Being creative is both a blessing and a curse. Having a head full of ideas means there’s never a dull moment, but sometimes you just can’t switch it off. Any enthusiastic designer, art director or copywriter has always got some weird or wonderful creative idea hatching – that’s why most of us have dictaphones in the car and sleep with note pads next to the bed.
The other day, D&AD creative workshops cropped up in the studio banter. For the uninitiated, the basic idea is that young creatives are given briefs from top London advertising and design agencies and then have to present their creative concepts on a weekly basis. At each presentation, they are given the next week’s brief and they have 7 more days to crack it (down the pub, at 3.00 in the morning, at weekends… whenever they can fit it in between live client briefs). This set Jason off reminiscing with Sam (our junior creative) about how much fun it was “back in the day” to work on briefs where creative ingenuity was the only criteria. No existing brand guidelines, no budgetry constraints, just the chance to give the old creative noggin a massive work-out.
“Hey Sam, what if we conjured-up some briefs for you? Fancy an extra challenge?”
Funny, when you’re 23, you’ll say yes to anything. So we cooked up Sam’s first brief: coming up with brand names and top-line packaging ideas for a new biscuit, that no matter how much you dunk it, it won’t collapse into your tea.
We loved the nifty stripes on the biscuits, perfect for gauging how deep to dunk and the ‘the unsinkable tea time treat’ is a winner. “Pass the Admirals”.
Taking the nautical theme to the next level, Sam also came up with ‘U-Biscuits’, but we thought Submersibles was really quirky. A fun way of expressing their dunk-ability.
The sign of a good creative. Take the brief, turn it inside-out and come up with something even better. Rather than a biscuit that won’t break, what about the most absorbent biscuit in the world? Genius! A real USP, but because it will eventually collapse in your mug, there’s still a challenge – just how long dare you dunk? ‘Riskits’, now there’s a brand name waiting to happen.
In the spirit of the D&AD workshop, as soon as we’d reviewed Sam’s ideas, we gave him the next brief – a new logo and slogan for The Green Party. Watch this space.
By the way, just in case there are any biscuit technologists or marketeers reading this, the copyright stays with Remedy, but we’re open to offers.