April 08, 2020
The creative process is never set in stone.
It can go on until the very last second before a campaign launches. The right creative agency will also provide ideas throughout the campaign when it’s been activated, and will even sit and come up with some brief-worthy ideas after the campaign has finished.
It simply isn’t the case that a continual creative approach ignores the foundations of a client’s brief. If anything, it enhances a brief in ways the client may not have ever thought possible, and builds on the expectations agreed from day one.
Having creative agility doesn’t mean that your wishes, targets and overall brief go out the window. Rather, reversing the brief includes extensive research on what your competition is doing, how they’re targeting the market, what your audience is digesting content-wise, and many other factors.
Creative agility can help when your back’s against the wall
An agency’s creative agility makes sure that you’re not saying the same things as other brands, and are able to make a real impact on your market with fresh ideas and new approaches that can’t be found anywhere else.
Creative agility is also crucial in times of crisis. The recent Coronavirus pandemic is an example of that; the vast majority of businesses across the world have had to think of new approaches to the way they work to keep in their audiences’ consciousness.
Covid-19 has helped a vast amount of brands take a step back and think about what more they could be doing digitally, to get their message across during lockdown and expand their ecommerce offerings.
Which can be a good thing with the right approach. Creative agility is about helping businesses grow with fresh ideas to generate new business when you feel you’re plateauing or want to tap into new audiences. Now is the perfect time to do that.
How creative agility helps brands in the long-term
We want to underline that reversing a brief may not be for everyone. If you think your brief can’t be topped, that’s good enough for us! We will always respond to the client’s outlined brief and meet expectations from day one, whether they want a reverse approach or not.
It’s great that, in our experience, a lot of brands like the idea of reversing the brief because it opens them to acquisition avenues they simply would never have contemplated.
That originality and unique approach from reversing a brief, though, can often be better for the budget and produce results in more efficient ways than their usual ways of working.
A creative agency isn’t just about throwing ideas at the wall until one sticks. They’ll also bring strong relationships with manufacturers, printers, freelance professionals across numerous sectors, industry knowledge and more to the table to ensure your project hits new heights.
Sometimes the cost tag of a creative suggestion may be a little higher than expected, but that cost on producing something unique and exciting could come back to the brand tenfold in way of word of mouth, social commentary, column inches and many other long-term benefits.
One area where this can have a real impact is in the experiential space, providing new, exciting and interactive displays that boost footfall, improve acquisitions and help people become brand advocates.
Reversing the brief in action
Two examples of this include our work on the WATCH_DOGS 2 collector’s edition and the experiential launch event Mortal Kombat 11.
Our brief for the WATCH_DOGS 2 collector’s edition was to design the contents for the box, which eventually featured incredibly cool custom items.
We didn’t want to stop there, though, and decided to go the extra mile for our client by creating a box for the edition that would incorporate unique design techniques and draw further attention to the game’s amazing art direction.
We were given the opportunity to reverse the brief, and quite literally turned the creative inside-out. We wanted to animate the box in a way that conveyed the stylised, digital world found within Ubisoft’s hackathon.
We eventually created a kinegram/barrier grid-styled sleeve for the collector’s edition that would produce an ‘animated’ effect of the visuals on the cover when removed. Not only did we show our creative muscles and stay within budget, but we were also proud to win a Clio packaging award for our efforts.
This, in essence, is what reversing a brief is really all about. The idea we came up with for the box and agreed final concept is something that the client couldn’t have provided us brief-wise.
The Mortal Kombat 11 Reveal event at KOKO, London, was one where we were able to come up with numerous creative ideas as part of the activation, not just to make the event fun on the night but to make sure that its creative impact could be felt long afterward.
To help that happen we constructed and hosted a Celebrity Vs. Influencer gaming tournament, on-stage on the night, featuring Creed 2’s Florian Munteanu and Chris Eubank Jr. against celebrities including Mesut Ozil and Teddy Riner.
The event was broadcast to an audience of 2 million people which generated a huge ripple of social media interest and commentary, helping Mortal Kombat 11 reach people that may not have been interested in the game before the event.
The tournament alongside other creative features such as medals, statues, cosplayers and more saw interest and pre-orders for the game explode, with the event helping to attract and acquire new fans to the Mortal Kombat series.
REVERSE YOUR BRIEF AND FIND A NEW WAY OF THINKING WITH CREATIVE AGILITY. TALK TO THE TAKEOFF TEAM TODAY TO FIND OUT MORE!