There’s a good chance you’ve been on the receiving end of a creative presentation. Where someone shows you the ideas they’ve come up with.
Oh, it’s exciting. Someone with a large collection of felt-tips has spent the past few weeks beavering away in secret, tongue stuck out the side of their mouth as they furiously scribble down the genius in their head.
Then they’re in the spray booth, mounting all the concepts onto board to make them look dead posh and proper.
They turn up at your office with the concepts in a giant black portfolio bag that’s annoyed everyone on the Tube, but they refuse to show you what’s inside until they’ve spent at least half an hour building it up to a fevered crescendo.
Then, when you can bear it no longer – ta da! – they lift out the first board (with its back to you) and turn it round with a dramatic flourish.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how creative types present their ideas.
I should know, I’ve been one of those people for many years. I was even thinking of buying my own dry ice machine, to make the ‘reveal’ even more theatrical.
But there’s a problem.
It might make for an entertaining 90 minutes, but it’s not necessarily the best way to develop concepts.
So at Tangible, we’ve developed an alternative method which our clients can choose if they wish. We call it Pro Creation.
More choice, more input, more polish
It’s a really simple idea. Instead of working up three ideas fully and presenting them as a big surprise to our client, we show four ideas at an earlier stage, with a description of how each could develop.
That way, the client gets to see more ideas, and can give us their input. They choose the two concepts they want to see developed, and we go away and work those up fully and in accordance with their input, before re-presenting them.
For example
Say we’re creating a mini campaign – email, mailing and microsite.
We’d show four ‘adcepts’ with a lead headline and image, plus a written rationale for each and a description of how the idea would track through each element.
We’d discuss them with the client, who’d give us their input to help shape the one or two concepts they chose to see fully developed.
It’s a simple little innovation. And it costs no more than the traditional way of creating concepts.
But it means we spend less time working on ideas that aren’t right, and more on really polishing the strongest concepts to create the most effective, exciting work.
Several of our charity clients are using Pro Creation with us and they already prefer it to the old-fashioned method.
Still might get that dry ice machine, mind.
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