An Enigma In My Toast

My job does require me to be creative on a fairly regular basis. Over the years I’ll developed my own brainstorming style. A little mental word play. Some doodling. And then we can kick around ideas as a group.

When I’m moving at a hectic pace, I forget that taking this time to just let my mind wander, attempt to make nonsense of the world around me and connect ideas that appear to have no apparent relationship can be a great stress reliever and beneficial inside and outside of the office, even if I’m not conceptualizing ideas for a specific project.

I had lunch with some friends the other day. We chatted amicably and we took some mental vacation time. In that brief hour, we launched an entire fictitious company (Crash Marketing?), complete with fantasy clients and a slew of zany campaigns. Our goal was to literally “break through the clutter.”  This group of friends decided it made sense to have a window glass replacement company as a client. They were seeking “aggressive” marketing tactics and so we conceptualized a flyer that said “Broken Window? Call XYZ Co.”  Distribution channels easily followed.  We’d wrap the flyer around a brick and toss it through the windows of nearby businesses. . . After all, if you have a broken window (and you do now), you need to know who to call to have it fixed, right?. Well, ok.  It seemed kind of funny at the time. . .

We were a little slap happy and took it to the extreme.  The point of all of this though-what the take home message for us was- is that public relations, advertising or digital media campaign messages have to be timely and relevant to audiences.

If I pitch a reporter in Detroit about a new snow shovel design in July, it has no relevance to their audience AT THAT TIME. People aren’t thinking snow shovels in a heatwave even though the shovel manufacturer may want to start selling some at that time. If the same city has just been hit with three feet of snow, BINGO, we might have something there.

People don’t generally keep flyers for glass repair shops kicking around. Why would they? They don’t have a broken window. Unfortunately, tossing the brick through the window wouldn’t exactly endear the repair company to the business with the broken glass, but again, good lesson reminder came from our nonsense. We all had a good laugh and could feel our creative juices flowing to take to the next real project.