There you are. Monday morning. 

You have to campaign to create and the benefit/message you need to communicate is (fill in the blank). As you stare down at your blank white notepad, your mind just sort of goes blank. It’s like the well’s run dry. I feel your pain. Having spent the better part of my career in ad agencies, I know how difficult it can be to come up with fresh ideas day in and day out. That’s why I’ve learned to rely on certain brainstorming strategies to help kickstart my thinking.

There you are. Monday morning. 

You have to campaign to create and the benefit/message you need to communicate is (fill in the blank). As you stare down at your blank white notepad, your mind just sort of goes blank. It’s like the well’s run dry. I feel your pain. Having spent the better part of my career in ad agencies, I know how difficult it can be to come up with fresh ideas day in and day out. That’s why I’ve learned to rely on certain brainstorming strategies to help kickstart my thinking.

 
A while back, I shared one that I call WithoutWords. Here’s another. I call it Opposites Attract. 

At its most basic, this strategy means communicating your message/benefit by showing the opposite of what people expect which, in theory, creates enough of a visual disconnect that it attracts attention—and getting your audience to stop and look is more than half the battle. Here’s an example. 

 
There was an ad I remember from years ago for a “vitamin enriched milk for cats” which showed a bunch of dogs that had been treed by a cat instead of the other way around which is what you’d expect. (I found an image of it on the web, but it’s not very crisp.) The dogs are all staring down from their respective branches with an air of humiliation and fear.
 

Nice way to get the benefit across (a stronger, tougher, healthier cat) by showing the opposite of what people expect.

 
 

More recently, I came across this uber smart ad campaign—it also employs a kind of “opposite” or reversal move. The campaign’s goal was to introduce an online job market operated by the Brazilian internet service provider UOL.

 

As you can see, each ad features the visual of a job seeker whose head is highlighted yellow and the very simple but clever line: “There’s a job looking for you.” I love the reversed premise here: that jobs are looking for job seekers.

 

For my money, basing the creative around a visual opposite of the traditional job search model is a powerful way to introduce the job service. I can just imagine a creative team sitting around and someone throwing out the thought: “What if we flip it around, and say jobs are looking for people instead of people looking for jobs.” That line of thinking gets you to the visual idea of highlighting job seekers the way they would typically highlight a job in say, the paper. And then there’s that last, perfect touch where the word “you” in the headline is highlighted.
 
Lastly, while everyone gets the idea of highlighting content of importance in printed material, I think these ads will resonate a little more with those of us “seasoned” enough to remember looking for jobs the old-fashioned way, pouring over the (printed!) Classifieds of your local paper with a fluorescent yellow Highlighter, versus the generations of job seekers out there who have probably only ever looked for work online.
 
So, what kind of brainstorming tactics and techniques have you found successful?
 

 

Contact me to learn more about how MarketMatch uses proven creative strategies to bring great work to life for credit unions and community banks across the country.

 

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