What is an idea?
An idea is the answer to the question "what is this about?" In agency work it is the core thought a piece of work expresses: the insight about the audience, the angle on the product, the story that makes a brand feel like a point of view. A thirty-second film, a season of social, a mascot reveal and a rebrand each start as one sentence somebody said in a room, and everything made afterwards is an attempt to keep faith with that sentence.
It is different from an execution. "A film shot in one take" is an execution. "This city has been waiting for a team it can love again" is an idea, and it can be executed a hundred ways.
Why it matters
Why an idea matters
Without one, a campaign is a list of assets. The idea is what makes the pieces belong together, what gives the editor a reason to cut one way and not another, what tells the designer which type is right. It is also what people remember. Nobody recalls a media plan; they recall the thought, the joke, the image that carried it.
Ideas are also the cheapest leverage in the business. The cost of a better idea is a few more days of thinking; the cost of a worse one is every dollar of production and media spent on it.
In practice
How an idea works in practice
- 01
It starts with a brief that is honest about the problem. Strategy sharpens the problem into an insight, and creative teams generate many ideas against it, fast and without judgment at first. The creative director sorts them, kills the clever ones that do not do the job and chooses the one with the most life in it. That idea is written down in a sentence, tested against the brief and presented as a world the client can see.
- 02
Then it has to survive production. Every decision, from casting to color to the music, is checked against the idea, and the people who had it stay close to the making so it reaches the screen intact.
At RIOT
Ideas at RIOT
When the Washington Commanders introduced the Major Tuddy mascot, the idea was that a reveal is a story, not an announcement. So we made the reveal and the "Making the Mascot" documentary behind it, turning a moment into a piece a fan base could spend time with. The idea came first; the format followed it.
Watch out
What people get wrong about ideas
Mistaking a format for an idea. "Let's do a docuseries" is a shape; the idea is what the series is about. The second mistake is voting on ideas in large groups, which produces the one nobody objected to rather than the one somebody loved. The third is separating the idea from the making, so the people who understood it are not in the room when it is being built.
A fourth mistake is falling for the first one. The first idea in a session is usually the one everybody else in the category also had, because it is the obvious response to the brief. The job is to keep going past it.
