Where do you find good ideas? Seth Godin posed this question in a recent blog post. Freelance writer Geeta Dayal offers tips for fellow creative types on how to stay fresh.
The idea of ideas has been on my mind a lot lately. All agencies are faced with idea generation on a daily, if not minute-by-minute, basis. From pitching journalists, to coming up with relevant tweets, to creating “big ideas” for marketing and PR campaigns, to writing proposals from scratch, everyone on our team pulls rabbits out of hats daily.
Yesterday, we were asked to revise a proposal for an existing client and instead came up with three new concepts that hadn’t even crossed our mind previously. Good ones! We felt smug, if a bit confused as to where the inspiration came from. “If we met tomorrow, we’d probably come up with three more,” I noted. And I really meant it.
Agency folks are a self-selected group of people who really like coming up with ideas. And that’s why I’ve always been unafraid to share our dreams, schemes, half- and whole-baked concepts with clients. Yes, this occasionally means that your brilliant program will be executed in-house, and that stings. But if you are confident in your ability to find something new around the next corner, you aren’t too concerned.
But what happens when the seemingly perpetual faucet of ideas runs dry? Not only do you lose your ideas source — bad enough — but, if you buy into the whole framework above, it can even put your agency in danger. Maybe you should start hoarding your ideas? Maybe you should start calling down the media list instead of tailoring individual pitches to each reporter? Maybe you should just do a “find and replace” in the proposal instead of finding specific examples relevant to the prospect?
As someone who prides myself on being one of these idea people, I have lately felt as though I am turning to the same old sources for material and having the same old thoughts around them. Even my recent Twitter refresh didn’t seem to help. I joked to the team that, instead of reading up on the news or finding inspiration online, sometimes I feel like I’m just pressing buttons to get pellets. Refresh. Refresh. And then I remembered this New York Times article from last year that is still seared into my brain:
Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.
From Seth’s blog post:
Do you often find ideas that change everything in a windowless conference room, with bottled water on the side table and a circle of critics and skeptics wearing suits looking at you as the clock ticks down to the 60 minutes allocated for this meeting?
If not, then why do you keep looking for them there?
From Geeta’s:
Travel. Traveling opens up your brain. If you live in NYC all the time, and you don’t leave, you’re running head to head with the most competitive group of journalists in the most competitive market on the planet. The media business is centered there; it’s the belly of the beast. It’s likely that a lot of you are coming up with the same pitches, and pitching them to the same editors. This makes everything harder for everyone.
If you feel like you are losing your elastic rat cunning and are falling into the press-button-get-pellets trap, you’re not alone. To the above advice, I would add:
- Surround yourself with awesome people. Create a work environment where everyone is expected to — and genuinely enjoys — creative thinking. You don’t want to be The Idea Guy at your office. What happens if you’re having a bad day? I know that if I’m feeling a little off, I can turn to anyone on my team for a burst of inspiration.
- Admit defeat. When you’re done, you’re done. Go home. Take a day off. If there’s anything worse than feeling like a pellet-seeking rat, it’s working alongside a pellet-seeking rat.
- Know your work style. Sometimes I bow out of brainstorming sessions because I know that some of my best ideas happen when I let my fingers do the talking, i.e., just start typing.
- Be patient. With yourself. With your team. And with your expectations. Maybe you’re not procrastinating — maybe you’re just not ready yet. Don’t force it.
We agency folks on the PR and marketing side should make an effort to treat ourselves like the “creatives” we are. It’s easy to get caught up in client relations, account management, and executing on all of the ideas we’ve generated. But we can’t take our ideas, or the environment it takes to cultivate them, for granted.
Image above via the University of North Florida Animal Lab
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