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How To Avoid Falling Victim To Sameness And Stale Marketing

By May 5, 2016March 10th, 2017News

Green Pears

It’s likely that Mr. Tom Nowak of BestBuy, is presenting some invigorating ideas for stimulating creativity among in-house teams at the AdAge Brand Summit, Chicago, May 5, 2016. He certainly justified in reinforcing the importance of  “staying true to brand values.” It’s tricky for even highly familiar teams to meet that standard. But there can be a price to be paid in doing so: routinized thinking. Or as described in the agenda, “Sameness and Stale Marketing.” These are real issues. With some traditional and some not so traditional ways to address them.

It does makes sense for agencies (in-house or independent) to staff a creative department. Not just because that’s “the way we’ve always done it;” but because there’s a learning curve on a client’s business. Full-time creative teams earn the advantage of learning the brand personality, corporate mandatories and preferences, as well as audience mindsets and behaviors and category issues. That’s what it means to “stay true.”

However there are risks — when staying true also puts teams in a rut:

  1. One risk is that there is always the challenge to stay fresh, to side-step routine thinking. There is a tendency to narrow the boundaries or rehash old territory when the brand calendar cycles around to the same promotion or media strategy year after year.
  2. A second is that the left-field thinking that often comes from “newbies” — even while going out of brand bounds — can indeed lead to unexpected and positive outcomes.
  3. A third might just be that many agencies, especially in the current employment climate, simply tend to overload their creative staff; too many late nights, too many weekends — just when a new business pitch shows up and all hands are needed on deck.

The comfort-zone answer in these cases tends to be to bring in freelancers. Most CDs have a few go-to free agents he or she counts on to step in and save the day. But what if those folks are booked? What if they don’t have experience in the category or the channel required for this RFP? What if what you really need is a volume of thinking, more than one or two freelancers can generate?

There is an entirely novel option:

  • What if the creative department leadership could call on a vetted network of disciplined creative talent who can step in almost instantly with background in a channel or experience in a category? You’d have a ready pool of specialists to bridge the gap as needed.
  • What if you could call on experience in digital? Direct mail? Campaign concepts? You’d have an abundance of thinking that by its nature pushes the boundaries, explores new avenues of thought, reveals new ways of unraveling old problems.
  • What if the ECD could tap a dynamic network of creatives capable of honoring brand guidelines, respecting a brief. YOu’d have a resource that could turn around original ideas in short order?
  • What if you could engage this creative talent confidentially? You’d have an expansive pool of thinking without going public with your activity; ideal for pitches and campaign development.

This is not about user-generated content or ideas (ala Doritos Crash The SuperBowl). This is not about multitudes of hand-raisers who’ll do almost anything once — for $5. This is about a connected, distributed, vetted network of NDA’d creative experience. At your fingertips. It’s a way to bolster your creative resources and generate original ideas not just on demand, but on brand. More conveniently than wrangling freelancers. More affordably than one might think.

It’s not crowdsourcing. It’s ideasourcing. It’s about as far as agencies can get from stilted, stale sameness.

Want to know about the varieties of creative crowdsourcing and how Boom Ideanet is different? Find out more when you download our free eBook here: http://boomideanet.com/transformation/

No obligation! And no drip email follow-up campaigns. (Another novelty of Boom.)