At Guerilla we work in creative teams and each team want their ideas to win out, to be the ones selected to go forward. I recently came across a blog outlining techniques to get your ideas selected, most I have used in the past but there are a couple of new thoughts here worth considering:
1. Putting your own idea to the same test you apply to an idea from someone else.
When it comes to your own ideas, it’s easy to be a hypocrite and apply all kinds of hurdles to other ideas while letting your own thinking slide by unchallenged in your own mind.
2. Suspending advocacy of your own idea to push for another person’s concept.
It’s helpful to be able to come into a creative situation and demonstrate your willingness to champion another person’s idea. It can also open the way to getting others to support your thinking.
3. Combining two different ideas and making them better (not muddled) as one idea.
Being able to dissect ideas to pull out highlights and put them together as something new, is a great skill to have. Making everyone think it was your idea in the first place is genius.
4. Letting someone else take “ownership” of your idea in order to build support for it.
This skill really tests whether you believe so strongly in an idea you’re willing to let someone else step up and take it on as their own idea to see it prevail. The key to seeing your idea win out can be letting somebody else be the vocal proponent for it.
5. Displaying the patience to wait for someone else to say what needs to be said so all you have to do is agree.
It’s tempting to jump in right away and make all the points you feel necessary in a creative discussion before anyone else talks. At times though, patience and silence are called for when it becomes clear someone can and will express your perspective – and can do it more appropriately than you can.
6. Sticking to your guns amid challenges to a creative idea which delivers the core strategy.
There are many creative ideas which, while being really cool, have nothing to do with what you’re trying to achieve and how you should be achieving it. When confronted with others who are passionately arguing for highly creative yet hardly strategic concepts, make and remake your case if the idea you’re advocating is on the mark strategically.
These same principles can be applied in meetings with Clients and in the dreaded inter agency blue sky days.
If you want this kind of passionate belief in winning creative ideas for your next campaign contact us team@guerilla-creative.co.uk.
