Skip the Brainstorm Mr. O

I'm officially arming you with legit reasons to skip your next group idea session at work.  You can thank me later. The next time you're stuck with a group of colleagues in some endless meeting in a room with stale air and even staler sandwiches and the minutes go by super slow because your team is, well, brainstorming, damnit!  When that happens, you can thank Alex Osborn, the original OG of Brainstorming.  Yup, Mr. O happens to be the "O" in BBDO.  He coined the idea in his book back in 1938, and we've been storming the brains ever since in marketing and advertising.  When a group attempts to find a solution for a specific problem together spontaneously, this would seem like a good way to be innovative and creative. 

So does brainstorming make us more creative?  Maybe not.  Turns out, lots of great original ideas and creative thinking occurs when we aren’t interacting with other people. So maybe sharing isn't caring?  The creative process is often perceived as collaborative, yet only 18% of creatives will consult their ideas with friends, family or colleagues. Even when working together, we are still restrained by social anxieties, and we tend to worry about how other people will respond to our ideas.  Further, we can probably all relate to those colleagues who practice the fine art of “social loafing,” which means people are less likely to try as hard if there are other people willing to pick up the slack.  All brainstorm sessions are not lost, however. Try allowing people to spend some time alone with their ideas to fine-tune them and improve their quality.  So skip the stuffy meeting room and the crappy finger food...order DoorDash, chill out, and get creative! {You can tell your boss I said so.]

Don’t be a #ClickHead

Well, that video was thoroughly enjoyable.  A humorous take on the importance our industry places on the click-thru rate. We all know that the CTR is not and should not be the catch-all metric assigned to every digital media campaign. So what gives…why can’t we move past it? In order to raise awareness on the whole measurement topic, IAB UK released a robust toolkit, in honor of “National Anti-Click-Through Rate Day” to re-educate the click heads among us about all the other tools at our disposal. What brands want is clear insight and confidence on what their advertising has achieved.  The type of measurement used should align with the campaign’s objective, be it Awareness, Consideration, Favorability, Clicks, Acquisition, etc. Brands need to ok with deemphasizing the role of CTR and consider more meaningful metrics like engagement, time spent, brand studies and controlled creative experiments to truly assess their campaign performance. It goes without saying…great creative will always drive the desired result.

Movies with a side of Fries

Trailers just for movies?  Nope. Now they help sell crunchy hard tacos too.  Taco Bell has been releasing fake movie trailers under the name, Live Mas Productions, to promote their ‘nacho fries’ menu item since making their first debut in 2018. The inspiration for the trailers come from the fans and what’s trending in Hollywood. The latest trailer in the series, titled “Supply & Demand,” has a distinctive Fast and the Furious vibe, though this storyline is all about hostile forces trying to keep nacho fries out of the hands of the public. The trailers tap into the cult fandom of Taco Bell and make the semi-annual return of nacho fries a highly anticipated event.  Something is working, as nacho fries are one of the hottest selling items in fast food overall, and are reportedly requested in 1 out of every 3 Taco Bell orders.