Creative Juice 🧃
To facilitate more creative collaboration and brainstorming within the agency, I created and launched a series of workshops for our content, design and video teams called the Creative Co-Op.
This recurring workshop provides our teams the time and space to come together and do what they do best: think big, strategize and experiment—without the constraints of billable hours, client needs, deadlines or style guides.
Below are a few examples of past workshops that left creatives energized, inspired and motivated to try something new at work.
CLIENT
Content Strategy, Design and Video Teams
ROLE
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Concept Planner and Organizer
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Meeting Facilitator
AGENCY
TriMark Digital
DATE
August 2021-Current
PLATFORMS
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In-person & virtual meetings
Christmas in July
In an effort to avoid the usual crunch of holiday campaign planning, our first Co-Op was all about pitching creative campaigns that drove sales, sign-ups or brand awareness for our clients.
Creatives on the Content Strategy team were split into groups, and each group was assigned a client that they had never worked on before. The resulting ideas were fresh, fun and often a completely new concept for the client.
Oh, and we decorated cookies, too.
Bad Ideas Rodeo
They say there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Despite this platitude, creatives often find themselves censoring their ideas in a brainstorm setting for fear of sounding silly or wrong. But it's usually those ideas—the ones that would never work or get the client's sign-off—that inspire the winning concept in the end.
For this exercise, each team was given a client and a goal, either brand awareness or lead generation. They had 45 minutes to think of as many terrible, off-brand and absurd campaign ideas that would never work or be appropriate for client review.
When we reconvened to share our ridiculous ideas, there were plenty of laughs, but also more than a few lightbulb moments for fresh campaigns and concepts that may not be such a terrible idea after all.