Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Špela Pregl, Brand Leader, MSL Slovenia
One of the most interesting workshops held during this year’s Golden Drum festival of creativity in Ljubljana was the Dynamic Creativity – a workshop designed to spark your creative spirit and ensure a flood of awesome ideas.
This workshop for young creative teams under the age of 30, combines games, exercises and work sessions, teaching simple techniques and creating the playful atmosphere necessary for creative flow.
Wanting to bring this fun and challenging practice closer to you, we decided to speak with the workshop’s authors John Pallant, Director of Unstoppability, Brouhaha UK, and Joe Howard, Chief Marketing Officer at Windfire.
Media Marketing: What do you see as the biggest challenge or limitation to creativity at the level of the industry, and also for an individual?
John Pallant: As always, it feels like we’re going to a time when we have to work harder and do more with fewer people. And as I said when I was asked for a quote for the festival, I think it’s the perfect time for what we do to be brought to bear, because we’re all about working faster, but not working faster with diminishing quality, but working faster for the fun of working faster. So what we do is a lot of fun. As hard as it is, and as challenging as it can be, it is more fun than the way I used to work when I was a young creative, in a creative team.
It feels like now is the time to work harder, but have more fun doing it as well. I think that’s possible. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Media Marketing: From a perspective of an individual, what are the limitations? What keeps people back from being creative?
John Pallant: One of the biggest problems is that there are too many tools available, and too many media available. That’s a lot of noise. Back in the days when we all worked in a very limited range of formats, it was easy to spot creativity. It was relatively easy to do it. And now all of the clutter and the noise distracts people and takes them away from what they’re really supposed to be doing. And what they’re supposed to be doing is creating meaning, doing things that mean something. And the more tools we have, the more technology we have, the less meaning we have. So people think that using the latest technology is creative. It’s not. It’s what you do with it that’s creative. And it doesn’t need to be the latest technology. That’s the big challenge – people keeping their eye on what they really need to be doing, thinking creatively and create meaning for people, instead of just playing with tools.
Media Marketing: How do you overcome these challenges with your workshops? How do you leverage creativity in your workshops?
John Pallant: This is a workshop that we’ve been running for over ten years, when I was at Saatchi we developed it together. At a certain point I was given a regional role across Europe, Middle East and Africa, and I wanted to create some kind of workshop for the teams that would raise the energy and confidence for those with lack of ambition in some of the markets, because previously they haven’t been very connected in any way. I used to work with Joe. Joe was a planner at Saatchi, and AMV BBDO, and I used to work with Joe on VISA Europe. I discovered that Joe had gone off to study improvisation all over the world, and at the same time I discovered it through various books and started to take an interest. I realized that improvisers are the most dynamic creatives out there. They have to deliver ideas now, because the audience won’t wait. I talked to Joe about it and we created this kind of a training workshop using lots of drama school type of games and exercises to show the teams how to be more spontaneous, and how to stop judging ideas as they come up, whether they had been done before, whether their relevant… Just to have a lots and lots of ideas, and to let the editing and judging of those ideas to come later. And that enables and facilitates a much faster way of working.
I remember when I was a junior, working for a very good agency, and for a very good creative director who was very supportive. But I remember sitting there and it’s a very stressful place to be. Going in every day and trying to have a great idea, and sometimes going home having not had one and feeling quite bad about it. And sometimes that would go on for days. Obviously I found a way of getting through that, but it was quite stressful. This is a much more fun way to work. And if you work this way, what you find is that the good ideas almost pop up without effort, because you’re having so many ideas it’s almost like you are releasing something that is deep inside. And often – quite often- it surprises you yourself.
Joe has done a lot of improvisation, and I think that’s what it must be like on the stage. When you come off of it you just go “How did we think of that?” It’s as entertaining for you as it is for the audience I would imagine.
Joe Howard: The most important thing is playfulness. Creativity needs to be playful. If it’s not playful and fun then you’re doing it wrong. There’s fun and games for the sake of fun and games, and there’s fun and games with a creative purpose. Usually we think “If it’s worth doing, it can’t be fun”. We have this puritan idea that anything worthwhile must be difficult, you have to sweat, and it’s got to be an effort. With creativity, it’s a stupid way to approach it. Of course you can be creative if you’re making an effort and taking it seriously, it just takes a lot longer, and it’s a lot harder. If you want to do it fast and well, you have to get into a playful state of mind, which means getting out of your own way. Creative people get in their own way. Their own expectations of what they think they should be doing.
You stare at a blank sheet of paper, you’ve got nothing, and suddenly you think you’re a terrible person. It’s a negotiation inside your mind that need to take place. And the kind of techniques that we use are about doing that negotiation for you. So you throw yourself into the experience and you find you’re being incredibly playful and creative and productive. And you can recreate that mindset anytime you want to.
Media Marketing: What are some success stories out of this workshop?
John Pallant: There are two ways we’ve used this at Saatchi. One is the training workshops, the other is to curate with the more senior teams a dynamic ideation workshop. At Saatchi we called it The Tribe. It was a three day workshop and it had a very specific structure. It was designed to deliver results quickly. We used this on all the big regional projects and pitches. One of the very first ones we did was a pitch for Novartis which we run subsequently. It recently merged with GSK. That is now one of Saatchi’s biggest global clients.
That is probably the biggest business success that we had as a result of this way of working. Other than that, we’ve run a lots of pitches and won a few awards along the way. It’s just amazing.
As creative people say – and I would have said this before – “We need time. We are creative. We need time to get it right, we need time to have lots of ideas.” That’s not true. I heard a quote once: “Greatness happens when you’ve got a plan, but not quite enough time”. That time pressure somehow motivates you to dig deeper. For me, personally, in the regional role running these ideation workshops, it was very successful. I’m sure other networks may have similar things, but we have a particular way of doing it. I keep reading how clients are dissatisfied with how big agencies are slow, taking a long time, and I think this is one of the ways in which we could all benefit, including the clients.
Joe Howard: They just don’t know they need it, because they don’t know it’s available. When they see it, they understand that they need it. Before then they’re kind of groping around in the dark, wondering what’s going on. There’s also another way of measuring success which is about the impact that it has on the people who do it. And alongside the tangible success stories about pitches won and awards won, there’s also the moment when somebody says, for example one guy said “this has changed my relationship with my son.” That was a guy who came to one of our sessions, and he was on very heavy anti-depressant medication, and he dropped his medication after it.
It can have quite transformational effects. And the kind of mindset the people get into, the techniques that they use, they have with them for life. They don’t need to be in the room with us to keep it going.
Media Marketing: But the workshop is not appropriate just for creatives in the agency, but also for accounts, PR people…?
John Pallant: It can be very scary for creatives, because they see the CEO’s PA, they see a traffic manager, writing out alongside them. And they’re like “Damn, that’s a really good ad. How did you do that?” We did one of those workshops for the whole agency in Hungary – everybody, in every department, and every level. And the CEO was in the session with an IT guy, and she obviously only knew him as the IT, but she was amazed by his ideas. He was like a completely new person. A reinvented IT man.
You only get real creative momentum when everybody is aligned with the creative agenda, and there should be creativity in everything we do. Creativity should be included in maintaining the relationship with the client, in creating a climate where great ideas are valued and appreciated. There should be creativity in developing a brief. And certainly in selling the work.
The more creative everybody is, the better the organization is. We’ve done a lot of these workshops with everybody in the agency, and from time to time Joe also does a lot of work with clients on the client side. The more the client team and the agency team are aligned towards the same goals and objectives, the more likely they are to get somewhere interesting. It should make life more fun for everybody, including clients.
Media Marketing: So the workshop is also for the clients. How do you work with clients on this?
John Pallant: Exactly the same way as we do with agencies. We don’t treat them as being different. We treat them as same. The only challenge is getting them all in the same room. But once they’re in the room, the methodology is no different. Basically everybody who can say NO at any stage of the process should be involved, and should be thinking in this playful way, because otherwise they start to assess work on the wrong basis. Clients think they are selling a product. We all understand instinctively in advertising that the first thing we do is entertaining. And we’re not dealing with the consumer, but with the audience. They’re different from the consumer. So, selling the product to consumers is the client’s problem, entertaining the audience is ours. And if they don’t let us do our job, they won’t do theirs very well, so we have to get them into that mindset.
Media Marketing: What would you say to your younger self now with all the knowledge that you’ve gained so far?
John Pallant: Just loosen up I guess. Stop giving yourself a hard time, and realize that to get to great ideas you don’t just sit there and have a great idea. There are stepping stones that you need to create, and you might not even recognize these stepping stones as ideas. You may be ashamed of them. You may think they’re OK… but we need to create these stepping stones, and that is the best way to work.
Honestly, I achieved quite a lot as a young creative, but I would have been awesome if I had known this.
Joe Howard: I would tell myself the definition of a good idea is not an idea that I had. The definition of a good idea is an idea that other people like. If I had known that earlier in my career I would have been a lot happier. Because the amount of creativity and effort that I put into selling ideas that I had, that people didn’t like, if I had put that effort into having new ideas I would’ve had a lot more ideas. So I worked harder than I needed to, for less results than I could have gotten.