploring the frustrations in the economy, it helps you position your premium upgrades is a real benefit. This is the thing. It's not just about what you present to your audience. You can pick it up in your mind, which helps to think of it bigger and more powerful idea. But you needn't reference the economy version in the creative and the idea of, let's say economy flight, where you're limited like room, you don't get any food bargains not included, etc, etc. You can then position the premium upgrade and response, or you can toggle between the two, you can reverse it. But let's say you're selling something that's economy. You could use the premium upgrade in this way as well. So let's say you've got a premium product which is on the face of it looks preferable. But what you can do if you think about the audiences choose an economy, the primary objective is they want to save money, they want or less of that money going in. They want less energy and to get where they want to go to get the result which is getting to their destination. What you can do is position the premium element is unnecessary. You don't need all that extra baggage allowance. You don't need the meal that you probably not gonna like anyway. You don't need massive amounts of leg room. By using that polarity, you're able to then position the economy is a good thing. So let's look at number five. We can flip the polarities. So the negative becomes positive. The positive becomes negative. Well, how do we do that? Well, well, let's think about it in terms of a sarcastic or joke campaign, is where you pretend to extol the virtues of the opposite brand. Your brand takes on the personality. Temporarily of the other brand in order to show it up. For instance, straight talking brand may pretend to be pretentious temporarily with the audience and on the joke. That's the thing we have to at the end of the day show that were just joking. And it's the opposite to that. The audience has to see that as pretentious. If the audience likes pretentious stuff, there's no point showing it like that. So that's where you can do that. Now, number six, we can choose the most natural polarized scenario for the offer. For the offer for the problem or the audience, we can look what's the most natural fit. For instance, household products, domestic cleaning products. It might be filthy and sparkling or dirty and clean. While a theme part might be excitement versus boredom. You often see this in cleaning out the, you know, you've got this person who clearly takes good care of the home yet somehow you've got a ridiculous amount of dirt and then you've got a ridiculously sparkling clean floor after the views, mop, x or whatever. That's simple polarity switch that they're pulling these adverts. They don't show sandy, dirty floor, the show and absolutely filthy floor. Ridiculous stains as well. And then you look at the theme park example, for instance, you might say, okay, it's a trip to Disney in America to really ramp up our exciting and thrilling and a magical that is, you could then also position the boredom sides. So let's say you're not on vacation or holiday, or maybe you've gone on the wrong one. Maybe you've gone on a boring one, that nothing's happening and maybe the weather is terrible and it's raining all the time. Let's say you live in Britain like I do, I'm in crystals. You take any chances with the weather. Let's just say that. Whereas if you go to Florida and my reign in the afternoon a little bit, but most of the time it's gonna be glorious sunshine. Obviously it's going to avoid all these amazing rides. So you can position the two against each other and you can pick the most natural fit in there. But we can also do in variation on the southern, you can actually choose the most unnatural fit for your offer or problem. This helps to produce unexpected ideas. So just as number six helps produce solid, robust ideas, we can then position against it and more of an unexpected twist and idea and test that out as well and present that. Let's say household products could be related to Monster and slayer. You sometimes see this where the germs on the inside of the toilet rim presented as little monsters and grand lens and troublemakers. And then the bleach solution comes in and kills them off. And sometimes there's a hero character involved in that. You could also take say, triumph and disaster. Again for cleaning. Let's say it was to vacuum cleaners competing against each other or three. And it's the vacuum clean and Olympics. And product comes out on top. It's a gold medal winner. It's just a more creative way to do it. And you don't necessarily associate these things with cleaning products. And again, you can flip it around and have it disaster while there's just a hurricane of mass flying around in the house and your products, sorted it out. Finally, we've got variation number eight. We can do more than just switch between polarizing scenarios, emotions as well. We can do more than now. We can actually pull it Convention on its head. We can pull the polarity switch in terms of playing with conventions. Once we've established what the convention is, for instance, the tortoise in their hand, rather than lose to the tortoise. What if the headwinds? What if the tortoise is actually faster out of the blocks than the hair, what if both of them, rather than being kind of opposites and enemies? What if their best pals and they work together to win the race against a rival G20, which represents the market competition. Well, then again then without To the best of both worlds, and they don't necessarily need to compete. He could have the same width. Predator and prey. And sweet and sour is like popcorn, sweet and salty. In some ways this shouldn't go together here. You can actually have them together now and actually tastes pretty good to me, at least that other variations you can do, that's how you can pull the switch in different ways. And again, it's just given you more ways to an idea and helping you get there faster, helping you make more than helping you explore the potential. So that you're not just life with one variation, like the center saint. Potentially you can do eight different variations on the same scenario. So you've got a two ideas rather than one. 23. What Else in Life?: There's one more exercise as part of Power workout. This is exercise two, it's called What else in life? Now, we've explored the power of creative contrast. Let's turn our attention to the power of creative comparison. Whereas with the polarities which we will look in a stark contrast, the positive and the negative. Here we're looking for similarities, but in creative ways, a lot like the WATI of approach opens up all kinds of new pathways to an idea asking what else in life achieves essentially the same thing. But with this technique, rather than opening up to all kinds of new and interesting questions that could be related to anything. We're gonna actually narrow our focus and we're gonna do this by asking what the product or the service or the brand compares two. And we're gonna explore these comparisons through a variety of different riffs on the same basic questions. But rather than being focused on the product, we're gonna be focused on life itself. We're thinking in creative ways, but very specific ways at the same time, again, we're running our basic question of comparison. The wells in life through different creative lenses just as we did in the polarity switch. Let's look at how it works though. What else in life exercise works very much as the name suggests. We start by asking a question that each time begins with the prefix of what else in life, then it's fill in the bank after that. What we do is we then complete the question by making a comparison with something else in life, beyond the realms of the product, the brand, or the service. By something else. In life we mean something that's part of the real physical world or something imaginary, yet it is kind of within the bounds of popular culture, is what people have a frame of reference for is not completely abstract. You know, if you can think of it, somebody else's gonna recognize it. And it's a great way to almost create fresh takes on familiar. It's another way of producing the same result as that exercise, but through this particular lens. So every time we answer our own question, we're making a potential platform on which to base our new ideas is kind of like Launchpad from which to make that initial creative leap, which is kind of the hardest part, is getting off the ground is split like a spatial, even the Earth's atmosphere. The hardest part is the taken off and getting through that initial atmosphere and beat in the pull of gravity and once the past that they're away and flying. When we asked this question, whilst in life is always related to the problem the audience is facing or the benefit that leads to the desired outcome. But the problem is a lot at the time we can be focused on the product or the service. It's hard to see beyond that sometimes, what can we do with this? We're almost locks into this thing. Well, this does even though it's in relation to the thing that was selling or promoting, were actually moving that thing out of the picture. We're focusing on something else instead that has a similar payoff or a similar kind of pain point or whatever it is. And then we wrote were open to new things, other things from life. And it just makes it a whole lot easier. And we're gonna show you, first of all, we're going to go through some sample questions and then we're gonna show you a few examples and you'll start to get a feel for what we mean just as we did with what-if questions. Let's look at ten status for ten just to get you going. And also I think the first few here perhaps might even be the most useful. Here's ten starts with 1010 questions to get you going. Let's start with this one. Very general. What else in life does this compare to? And when we say this, we mean the product, service, the brand, or even the problem that we're trying to solve. Let's look at another question. What else in life has the same trace? This is really, really useful when you're looking to come up with ideas. If you use this question, you'll see that it just leads to ideas really easily because you can see the same benefit in something else or the same quality and something else. And again, it pulls you out of just staring at the product, not having this myopic focus where you can't see past it. Another question might be, What else in life has the same personality? This is great for brands because your brand is going to have a personality. It's gonna have certain values, maybe even certain quirks. And the way it talks is gonna be a certain way in the way it works. And so therefore you can ask yourself, well, offices in life has the same personality as a person, as an animal. What is it could be anything, it could be another brand, even. What else in life does this remind me of? That's a good question to ask because it can trigger memories and it can trigger unique memories that you can then apply to the grave advert that on your own. And so they're gonna be fresh and you're also going to be found a bit of inspiration there, hopefully. What else in life does this look like? The next few questions are really useful. There's a lot of great adverts are based on the technique of something looking like something. It's a really great way to create that gap in understanding that people have to fill in, you have to make that connection. Then that gets injury, gets them to give themselves apart on the back because they figured it out as well. It can be really clever way of doing an idea, but clever with a point, clever with a purpose. You could also ask what else in life make this sound like? Again, that's kind of a new train of thought that you might not have gone down. So what else in life might just tastes like, even if it doesn't have a taste, you can just ask his half list and it might lead to some interesting thoughts if you go, well, if it did taste like this, like well, let's say this, this is metal or something. What does metal tastes like? Or maybe it's torch instead of taste or something like that. That kind of question is just to get you RVUs will headspace wells in life? Might this be used for? This is probably more practical because you can imagine scenarios. If this product is really good at doing this, maybe it's really good at doing something else as well. What else in life does this trigger memories of? This could actually be specific memories like view hard this kind of product, or interacted with this kind of product or service in the past yourself, you can tap into those direct memories and they'll give you thoughts. The goofy feelings will give you emotions, may even give you situations that you can then apply something to. Like, let's say it's a food may be asserted food remind you of family meals. And then you can base an idea around family meals. You can create a family around products, a made-up family OXO. They do that with gravy, essentially, it's just a gravy cube. But they did all our marketing around. Basically the children being at home and coming home for his gravy and things like that. What else in life might this cause or prevent? Now this is quite a good question because we've, in another part of the course, we've covered Kellogg's crunchy not conflicts where they are so delicious that people can't stop, eat in a minute actually leads to mishaps, chemical mishaps, or prevent. Again, you can take the snake as an example where they have a campaign. You're not you when you're hungry. So because people are hungry is causing all kinds of problems. And you even get a rapper turns into ONE John, because he's not himself. He's getting given a snake as it needs, okay, and it prevents that. So these are just some stars for tend to get you into it. But what we're gonna do is look at how we move these questions into ideas. We're gonna look at some examples. And this will give you a much better feel for it in terms of how this works and how you can turn what might seem like slightly obscure questions into new ideas. 24. What Else in Life? Examples: Let's look at some of these examples. Will take three products at random. We'll ask a different question each time. And then we'll see if we can quickly get to an interesting idea. Let's take something really dry and secure data storage. Let's see what we can get when we ask one of these questions. What else in life exhibits the same trace? So what's the trade for secure data storage is usually pretty easy to pick the products and go well, this is the basic traits will pick. One will say secure at the end of the day. That's what it's all about. When you think about secure, you could think guard dog. You could think for Knox or you think Temple of Doom like the movie where Indiana Jones is trying to get to the thing you want to get to whatever the artifact is. And there's this booby trap temporal, but he's trying to get past where the big stone bowls chasing him and all that stuff. Well, that might be a really good idea actually. Whatever we have an Indiana Jones reversal, because in Indiana Jones, he finds his way out of these life or death situations and he gets around these problems and just by the skin of his teeth escapes and gets the thing is after and gets out of there. Well, whatever it was the other way, what if the would-be thief was beaten at every turn by these Temple of Doom style traps. You just couldn't get past them and you can have it to chemical effect. And that kind of represents how secure this data storage, as I imagine, they've got all these different security measures in place. But we could bring it to life in a creative way, like creative fun way. And of course it's not necessarily the idea you can go with for that product. It depends on the audience. As with all these, it depends on the audience and it depends on the tone of the brand and everything else. But it's just a great way to get started and to get past the initial thing of you might be thinking, well, we've got a picture of a safe and then a lock, and then a cybersecurity, and it just comes at it from a different angle. So let's look at the next one. I mean, what's more? Branded them water almost. Well, let's ask a question and we're gonna assume we've got nothing to say. Like it's not organic, it's not a better brand, does nothing going on, but we still need to sell it in an interesting way. So what else in life does this feel like? Well, the feeling, just as with the trait, we identify a feeling. I would say refreshing. It's the one thing you can say about water. You could say hydrating as well. But let's just say refreshing. Refreshing could be a waterfall on ocean, mountain air, dancing and a fountain. So what ideas might that lead to? Well, what about a bottle pouring into glass book? Instead of looking like a bottle into a glass, it resembles a waterfall or a fountain with someone dancing in the water. There's a little bit of crossover here in terms of worlds in life questions, we're strain into what else does this resemble as well. But you'll find this, you'll find a natural crossovers, you go into it. So we've got this kind of adverb. It looks like someone is in the water for, in the fountain. That's to represent whenever they have this drink that, that refreshing, that that's the experience. Or we could commission or sponsor a waterfall or fountain and a major tourist hotspots, whether it's already there or do we create something by sponsoring it and maybe get in, maybe filming or encouraging people to record themselves in and around this interacting with this thing, we can create a lot of viral marketing for free. Essentially, we can make more of our budget. And it can be something that becomes renowned in that space. Like the London Eye for instance in London. That big wheel that goes around his sponsored. Let's look. Final one, herbal tea bugs will take another drink, but we'll have it a bit more interesting as a bit more going on. While it's in life has a similar benefit. Well, what's the benefit? It's that it's soothing and relaxing. What else in life is soothing and relaxing? Well, how about a luxury spar or a hot tub, or a massage or yoga, just a yoga session. Then how can we link this products or these other experiences as well? Let's say the first idea, maybe there's a, maybe this is more of a comical idea. Maybe there's a woman struggling with yoga and all these crazy different latest treatments to try and distress. And she's like going through all this kind of thing, paying all this money, doing all these things, getting into all these yoga positions and struggling with it and everything else. Then at the end, the alternative is to just have this herbal tea and I'll give you the same experience. Again, it's the comparison between the two experiences that counts in the catchy to the idea. The straight-line could be the easy way to relax. You don't have to do yoga and I will always kind of stuff just by these herbal tea, you feel relaxed. But what about this as another idea? This also came to mind. What about a woman relaxing in steaming cup of herbal tea? But it resembles a hot tub again, we've got Crossover. What else in life resembles what it looks like she's in a hot tub at first glance, but then when you take a closer look, you go, Oh, she's actually in the tea, can be really luxurious. Pick up Tableau almost looks like an infinity one. And again, its comparison is the kind of similar benefit or experience that you'd feel in the heart or while you're relaxing, you just get a cup of tea. So the straight-line can be simple relaxation and a cop. There you get the kind of intrigue of the advent of all what's going on here. Oh, she's actually in a cup of tea. And oh, this explains why it's relaxation in a cup. Let's look at a third idea here that came from comparing benefits. Again, we could go humerus here. Let's say we have a woman receiving a massage every time she drinks the t, so she has the T starts sipping and then she's almost transport is whether she's actually transported to a spar or she is transported to the site fantasy world. This kind of really handsome, younger dynasties master Gina, shoulders or something like that. By the time she finishes the T, which he snaps out of it, He's gone and maybe she's just there in the office or something with a coworker who's slurp in his bro, whatever or written is somebody's looking at it, thinking What's wrong with her. Maybe she looks around and she's got other colleagues who are look as though they're receiving a muscle are just there drinking the tea. Well, you could have a strap line, very simply Hamas RG and a mug. And there you've got something that can be become known for. So you've got campaign and you've got Brandon and something that could last a long time there. You could do a lot of different things with this. You could run multiple ideas out across a period of time around these kind of messages. That's just an idea of how these questions can turn into concepts. Very simply by just focusing our minds. Making a comparison with something else in life. And again, we're not think, keep going on about this, but we're not thinking of an idea really. We're not forcing an idea out of our minds would just, I'm answering questions that we're posing ourselves. We have got a couple of tips on how to get the most out of this exercise. These are just two ninja tips and very simple, very quick, and kind of similar to with the polarity switch. In the polarity switch, we said to think in extremes in terms of the polar opposite situation. Do you think of the scenario as well? Here it works in much the same way. I think outlandish really basically, the further removed the comparison from the product or service or the brand, the more fresh, the more disruptive and probably the more unexpected the idea for you and therefore for the audience as well. So think in big, in funny and risque and cinematic terms. You know, look at some of the ideas we have there. The Temple of Doom, where the woman getting the massage, certain cup of tea. We had the person in the fountain and the waterfall. We are sponsoring of a waterfall or something like that. That's much bigger than the product itself. So it takes that basic tray or that benefit, all that experience and it blows it up really in terms of the more extreme version. Ninja tip two is to think laterally. Now, you may already have a proposition or a strap line or just one key benefit, assuming you do then ask yourself, what is the literal embodiment? You may not have one of those as well. You may just have like a trade to go off or whatever it is. But just ask yourself, what's the literal embodiment of either the message or the identified trade for kind of experience or something like that. This helps you to think in images rather than words. When you think literally, go back to the massaging or MOG example, that's called literal interpretation. The relaxation and the core is the literal interpretation. Woman who appears to be in the hot tub books in the cup of tea relaxing. That's the literal interpretation. Again, to some extent in the waterfall or the fountain, the refreshing aspect. If you think in terms of images rather than words, then this exercise really help you create elegant visual ideas. And you're gonna be showing rather than telling. And it's gonna be a lot simpler to think of those kinds of ideas. 25. BONUS MODULE: PLUG & PLAY: We've got a bit of a secret weapon or pass leave. And once you've done these workouts, all these exercises, once you've got the hang of it, you can actually combine them to massively increase your output. And when we develop these exercises, we wanted to put together an extra system or method for you to really multiply your effectiveness as a creative. We call it plug and play is the plug-and-play method. This is going to help you think laterally in a linear way. Essentially we're using the left-brain to trigger the right. You can't think of the ideas with your analytical part of your mind, with the conscious mind, the key to it isn't the right side of your brain, and it's in the subconscious mind. Well, what we're gonna do here with blogging play, we're going to use these exercises in a way that almost mimics lateral thinking. But we're going to consciously trigger it. What this is going to do is mimic the way top creatives think, whether it comes naturally to you or not. So he could already be a top creative who are already does a lot of this automatically. If you are, this is gonna help you take your game to the next level, through conscious control. If you're not, if you're just getting into it, if you don't think it's a natural skill for you. This is going to allow you to access the right brain and it's going to help you get there consciously view will. Essentially it's going to give you more conscious control over your subconscious creative output. So whether you're already at an advanced stage in your creative career, or whether you're just starting out, whether you do it automatically or you don't. This is going to give you that conscious control over the process when you need it. That extra little power boost. If you've ever watched the Fast and Furious and the driving these fast cars, and they're already going really fast. And then they have this important that the portion nitro tank fires often suddenly they go another 50 miles an hour faster than the when. This is what this is gonna do. This means the plugin play method. It's not only going to inject great creativity into your works, actually going to create a great sense of fun and play and could do as much as ten extra output, could do far more than that. And the great thing about this is when they're combined in different ways, that's actually going to give you hundreds of unique pathways to an idea, in fact, to infinity, to infinity and beyond. To quote Buzz Lightyear, when we're talking about these unique pathways, that would be just for one thing. Let's say you got one offer, you've got one brief. You could potentially have millions of different directions to an idea all through conscious control. Because let's face it, there's infinite potential in terms of ideas out there accessible by our subconscious mind, but we can access them all. Whereas when we use these techniques, we're going to show you in the plug-and-play method. You do have conscious access or all times through as many as you want. So you're not gonna run out basically. And also you're not gonna have to strain to try and think of an idea. Hopefully ever again, we're gonna show you examples and we're going to show you the unique combinations you can do because this is the best way to show you how this works. And we're going to do it for different products and we're gonna do it for different types of brief. So we're gonna show you a proposition and a campaign. We're going to show you some branding and some naming and just some basic ideas. And we're going to show you how it can work early in the process. Towards the end of the process, what we're gonna do is take few exercises and then plug them into each other. We've chosen products at random. We've chosen the exercises that plug into each other at random. Again, when we would develop in this course, we didn't want it to be contrived. We didn't want to come out at where we were going. What can we get the best idea of for ourselves in the best products so we can look cool. We want this to work. We wanted to test it ourselves, essentially as we were doing it, you know, does this work? Will this work for everybody? And so therefore, we didn't think about it too much. We just go, let's come up with an idea for a product or a service that'll do first thing that comes to mind. Let's start with an exercise. Let's pick one at random. Okay, we'll do that. 26. Plug & Play: Travel: Freedom: The first example we've got is package holidays. Again, we've not gone too in depth of this and not even given it a name. But we've come up with the thought that there's this tailored package holidays where basically the landscape at the moment we package our day certainly in Britain is that the fallen apart. The biggest travel operator in the UK, Thomas Cook, has now gone under because people aren't putting their own holidays together using DIY services, these online brokers like sky scanner and Booking.com and things like that. So we just thought, Okay, well, if we're gonna do a tour operator or whatever, it's gonna be a tailored one, isn't it? It's not just Garner playing, go somewhere, Sony, come back. It's what do you want to experience? So let's assume we've got a tailored package, holiday or vacation solution. How can we combine exercises to bring this to life? And all this is assuming we don't know a great deal about it. Because yes, we may get a brilliant brief, but let's work on the assumption when we haven't got much to go off. Let's work in the worst-case scenarios, if you will, rather than the best-case scenarios. Because if we can do all lists when we haven't got anything to go off, we're certainly going to be able to fly out the blocks when we've got a great grief and we've got a great USP and everything else. So first of all, to promote this Taylor package, holiday or vacation solution, we chose emotion hacks. We assumed we didn't know a great deal about it. And we went for emotion hacks first when we're doing this exercise, if you remember, we identify the dominant emotion for the offer or the problem. But we're gonna go with the offer here. What is it? What's dominant emotion here? Write down what comes to mind for those emotions. As we did before. Earlier on, we do the associations exercise. We write down what comes off the top of our head. Let us assume the key benefit here is to tailor every part of your trip by swapping elements in and out. At least we've identified that. So again, it's this spoke holiday. I want this I want that. I want to go skiing and I want this and I want that, or I want to go to the beach and I want this kind of fly in this kind of hotel. The emotion of the offer is essentially freedom. Freedom of choice when they no longer tied into this rigid system where you go is this hotel, is this flight at this time and it's this result, The against choose different elements, but you do in it through your avoid and all the pitfalls of the DIY method where you don't always know what you get in the key thoughts we had from our associations. We're gonna skip the associations for now. You already know how that works. The things that came out for us, we're free to choose liberation and no ties. Okay, that's a start, but where do we go from there? How does that lead to an idea? Free to choose liberation, no ties? Well, if we're not getting an automatic idea, well, we can take conscious control of that. We can plug it in to another exercise so we can run it through up the polarity switch. Use one polarity to highlight the other. That's essentially what we do. We already know what the emotion of freedom is and they offer What's the emotion of the problem? We flip the polarity to the negative, while the emotion of that is feeling trapped. So key thoughts are trapped, suffocating. No turning back in chains again, okay, yeah, we've got both sides of it. We've got the liberation freedom to choose no ties, but then we've got the negative that positions in our mind is creatives even as more can I desirable. So we've got trapped suffocating note and impact chains. But let's assume we've not got an idea by now. Well, we can keep going. So let's ask what if this is actually how we did it. We went okay, we're not got anything there. Nothing springs to mind. Now, let's plug it in to another. We frame one or more key thought as an F-type question. We've got these key thoughts of freedoms to use and trapped and things like that. What if this was a song? What if this was represented by a song? We want to move from feeling trapped. The old package holiday way, the feeling of freedom to be able to choose what we want to do. Why is that was a song, well, song freedom by George Michael. What if we adopted this as our song for a campaign? We could show the experience of all these very different tailor trips. We could do it to the same song and that song could become our theme tune. We keep playing this campaign with the same song. We echo it in the other media. We've got something memorable with sticker ability. And the audience still has to do a little bit of work to connect with two things. So we then asked another question. We then said, well, wouldn't it be cool if for each separate commercial that ran, we have different types of holiday. Maybe we can have a flagship commercial with everything they want, but maybe we can have individual ones which can work when you break it down to the individual media as well. So let's say you got billboards are bookshelves, posters, or online banners. And let's assume there were offers on certain types of holiday and vacation. Well, then we can break it down into the individual ones as part of the same campaign. And in doing so, we can feature a different version of the song. I could cover version done by different artists and we could commission that. It's all in a genre that's suited to the trips. So for instance, easy listening Andy, for a relaxing trip. It can be rock, Hard Rock for a winter sports trip. And it can be the original song for a more general trip with personalized elements, people could almost look out for the latest version of the advert and the song. And that allows us to show the different elements in a slightly more creative way. There we used emotion hacks, which we plugged in to the polarity switch to get the contrast. And from the contrast, we asked the question, what if this song Freedom kind of sums up what we're talking about here, did you Hatch Michael is not singing about vacations, but it echoes the essence of the emotion that we're talking about. We dial in into a key emotion. The audience has to put the two things together. They have to put the song together with the freedom of choice and what the scene in terms of the imagery. And therefore, they get a little pat on the back and it sticks. 27. Plug & Play: Travel: Holiday Horrors: What if we wanted more ideas around this? We rallied, just do one idea and go, yeah, our work's done. So let's use the same product, but let's do another combination. So this is combination to, here we've taken a polarity switch and we've added it to a. What if we're just using the same exercises book, we're exploring things a bit differently now. Just by switching, the exercise is rounded a little bit. We can flip the polarity switch at anytime we want to. We can often do this in the form of an if style question. Let's ask this question. What if we had an alternative TV out that focused on the negative polarity? The other campaign is focusing on the positive. Well, let's flip the polarity switch through a what if question. What if we did the opposite? Well, that gives us a bit of a creative strategy. Now showing the old rigid failing model of the package holiday. And we're showing the risks of DIY blocking because people can go online and put their own holiday together or vacation together. You don't necessarily know. I mean, I've done it plenty of times myself where I've ended up on a flight, taken two flights paying all these extra charges for baggage, or I've booked a hotel or I've turned up at the hotel, it's supposed to be a double room and then it's not so much a room as a short corridor with a single bad in it wedged in. As a consumer, you're responsible for knowing everything and you can't always know everything. We want to show this, we want a big this up. So what if the idea revolved around the risks of gambling with your summer through DIY bucking, shown through the song. Please release me by crooner Engelberg impudent. And we can also at the same time show the old failing model of the package deal which still exists today. This please release me. If you don't know it. It's an old kind of song and we're almost given it that comedic element. We're no longer showing the freedom song. We're hooking it to a different song and it becomes a different idea in a different advert. But we can run it through a polarity switch to get more out of this train of thinking. So we know it's a case of safety and gambling becomes the safe bet and the gamble. What is that? Is it the wheel of fortune, but in reverse, maybe it's the wheel of misfortune that lead us to an idea of, it's a mock game show, commercial, holiday makers or vacation as gambled away their summer vacation and all their money. On a game of chance, on a spin of the wheel. Would We've got to this idea without running it through a polarity switch like this, Probably not, but let's run it through another polarity switch. Let's run it through another scenario with the dream and the nightmare. The dream, you know, maybe we could use the dream but I don't know. We're focusing on pain here negative. So really we're gonna focus on the nightmare. If the Taylor package holiday operator is the dream is the freedom of choice. What's the nightmare? Well, what about the Little Shop of holiday horrors? We can just poke fun at the online booking sites. So flights from how zombie fide service, blood-sucking brokers, coffin size room as we've already, I've already mentioned these real experiences. We can bring them to life. But what we do rather than showing the experiences as they are, we show them as the nightmare. So to accommodate extremes, imagine what a flight from how it might be blood sock in Broca's coffin size rooms. So he'll actually the size of a coffin is present in the nightmare and accommodate way, but the audience is still going to see it as a nightmare. And then by contrast, you're gonna be able to position your package holiday operator as the dream solution, even without presenting it in a creative way. What else can we get? I think we can squeeze a bit more outlets. What if we reverse the polarity switch into, or what if that means starting with a what if question. What if this was a movie? It might be a Western because the new DIY book in landscape, you know, all these new online brokers that we're booking through doing it ourselves. A little bit like the Wild West. It's a bit of a new frontier that could lead us into a polarity. The hero and the villain because the Western is typical good guy, bad guy. So if we've got the travel landscape as the wild west and the competition as the villain, playing fast and loose with people's money. Maybe our offers the hero here to restore order. So then we can position by exploring the villain in the context of a movie. This allows us to position the product in a new unexpected way that we wouldn't have got to otherwise. Maybe it's the new sheriff in town. And our brand rides into town as the new sheriff bringing order to this new frontier, this Wild West. So the sheriff is coming in right in and say No, Okay, we don't need all that. Do it through rules and we'll take care of all. Regardless, fonts dropped line, don't settle for less. In other words, don't sell for us. So what do we do? A Wild West idea? Would we do it in reality, maybe, maybe not. But it's a totally different spin on an idea and certainly think they increase, wouldn't have got two. If we do just set off to think of an idea without using this plug and play method. And you don't lose any points for having a wider variety of ideas at this stage. You only lose points if you present in something that at the end of the day is completely wrong for the brand. But at this point we're just coming up with ideas were just play. And really, that's why it's called polygons, black. 28. Plug & Play: Travel: Swipe Left: Let's look at one more combination for this. Just to show you how much we can get out of this, squeeze out of this by just using different exercises. And we're gonna throw in another exercise not used so far in terms of fresh take on familiar combination three, Let's start with a what if question. What if we showed the offer in a completely new light that was unexpected and funny. Let's run it through emotion hacks. Let's plug into this exercise. Remember the emotion of the offer we've already done this work was freedom. And our key thoughts, we're free to choose liberation, no ties. Again, you can reuse the work you've already done in these exercises in different ways so you don't need to redo it. The emotion of the problem that we had was trapped. And the key thoughts there were trapped, suffocating, no turning back in chains. Now what if we run it through a new exercise? Are fresh, take on familiar? Well, what is our audience use to see? By now we've got an idea for that. They use to seeing holidays, vacations, trips, the usual standard stuff that you see, people on beaches, adventures, romances, relaxing, essentially people on the trip after the booking. Now what are they not used to seeing? Well, our first thought with this was people doing the booking. But then we thought, you do sometimes see that to some extent, especially on these online DIY blocking things. But we thought, well, okay, what do people use when they're doing the booking? A finger? And what do you not see in these ads where you don't see a giant finger? You should have say a giant finger appear in the middle of the art, generally speaking. So what would look totally out of place while a giant finger clicking those swiping through holiday options that would look out of place compared to what you normally see. That's kind of half an idea because that's the problem a lot of the time, the creative process, you might have half an idea. We don't read, it's not really full. It's not really completely, don't know how to complete it into a campaign. Well, we throw a polarity switch in there. This will help us do that because now we can think of it in terms of creative scenarios. We can expand it into an idea. Let's take the polarity switch. The natural fit for this is swipe left and swipe right. Essentially like a dating app where you go in no far-left and yes for right. What might be the swipe left polarities? If you imagine in a dating app, the polarities for you, they depend on what you're looking for. What might be a swipe left for one person might be a swipe right for another because one person is looking for someone tall, person who's shorter, swipe left. One person is looking for someone who's a bit shorter. Okay, swipe, right? What the definite swipe left for most people? Well, we could show indirect flights. We could show single beds rather than double beds. We could show a crowded beach. We could show an old man in tiny Speedo swipe right? Polarities for instance. Well, what about extra leg room, a king size bed, the private hot tub, a view of the mountains. Maybe we can throw a joke in there where it's girls only swipe, right is for girls only book maybe that tells us that it's swipe left on the husband because it's a girls trip. Basically, we're comparing booking holidays to use intended just by exploring the polarities on both sides is swipe left and swipe right. We've got a campaign. Now we can lose the giant finger. We don't need that anymore. We can just have the scenario swiping left and swipe, right. And if they're going on a ski holiday as opposed to a beach holiday, there gunners white rhino left on different things. We can mix up body do. The proposition here is to be as picky with your holiday or vacation packages as people are with dating. The straight-line is really simple, be picky. Whereas it might be seen as a negative in some of the areas of life. You can't be picky enough when it comes to holiday. We're actually celebrating this pickiness celebrates and the left swipe, swipe left. We can bring humor into play all the way through this. The guy in the speed OSE, the husband getting swipe to the left because it's a girls trip, things like that. What we can also show these amazing experiences but in a creative way. And again, it's a fresh take on familiar, it's actually two things you familiar with. But you're bringing the two together, which is the fresh part, you bringing it from the dating world into the travel world. Then the polarity switch allows us to explore the extremes of that. And it gives us ideas without us having to think, we can start to think of these scenarios. No longer is it a half idea? Now it's a campaign because we've got all these possibilities we can think of. All we need to do is think in terms of swipe left and swipe, right. What would somebody on a skiing holiday as white and left and right to what would somebody on a beach holiday, maybe they love exotic trips to beaches. What would they swipe left and right on. Someone who likes a city break? What would they swipe left and right on? And we just need to think about from our audience's point of view, What's their priority? And so therefore, what's the left and right swipe? Again, because we've got that idea. We can boil it down to a strap line, be picky, and that's our ethos and motto, as well as having a campaign. These are just three different combinations and you can see what we got from there we go. Wild west idea. We got idea based on two different types of songs. We got the wheel of misfortune regard the Shop of Horrors, and we ended up with this swipe, left, swipe right, be picky. Dating meets travel idea. All by just combining exercises, plugging them into each other, and playing around with the possibilities. 29. Plug & Play: Software: Whodunnit: Let's look at example two, creating a campaign of ideas. We can just call it accounting software x. Once again, we're picking something that's totally thrilling. We've picked something business to business on purpose just to show you the variation, because a lot of the time you might be selling from one business to another. Let's look at a couple of combinations. How we can get to some interesting and sticker ideas from something that's not the most exciting in the world. And in fact, probably is in an environment. And in fact, I can tell you with some certainty from working on this kind of stuff. And Chris would tell you the same. It's not exactly an area of creative risk-taking. But this is a great opportunity because it enables us to stand out. Because the thing that people often forget, if you're an accountant, being an accountant doesn't lead to suddenly make you less human. People are still human beings and they still have always kind of interests and they have a sense of humor in this town. The other or the basic human nature is all the same thing. It doesn't matter if the consumer buying something or if they're in a, in a business making a business decision, they still get all the same kind of references. We can use that and a lot of cases, what the dying to see is something original and unique and phonic, not the same old thing they say all the time. So not a picture of a calculator, no boring headline. Let's look at how we can produce creative ideas. Not very much time for something like accounted software. And we don't even need to know that much about the accounting software at this point. Let's start with our friend, the polarity switch. Let's pick a polarized scenario first to compare the offer and or problem to the problems that come up in accounting are gonna be issues where you don't know what's going on. You've got some rogue figures. You can understand what it is or maybe it's time-consuming, it's labor-intensive. Maybe the software doesn't always work great. Work off that generic basis. Let's run it through a polarized scenario that's gotten nothing to do with accounting. Detective and murderer. If they're essentially a polar opposite, is always the detective trying to track down the murderer and it's always the murder of trying to evade detection rather watch the old show. Colombo is always an intellectual duel between Colombo and the murderer. And the murderer is almost always thinks that they're intellectually superior because they're a doctor or a psychologist or something. And they think they're so clever, they can't get caught on this column bot he plays up is the version of himself as not be buying in every man and not being too sharp when really sharp as attack and he proves so at the end. That's kind of a polarized convention, if you will. So we can start off with that, but can't necessarily make that leap from accounting software to detect if a murderer that easily. So why don't we run it through a fresh take on familiar to help us take something that's familiar like the accounts in and drop something alien inline detective murder. What are they used to seeing? As we mentioned, they're gonna be used to see in spreadsheets, calculators, financials, offices, people in suits, again, models in suits, pointing at spreadsheets and pieces of paper. They're gonna see compute screens with the software working. Now what are they not used to seeing in the context of the polarity switch? Because you could go to the fresh take on familiar exercise and what are they not used to seeing where it could be anything. But if you have a polarity switch, that kind of reduces the options down. In this case, detective a murderer. So while they're not used to say murder mystery or clue TO or something like that. What would look totally out of place in an accounting scenario? Well, it will be a who done it? Murder Mystery and a finance department. So in other words, a humorous Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes inspired homage to a who done it. You just don't see that when you're in work, that doesn't happen. I used to work in finance departments as well and I could tell you, nothing happens pretty much every other than trying to figure out what's gone wrong at some point in the numbers or the spreadsheet or whatever. By running it through a polarity switch would turn it into a mystery in a detective game. Let's say from that we got a strap line. No more mysteries because obviously, remember we had those questions. If the answer is the offer, What's the question? And if the question is the problem, what's the answer? Well, it's the offer. So the detective in this case is essentially the answer and the murderer is the question. So the detective is the product. The murderer is the problem. It's the murderer is essentially the mystery, which is the issue. This accounting software has taken the mystery out of the whole process endgame, therefore, no more mysteries. Okay, we've got a who done it? Murder mystery in a finance department and a strap line. And you can imagine how that would stand out really on online banners, on TV or on YouTube are pressured, whatever it is in, say an industry magazine, people aren't used to say in that. It's gonna make them stop, it's gonna make them think, it's gonna make them connect the dots and have an emotional reaction to that. Now. Combination to, again, what are they used to seeing fresh take on familiar, the audience is used to seeing spreadsheets, calculators, financials, offices, people in suits, blah, blah, blah. Let's assume we've not done combination 10 and we're just starting from scratch. We've identified what they used to seeing and now we're just plugging something out. They are not used to seeing, we've not got the polarity switch, we're starting from scratch. So while they're not used to seeing, the first thing is sprang to mind was animals in nature. From there we got allegories. What would look totally out of place? Toys. And the total is in the hash story surrounded by the usual B2B advertising that you see for accounts and stuff. It's gonna stand out in mile. And we can tap into the benefits of the hair is faster than the total. He says smarter. And maybe this accounting software as faster and smarter. Remember, when we talked about being able to combine negative and positive and both as a positive and mess around with these polarities. And actually, although we'd call on a fresh take on familiar exercise here, we have a bit of crossover in sub polarity switch where we've brought in this convention of toys and her. But what if we pick a polarized scenario that's different to run it through. So what have we go from total is to have two loved and lowly. Now when we pick this example, we just picked something randomly from those visuals of some suggested juxtapositions. Because we thought, well, what seems to have nothing to do with accounting software? Because you could pick smart and stupid and you okay, that's a natural fit. Well here we're doing the unnatural fear and surprise, surprise. We've got something unexpected out of it. And actually unexpectedly on the money a little bit. If you think about the opposite, so loved, lonely, the two extremes. It's somebody having this great time with all these people around them. Maybe in or maybe they've got an amazing relationship and everything else. And then on the other end of the spectrum, it's the person who either the not loved by anyone or maybe they're in a relationship that's failing or things like that. Maybe counting might demand along and social hours, certainly at certain parts of the year when it's the end of the year. This then becomes a comparison campaigns. Maybe we can therefore, just by thinking of those scenarios, what if we have most of the sliding doors? Example, you know, the movie sliding doors were Gwyneth Paltrow either makes it through the sliding doors onto the underground train or doesn't and nano alive goes into divergent directions. I haven't watched the end of the movie, so I don't know how it ends. That's the basic premise. And it's kind of, we could have that kind of thing here that there's two divergent lives and it's the same person. But one has the software and one doesn't the one with the software. By its very nature, you don't need to know anything about accounting software to know it's going to help you work faster and smarter. That's the whole point. It's going to make life easier and x is going to have a return on investment in terms of time, in terms of also clear enough any issues in your accounting. Person who's got it gets to have a life, to get to have a happy marriage. Maybe that gets our friends and a social life and they get to go home at a reasonable hour, maybe get time to go to the gym as well, and not be stressed and play with the kids. While this person is enjoying life. The same version of them. They don't have the software because they're spending all these hours work in and all these hours banging their head against a brick wall trying to do their work and this than the other, they're living a lonely, joyless existence of unsocial hours a night. The missing meals, they're up before the partner wakes up the home when the partners already asleep, they don't get to go to the parties. They don't even get time to play with the kids and all this kind of stuff. And meanwhile, they're having a worst time of work when there as well. So straightaway, you've got an idea in a straight line could be simple as get your life back. This is not a natural leap for accounting software is not all linear leap. It's a lateral weep. But we've got there by using the linear method of plugging it in through these different set exercises. Get your life back is not what you're not your typical strap line that you would have when their accounting software, this is why it's going to cause disruption. And it's going to have an emotive resonance. Because as we said, accountants are humans too, and businesses are full of human beings. So this is gonna be really, really good. If you're the accounts and working for a business, you're going to see that ongoing. I'm gonna get my business to get this. If you are the business, you're gonna get your life back while still running the business and running it better and smarter. Now, it might not be necessarily the right way to sell it. If you don't work in the finance department and you're making the decisions. But if the decision-maker, if this campaign isn't right for them, then you've still got the Murder Mystery campaign, which major is more on the benefit to the business. No more mysteries. Solve this and that, and therefore you get a better return on investment. But here what you've got is a choice and you've got to strong campaigns that come and attack at a different angle. You can decide later on which use or you can present to the client and see which they prefer and see which they respond to. Or you can test them with different audiences and see what's more likely to move the needle for them. 30. Plug & Play: Fashion: Queen of the Jungle: Now let's look at online fashion and we've picked it for women's online fashion because main Christo know anything about in terms of we're not in the natural audience verse. And some may argue we don't know anything about men's fashion either. But what we're focusing on here where the last one was majoring on a campaign and coming up with a straight line for a campaign. Here we're just looking at the earliest stages of the branding. We'll look at an idea towards the end of it. What really we wanted to see here, what if we need a name? We don't want to just think in ideas in terms of adverts. As creatives, we need to be able to come up with brand names as well. We need to be able to position brands. We need to be able to sell ourselves as creative strategist. This is one of the things that's going to say you apart, you know, only creative, strategic as well. And when you combine the two, that's a rare commodity. When you can do those two things is gonna be so far ahead and so much more valuable to your clients and to your own business. Before I said, it's deceptive because it doesn't seem like a creative exercise. Book, puts us in the audiences mindset and gives us plenty of ammunition to work with. And that's in their shoes. For instance, we've got women's online fashion where she, when we don't know much, we're assuming we get an info dump or maybe an info dribble. We don't even have much to go off. And we need to create a brand that's powerful and we need to do it faster now the gate, so we start with a simple question. Who is our audience? What do they care about in relation to our office? We did a little bit of thinking over who these women might be. For argument's sake. There are 20-something style conscious. Obviously. They spend their time partying, socializing. They may be students or they may be young professionals. They're gonna be career focused at this stage of the life. And a lot of them are gonna be urban, they're gonna be living in towns and cities. The more likely to be renting. They're gonna be sophisticated in terms of the style, are going to want that bit of sophistication. But they're gonna be on a budget. They're gonna be, either be single or they're gonna be in more casual relationships. In the most part, they're gonna be like that rather than getting married in settling down in this stage. All this means basically they're going to be competing with each other for status and attention, just like men do as well. So we've got some information to start off with, but we need to do something with that information. Pay, we're going to go into one of the speed exercises, benefit association. What benefits can we derive that are online fashion brand can provide? Well, being on top, being the most attractive, been on trend and in season ahead of the competition. Standing out, stone, double take, envious glances. Make an impact. Unique. Your personality. Queen of the Jungle. And who's not go. That's saying is that girl. She's so stylish. She's just that she makes an impact when she walks into the room. That's where our audience one, they want to stand out. You also want to fit in with the seasons and the styles and things like that. So the proposition is to get and stay on top. Now we're not going to say that. We're gonna be a bit more subtle than that. Select, pick out our key thoughts to help us come to something better. Let's say we want a brand name out of this. Well, we had Queen of the Jungle. We are double take. We are MVS glances and we add, who's that girl now, if we said Queen of the Jungle, that's a terrible name, split to enrich. But what have we looked at? The essence of Queen of the Jungle? What do we call it fierce? It's a brand with attitude embodying this Queen of the Jungle list. There's been ahead of the competition, but it's not being so obvious. But we can also use Who's that girl as well. So we're just showing it down. That girl, that girl that you see who's got it together with their outfits. And it's nice and short on. It's got a bit snapping, it stands out a little bit. Let's do a bit more than that. Let's, let's see what else we can get out of it. What are we plug it into a problem Association Wherever we looked at the opposite, what problem are they facing? The associations we had were keeping up black behind Fashion, disaster, expensive, out gunned, feel as beautiful, lost in the crowd. Unnoticed. Stand out for the wrong reasons. Competition is fierce. Not fitting right? Can't find the right outfit lacking and adj need an edge to get ahead. The two key themes within those associations would standing out in fitting in. Proposition is simple for the brand. We base our brand around, standout fits in. So let's look at the key thoughts to bring now, how can we turn that into a name again? Because that's the first thing we need. We need a name and an identity before we do anything else. We've already positioned our offer, but we need to bring it to life creatively. Key thoughts we had where we put these out of our associations. Can't find the right outfit, need an edge and unnoticed. These were the things that sounded interesting. And they all revolve around this standing out and fitting in. So think about these as angles of attack. Our proposition is the same, but we have a different angle of attack. We just come at it from a different approach and I'll explain this in the name. So let's say you took noticed as an angle of attack for the proposition is still the same, standout fits in. So what have we call the unmistakable? Well, you've got two things here. You've got standing out which is admissible, and it's countering the problem of going unnoticed, that's gonna be impossible. But also you can have slight take on that angle in terms of it's kind of a miserable deals. You can now also have all these things that are in season. You're not going to miss out on the Mu gonna find the deal that you want. This, things like that. You can play it from two angles, but your main angle is that you stand out. Let's look at another angle of attack on this same proposition. So standout fits in, need an edge. Because that's a bit more interesting than can't find the right outfit. We can call it misrepresented. Now, there's two things here. Misrepresented could be read two ways. It could be your misrepresented in society as people don't quite understand you. It's got a little bit of edge to it. Like there's something unique about you. But the great thing about our online fashion brand is they understand you. You could go the other way. You could say misrepresented as in you are represented. So that's the fit in element. It's doing two things. It's like a double-edged sword, not a double-edged sword. It's a double-whammy. Wrong metaphor. Misrepresented as another idea. So suddenly we've got four names. They're all a bit different and they all come from just plugging these exercises into each other. And all these things that we're showing you here, they've not taken belong. Okay. Yeah. Were experienced at doing it. But we've just been following the exercises. We've not been trying to come up with our own stuff off the top of our own heads. You're essentially seeing our workings out here. 31. Plug & Play: Fashion: Finders Keepers: Here we've got combination two. And again, we're using in their shoes. And now we're bringing in the strength exercises. We're bringing in visual and verbal because those exercises aren't just about training your mind and your brain. They're very useful for, again, forcing some limitations on your subconscious, which allows it to give you an idea about faster. So let's start with proposition association. Let's say the proposition is that this online retailer, they have all the top runs, plus they have smaller labels. It's kind of the best of both worlds really. It's that stand out fit in element that you're gonna be in season and then fashion. Plus you're going to have these unique finds as well. So associations we can make with this proposition. Top brands and unique boutique. All you need fashioned fines, all in one place. All the labels, everything you need, the right fit. Got you covered. She's got it. That's a good place to start, but it's not, we've not got a brand yet. Why don't we plug it into in their shoes so we can run it through the lens of what the audience is looking for and what their challenges are. Who is our audience in relation to the proposition? And what do they struggle with or care about the answer. They love a fashion find. But the can't always find what they need. They want to be your more unique. And they want to stand out from the rest, yet they want to fit their clothes on the trends. So it's these two dichotomies, if you will. We can look at fashion find, we can think of unique clothes and the trends. What can that lead to fashion fine for instances and instantly, we could call it fashion find.com. But equally, we could use the past tense. Fashion found. You found what you're looking for. You've got the word fashion is obvious what it is. So what about another spin on that idea? So well finders keepers, That's what people say you don't need. Finders keepers, losers, sweepers, because you're not just finding the right fit for you. You're not finding all the top brands. You finding these unique labels and designs that people are gonna go wow, where did you find that? Where did you find that amazing thing? And maybe it's a one-of-a-kind. It means you're not gonna be necessarily wearing the same as everybody else. So you're going to stand out. But it's still gonna be good stuff that's in season. Mine all mine is one thought we had and you could reduce it to all nine or just simply mine.com. I'm sure that that.com is taken. But mine all mine might be something a little bit unique. But we're locking our answers want to be more unique. We haven't really covered that much yet. Well, what do we think of when we think of being on miserable and unique? Who's been unforgettable, isn't it? We came up with this name, forget me, not. In some ways that might be the strongest name because it's fresh in, it's put together as a name, but it's familiar. People are familiar with the phrase. If you have the name unforgettable, okay, That's all right. But it's not as easy to own. Forget me not is a far more review commandeer that and say, okay, this common phrase is now means this is a bit more vulnerable in a bit more unique. But let's assume we need to come up with an idea, a basic idea that we can run with them. We can build this brand out now needs to be about the outfits really first and foremost. So we almost need like a light touch with this. In most cases you probably going to find essentially the advert is the clothing and then the price of that. But we can add just a little touch creativity to that, to brand it each time, and to just differentiate a little bit. So let's use visual and verbal. Well, let's take mine all mine and we have to strip it down. We can't really put copy on. So he was all about this. But what we can do is we can choose to use the fashion shot and just put the word mine on it. So by having just the word mine on it and nothing else, that just slight says always mine. This outfits mine. We say mine every time and that brands it as an idea. It makes it that little bit more creative. But what, what we're doing is using the image and the mine implies that you've found that outfit and Common Data and made it yours. Let's do it the other way. Let's do it verbally. Let's assume in the massively unlikely event that we're just gonna, we're not gonna show the clothes. How can we sum up the essence of the brand in words, Let's take, forget me, not the classic convention of it. Where you can just play with that a little bit. So you can say he loves me, he loves me, he loves me, he loves me. Adding an item. Now obviously this is the heterosexual version. It may be, it will be they loved me, they loved me, they loved me. And all the verbal exercise is doing is getting used to think out away from imagery. Then once you've got the word play-based idea, he can feed it back into the visual brand, if you will. So it may be that it could appear on a billboard, it could appear on the website. We started to get a bit of an idea and we're building up this picture of a brand and a position in a little bit unique. 32. Plug & Play: Pen: Commander-in-Chief: Finally, as part of this plug-and-play demonstration, we've got a couple more examples where we want to bring in the world else in life exercise from the end of the power workout, we've yet to cover that. So we're gonna start off. First of all with, I mentioned earlier in the course, The Wolf of Wall Street movie. If you've seen that Jordan Bell for me is being played by Leonardo DiCaprio when he tests the people who are going to work for him in terms of his Salesforce, tests them with this questioning. He says sell me this pen. And then the old kind of struggled to sell him the pen in the best way because it's not an easy, natural, easy thing to sell if you don't know how best to sell. But if you do, obviously, you can sell it. I'm going to start off with a pen here. Let's assume we need brand name to. Who is our audience in relation to the proposition, and what do they care about? Well, in this case, we haven't got a proposition. Let's just focus on who our audiences in relation to the pen. If it's a sterling silver pan, is gonna be quite pricey. It's gonna be IT market. That tells us something about who we are going to be targeting. If we think of who they are, they're gonna be executives to be financially secure. Most probably they might well value the traditional. At the end of the day, anyone who's going to buy a pen or stolen silver variety is gonna value the traditional method. Of course, they're likely to be mature or older simply because now it's the younger generation probably going to be more interested in virtual sign-ups on an iPad or wherever. They might be an executive in a position of power, they might value respect in terms of being respected in the workplace by their clients. Perhaps they're gonna be using the pen to sign important contracts and documents. They're gonna be in a lot of meetings. They're gonna be image conscious to a certain degree because of the care about something like a silver pan. They're going to want that to say something about them. They're gonna be at the suit and tie variety. Probably they're going to have certain degree of ambition in the career. Maybe they've got a corner office or something like that. Maybe there's a business owner or the robust. So let's save from now we pick out that maybe they're in a leadership position there an executive power is important, respect is important. Finer things in life are important and they've got an eye for the traditional. So if we look at those, we explore those key insights. First of all, we can start by getting a brand or a product name. If we say executive, when we say power and we say respect and leadership, well, what about the names? Sovereign, for example, some of those kind of things. Sovereign, it sounds like something that belongs to a sterling silver, like a sovereign nation or a sovereign coin or something like our sovereign ring. So that seems to have the right feel for it. We'll go with sovereign for now. Now, let's plug this in. We got a name, but we need to come up with a campaign to sell this pen. So let's ask ourselves, what else in life does this resemble? Well, you could say it resembles a missile or a submarine or a warhead. The end of the day append doesn't resemble many things, but it does resemble those. That actually leads to an idea of visual ideas. So you could take the panel that even just the tip of the pen. And maybe you could photograph it or position it to look like a missile or wired, as we just said, what does this resemble? Now, you look at the countries that have the most power in the world. It probably the ones who've got the most meself. So there you've got the power and the respect kind of element and the executive power. So maybe you could start off with straight-line instant respect. We can work on that strap line a little bit and hone it. We can make it more active, and we can just make it a bit more powerful. So what about command respect? You get this pen. You command respect naturally. And then it forms part of your identity as this leader is this person in the position of power. And the person who has the respect of his clients now is not just a pen anymore. There's an emotion attached to it. You know, it's not just doing the job of a pen, it does something else for you. It says something about you. Well, let's run that through another question and see what else pops out. Let's ask what else in life might this be used for? Other than signing contracts in your office, other than an even write in lattice or notes to people, rather than just sitting on your desk to look good. The most obvious thing in the context of what we've already explored. What about signing the world's most important documents? That's what pens are used for. Steel. You can have all these iPads and iPhones and everything else. But at the end of the day, somebody is still in the science of them with a pen. It could be the president signing treaties and agreements. If you think about all the biggest things that have happened, like walls piece everything else is with a pen, presumably a goat Pan, not cheap biro. Actually. Whatever you did have a cheap biro or a cheap pan. Well, what would that lead to if you didn't have this quality pen? How about if presidents were trying to sign world-changing treaties with substandard pens and the pens are running out or the breaking or whatever else the problem is. This leads to a propositional line of thinking or creative strategy. Now, where the pen is still your most important tool, It's almost like the pen is mightier than the sword. The pen is mightier than everything else still, because when these people in the position of top power from to make these agreements are signed. These things that make all these things happen in the world that decide all these things. Doing it with a pen. The pen is still mighty. You've heard that phrase. The pen is mightier than the sword. The pan is stolen ITS thing Inspire of all this new technology. But what about another strap line? Write your own history. We could show an alternative spin on the idea where we just show historical footage and people sign in, maybe even signing with last sovereign pan. Maybe we can insert that somehow. But the idea is Panza used throughout history to create history. Well, why don't you create and write your own with this pen? So whether that links into ambition within business, if you're a business person, if you're an executive, that's where my comment or it might work if you're writing your memoir, whatever it is, there you go. That's another example of how we can plug and play. 33. Plug & Play: Boot: Beast Mode: We're going to look at another example just to really hammer this home. Let's look at just purely campaign. Let's assume we've got this urban hiking boots. I can boot nowadays, they're not just about going into the wilderness. There actually, what you would call quote-unquote more fashionable versions that you just wear for everyday life. And you don't just wear these for going out in the hills or whatever you were them out on the street. But let's assume we've got some sort of feature we can turn into a benefit to differentiate these boots a little bit. We're going to have something to work with. Let us assume that the materials are BU is made from and the design is extremely tough. It's ready for any environment, so it's not even a USP. It's just like it's got a feature. Of course it's going to have. What's the benefit of that proposition to this? Well, they make you feel tougher when you wear them. You feel like you can stamp through anything in life. It's not just like, oh, here's a boot that's nice and soft and it's gonna do a job No, it makes you feel to offer as well. Let's start off with a exercise pick at random. What if, what if the boot was a famous person? What's that got to do with anything being tough? Well, if we're talking about being tough, then whatever it was, a world champion Cage Fighter, stray away, you've got an idea, get the boot endorsed by a world-famous cage fighter. Obviously, we need to check it's right for the audience. Is this the right person to promote it through evidence? Then we go ahead. If not, then we maybe we pick somebody else like could be a boxer or could be someone from the movies. There's an action star, could be anything really. That's, that's a good start. We've got an idea, but it's not the most creative thing. Well, let's try the What else in life question. What else in life might have the same traits? The trait is obviously tuff. What's the answer? Well, how about a tank? Rhino, tiger is pretty tough for, in different ways to the Reiner. You won't mess with one. Then there's a bear as well, again, tough in its own way. It's basically you wouldn't mess with any of these things are tanker rhino, a tiger, or a bear. But we've not necessarily got an idea from that. We've got a starting point now we've got, okay, we've got these traits. Who've gotten these animals or this tank? How can we shape that into an idea? Well, let's plug this into fresh take on familiar because we've got some reference point for this now. We've got used to seeing the audience is gonna be used to seeing the BU itself. They're gonna be used to seeing footprints mod terrain, things like that. What do we not used to seeing? Well, we can apply the word else in life here. We can plug this in. So what are they not used to seeing wild and dangerous beasts? This is what they're not used to seeing in the urban everyday environment. And second, are not used to seeing them probably in the ad campaigns either. In terms of the point of sale. Let's say you see an online ad when you search in the web, you're not gonna see this in what else clause and preference as part of that. What would October the other place? Well, I guess clade per print Bu salts, you don't see those. Nobody's making those other. Obviously, it's not necessary for the boot to have that. But maybe we can factor that in. And this sparks visual idea here. So we can plug this into visual verbal ideas where we, how can we tell this story of this really tough boo? And how can we bring in this beast-like element where it's almost like a beast of a boot. Well, let's look at Idea one. Boots leaving muddy boot prints behind. Accept the report. They've got clause as part of that power as well. So you know, it's a big, dangerous animal. So you'd expect to see the boot sole for what you wouldn't expect to see is rather than the boot print as big beastly footprint blueprint with clause. You can replicate this with snow, with cement, with grasped whatever it is to represent the different environments you can go into with these boots. But it's just a fresh day com familiar. It's something out of place. It's creating that intrigue. And it's doing it through a visual idea. And we'll get to strap lines in a minute. Let's look at idea too. We've got some CGI predators on hind legs wearing the boots. So you've got a bear standing up, a tiger standing up, a rhino, stunning go and maybe leaning against the wall casually like and they've got the boots on and maybe they've even got all the clothes on. Who knows? We'll look a bit weird, but it would get your attention and create that gap in understanding that you have to then go, Oh, yeah, okay, I got it. I put it together. You could reverse it. You could have modeled CGI dot. You could photograph a model wearing the boots and then CGI the model. It's like when you see in the movies and stuff. Although CGI effects that you watch an action scene, most of it isn't real, it's that kind of thing, or it's kind of CGI Photoshop over the top. But basically you get a similar effect where you'd get the model and they'd be made to look like a tiger or a bear or a rhino lot really probably looked really cool. But let's actually look at a verbal only expression. We can now look at verbal only in order to generate strap lines, to go with all of these ideas. To even go, even backtrack and go with the boot endorsement with a cage fighter to go with the muddy porphyrin or the CGI predators. So how do we sum these visual ideas, or just in words, well, how about this tough, just got tougher. You can imagine that being applied to the cage fighter, to the blueprint or to the CGI predators. You could say nothing tougher. You could say the beast of boots quite literally. It could be literal with it. Or you could just say this beast mode. When you put on these boots, you're in beast mode. It almost turns you into obese. You're ready for anything. You just tougher just by putting these boots on. You started off with a feature of being well, okay, it's tough and it's ready for the environment based on waterproof blah, blah, blah. But if we turn that into a benefit lab proposition, if you magnify the benefit of how you will feel tougher when you wear them. Then you've got a solid base on which to create. Then you just use these exercises and plug them into one another to then make these creative leaps to get there, if you'd like to the idea and you can do that much, much faster. So it's been a big module. We've covered a lot of things. Let's just have a recap as to what we've covered. When it comes to creative advertising. It's essentially survival of the fittest might sound quite hard and cut throat, but it is true. It's like anything else. You need to be fit to compete and to be fitter than the rest, we may need to work on the strengthen our speed, on our agility and power of our thinking. Certainly from time to time. And maybe even just to get us up to a certain level. And what we can do is add serious power to our output and our ideas using a combination of these simple exercises or without that much information to go off. Or we can tie really complex things together without us having to just pluck something out there. This all means that we can come up with more ideas and much less time and of a far greater variety and standard on all with what seems like Lucifer and probably is. So it's a win-win-win win. And hopefully these exercises will do that for you. And when you combine these with all the other things we cover in the winning idea in terms of propositions and strategy and audience first thinking magnifying benefits and all of a sudden no particular order of course, and arming yourself with the facts and getting in the right creative mindset and elevating your ideas to the next level in all the things we cover, it's very hard to lose.