Ideas should have a ‘Best Before’ date

Our monthly blogger Phil Rumbol, former marketing director of Cadbury’s and now founding partner of 101 – a free range creative company, discusses idea development.

Time is the enemy of ideas. This is well understood isn’t it? Give the agency too little time to respond to a brief and it’s hard for them to properly explore. But what’s less well understood is that too much time can actually kill an idea. It’s surprising how often there’s a mad rush to get to ‘the idea’, but then what follows is a protracted period of tweaking to get to final execution. This can happen for entirely understandable reasons. There’s often a desire amongst clients to be absolutely certain (to want to ‘see the ad before the ad is made’), rather than accepting that there’s always a leap of faith required to get great work. And in most organisations, this is compounded by the need to align stakeholders behind a more specific vision of the idea. Often against a backdrop of stakeholders only conditionally buying in to the idea in the first place. In which case, in an attempt to unite many different opinions, the final execution gets used as a kind of ‘creative United Nations.’

So I think it’s helpful to think of an idea like an Apple (the fruit one!) If you spend too long trying to polish it, it loses its freshness. If it spends too long being passed around the different stakeholder groups it loses its sheen and potentially gets bruised. Or, even worse, the apple gets sliced. “Can we take the skin off?” “Can we cut it into smaller pieces?” “Can we simplify and reduce it down?” And before you know it, you’re left with just the core of the apple (in other words, just the core logic of the idea, stripped of any juicy bits.)

I believe good client input is critical to the development of powerful ideas. But there’s a difference between good and bad input.

To get great work through, the primary client owner of the idea has to provide ‘fighter cover’, and play a key role in filtering and editing feedback. And, as difficult as it is, this will involve recognising that some feedback should probably never make its way to the agency. This is not to say agencies are always right, or that they always produce the right apple for the right client, but 2 years of agency side experience suggests to me that procrastination can have nothing but a corrosive effect on the work. I think better work will result if there’s a ‘use it or lose it’ attitude to promising ideas. The trick is to move it forward, to keep it fresh and free of too much manhandling or slicing and dicing. And harder still, to recognise when an idea loses its freshness and should be thrown away rather than progressed as a pale imitation of the original idea.

Read more from Phil Rumbol in our Clubhouse.