Ron Caughlin – Innovative Marketer and Master Storyteller
As a continuation of my “Storytelling” series, last week we explored how to get started creating a story that gets noticed with the good old fashion Creative Brief. This tried and true technique allows you to focus your energy and categorize your creative thoughts on a story. Remember, we need to understand the audience and how to engage them to get noticed.
So what’s next? How do I take that brief and conceive story ideas?
Next you organize a “creative squad” following the time tested BBDO’s Alex Osborne technique – “brainstorming” . Convince or bribe a few of your colleagues to give you a half hour to assist with free flowing thoughts.
As Osborne stated in his book “Your Creative Power” – “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas. When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.”
I suggest you use this technique next and find a quiet place with lots of room with free wall space. Either use flip board paper stuck on the wall or just use sticky paper and create themes inspired from your well crafted brief. Once the theme’s are created, have your “squad” expand on the theme’s with anything that comes to mind, using the sticky sheets to write his/her idea and fill up the free space. You will now have a flow of different idea’s and directions to go off of and you can either decide on your own or use your creative “squad” to help pick the best idea’s and further expand the main story ideas.
After this is complete, you are now ready and armed with ideas and thought’s that can be used in crafting your story. Remember, keep it simple, focussed and find the nugget that will get you noticed. Also a strong facilitator is needed to make the idea’s come out stronger. As Berkun puts it, “Doing a ‘brainstorm’ run by an idiot, or a smart person who has no skill at it, will disappoint. This is not a scientific evaluation of a method. Its like saying ‘brain surgery is a sham, it doesn’t work’, based not on using trained surgeons, but instead undergraduates who were placed behind the operating table for the first time.”
In my next blog I will look at other techniques and tools to make your story come alive and again make the audience really interested in you.
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