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Thoughts on VCCP London for strategy?
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I found that too early on, still do sometimes. A creative friend of mine once told me that stories are all about how you tell them. Ever meet someone who can tell amazing stories, and then you try to tell the same story and it lands like a lead balloon? That. So he suggested that if I land on a bland strategy, try to find the weirdest way to tell it. Because even a strategy's uniqueness can hinge on how you eventually phrase it. Think of it as Expedia's 'Travel Yourself Interesting' coming out of the insight that Millennials prefer experiences over things. The world's blandest insight expressed in a way that's actually really interesting. Because while we all aim for really interesting and exciting strategies, sometimes they just aren't. But the way we tell them can always be. And doing that will also help reveal the true insight behind it.
Depends what the need is for. Internal briefing or client selling. Different animals. For client selling-
Bullet point the basic idea inception style, single sentences:
Bottom line challenge
Most significant barrier
How to overcome, or how this idea overcomes the barrier to meet the challenge + audience insight
If case study example exists, Super to-the-point outcome: ROI or KPI measure
Yes, storytelling is important, it’s the crux of everything, but we live in different worlds on the creative agency side vs the client side. It’s the Art major talking philosophy to the Science club; our job is to filter and make it relevant to people who lack the creative capacity to see past excel sheets. With time and exposition you can sell the storytelling side; but in a very fast way, you want to just explain the what/why/how with tangible example of outcomes
Everyone should read up on personality/information types like DISC profiles also. We create different behavioral profiles for our audience segments, but don’t think the same way about selling ideas to clients? There’s no one size fits all. Figure out what makes the person your talking to tick, and what’s their motivation, then Taylor what you highlight for that person. Just like we do with the market
Pick a random word, and challenge yourself to create a strategy with that word in it….. here’s a challenge think of the last brief you wrote, rewrite the strategy using the word distinguished
Honestly I think it’s just about pushing from your first thought. Also having an interesting media diet that spans well outside of advertising. Read interesting books, etc
Your strategies don’t have to be original. Stop trying to be clever and go back to simple and effective. The rest will follow and those that try to over intellectualise will slowly realise that they only person that cares is them Liz
One thing I like to do is get gen Ai to come up with propositions alongside your own efforts. Knock out ones that Gen AI comes up with. What you're left with has a bit more creative space in it