S2E10 | How To Be More Creative With Your Marketing Ideas

Do you have to be a mad genius to be creative? Or get inspired somehow? Or is it something within reach of all of us, something that can actually be executed reliably and within deadlines?

Discussion Topics: How to be more creative with your marketing ideas

• How can we be creative?
• Do you always have to be inspired?
• How can a single person be consistently creative?
• 70% of ads aren’t memorable – how do you ensure yours don’t flop?
• Ways to get fresh ideas
• Connect the best ideas to your brand
• How to measure the effectiveness of your ideas
• Brands that transcend their status as a business

Transcript: How to be more creative with your marketing ideas

Hasita: Like, what a lot of famous authors have to say about creativity and it’s about putting pen to paper for 30 minutes every day, accepting that the first time you do it the 10th time, maybe even the 50th, time it is going to look ugly. But hopefully, after that, something resembling creative output will start emerging. And I think it’s so much more important in today’s context, because creativity, in some ways, is the last stand and the differentiation between what you and somebody else can potentially do.

Subha: You know, now that I’m a YouTube star with about six and a half followers, I happen to open the app a little more often Hasita, and so YouTube decided that I’m going to answer a bunch of surveys for them. And they keep asking me, do you remember this ad? Do you remember that ad? And there are so few that I remember, I’m quite surprised. You know, like, you and I, usually we pay attention to this stuff so often, and I find even on television, and during cricket matches, I see ads, and like, hey, I saw this, and I can’t remember the brand, or I can’t remember the product. And they’re spending so much just to get me to remember.

Hasita: Yeah, firstly, congratulations on your six and a half followers Subha. You have broken the bane of our existence just to show our faces on video. So congratulations. I do find that survey interesting. And in fact, I remember asking somebody as well, a senior colleague of mine as to what exactly are they trying to measure. And he told me that actually, it’s about measuring the brand recall. And as you said, you know, half the time, you remember the ad, you remember the creative, you remember how it looks also, but you can’t remember which brand it was that was doing the advertising.

I mean, all that creativity and then for what? That’s the question that I think we ask sometimes, especially when budgets are involved. So let’s dive deep into that. Welcome to the Damn Good Marketing Podcast, episode 10 it is. And we thought, what is it about creativity that makes it so hard to grasp? What about it is tangible? What about it is not? And can we really even find a process to just consistently do good creative work that makes us happy?

Subha: That’s interesting that you spoke about creativity. And then you brought in something, which I wouldn’t think of when I’m thinking creativity, which is a process, what really is the creativity that works as ours takes, by our work, I mean, running, supporting and growing a business or a brand, which is what most of us are out here doing what kind of creativity does it need? Like is creativity too bigger word? And is it the right word?

Hasita: No, it’s definitely a very scary word because I think when we think creative, we think insanity somehow I think that’s the creative genius, creative maverick, you know, the Mad creative what would Don Draper do? Like, it’s always the thing that is just outside of our reach, because nobody really teaches us.

You know, they teach us maths, they teach us science, they teach us languages, but they don’t teach us how to think. And that’s why I think some of us also fall into these buckets of either thinking of ourselves as, Oh I’m a very logically oriented person so therefore, I must not be creative, Oh I’m a very fact-driven individual and therefore, I must not be creative.

But the fact I think is that just in the act of living our lives on a day-to-day basis, you know, coming up with business ideas, talking to people in various ways some of the smartest marketing people I know, are simply people who are so good at contextualising their information, right, the story might be the same, but they know how to tell it to a different audience each time. And I like what a lot of famous authors have to say about creativity, I think they all say, finally, it’s about discipline.

It’s about putting pen to paper for 30 minutes every day, accepting that the first time you do it the 10th time, maybe even the 50th time it is going to look ugly. But hopefully, after that, something resembling the output will start emerging. And I think it’s so much more important in today’s context, because creativity, in some ways, is the last stand and the differentiation between what you and somebody else can potentially do.

I read this anecdote somewhere that apparently though we have such democratic access to social media, we are all influencers in our own right. And all of that is happening. But still, the bestselling authors in New York Times are people who have been bestsellers for 30, 40 years. So I mean, definitely experience probably has a role to play there. Right?

Subha: No, definitely. I think if you remove the glamour around the word creativity, it’s just that right? It’s kind of solving a problem and saying, Okay, how am I going to land up every day to solve this problem? Now my problem is to write a book or write a script or make a movie or make an ad, or even just think of certain products for my business.

Hasita: Yeah, and if we say that it doesn’t work it’s like how they say in that will be called the Prestige. The moment the magic trick is revealed it’s no longer magic. And I think that’s true for creativity as well. If the sheer mundanity of it ever kind of made itself felt, then it wouldn’t be so magical, I suppose.

Subha: Correct. There are steps to it, it’s not a sudden light or a warm glow that comes over you and the idea is, you know, on all parts of you, etc., there’s that whole intent of wanting to create something and then spending some time thinking about it. And then the process, as you said, it starts looking not so pretty. And then it gets a little prettier and prettier. But I think there’s also room for certain creative bursts, and we all have it once in a while.

Hasita: No, that’s just the best feeling isn’t it just like things land like ting, it’s there in your head, and then it just makes you so happy. But in saying all of that, what we also then kind of recognize is that creativity is a process that takes time because it’s about gathering enough information to be able to connect certain dots or to be able to stimulate the mind to think in certain ways.

Now, we all know that in the real world, context, time is not often a luxury that we have, because campaigns have to still launch on time, they can’t wait for the creative director to have gone and taken a walk as simple as that. And sometimes it feels a bit like diving without any harnessing, I suppose in the sense that, okay, I’ve done all this creative work, but how do I know it’s going to work?

And actually Subha, it’s a very common question that we get asked, usually when we pitch creative work, we pitch more than one concept root. It’s two, in most cases, but at least three sometimes do make it to the table. And you realise, finally, the person making the call as to what should go out, has actually made a very subjective call, like there is no, actual resonance in terms of, okay, I know that this campaign worked for my industry in the past, because the moment you do that, you’ve already taken the creativity out of the equation.

So sometimes, we still have to ground it in practicality, though, it can’t just be all sunshine and rainbows.

Subha: And spoken about earlier that while there may be this creative director, or there’s somebody who’s kind of running or hitting the show, so many times it’s such a group process as we’ve talked about the Daily Show and the room in which they just really are sitting down as a group and writing jokes. It was supposed to be one guy’s spur-of-the-moment, Brainwave, that’s where the joke was supposed to come from. And a group of people sit in the room on a daily basis and get creative. I mean, that’s so weird.

Hasita: But again, it kind of just reinforces the whole idea of there actually being a method to the madness. And sometimes the reason for that method is really what we discussed earlier on about, say, a YouTube asking you, which of these ads do you remember, and there’s an interesting statistic 71% of B2B brands cannot create memorable advertising. Now, I am both the glass half full and the glass half empty kind of person.

So the optimist in me says see 3 in 10 Ads, that work is not a bad number, actually, if you think about it, but the fact is 7 in 10, people have spent on something that didn’t have an outcome because you have to set a budget, say quarterly reviews coming up. And for the next quarter, I have an XYZ goal. And to meet that I have to increase my pipeline value. And to do that, I have to tell a bunch of new people who’ve never met me before that I exist. And how many people do I tell?

How do I tell it? And how do I know that it worked in the first place? And especially in the context of some of these really long sales cycles you really don’t know which is which like which ad from four years ago, really did the job. And that is where I think it’s important to contextualise because there are the tangibles, in the sense that now we’re all riding the AI as a generative and creative wave.

Sometimes they do wonder, if is ChatGPT going to push that number from 70% to 80%. Because if everyone talks similarly, then you already have a problem. And if I just had to kind of think about what is a tangible way of measuring creative output, then I would say, just keep falling back on the brand. Keep thinking about what is it that I can say, consistently and repeatedly without losing the essence of that message. So I think that’s what finally brand tone voice comes down to. And that is the part that I can finely control as well.

Subha: The notion that we start with, is that if you’re creative, you will come out with this one really good idea. But what I hear you saying is that if you have a creative process, then actually you come out with 20 ideas and then say, Okay, what’s the best for the brand here or what’s the best for the medium that we’re choosing, or the channel that we’re choosing. So there is value to volume and breath like it’s not one stroke of genius.

Hasita: That reminds me of an exercise that both of us really admire in the advertising space kind of taught us about a week ago. And the process is called 40 boxes. So this was given to us. So I kind of reached out to Niranjan. And I said, now there are four or five of us. And creativity, of course, is already hard enough as it is. And then it’s all scattered because nobody knows what’s a good idea, what’s a bad idea, how do I even decide, how do I filter, and how do I even think sometimes when you’re handling a bunch of different mandates, and he said just come, let’s do it, let’s workshop this.

And he taught us this technique called 40 boxes, which is essentially about so if I’m the creative director, and I run a team of four or five creatives, and we know that we have a campaign coming up 24 hours from now, right, we have to pitch concepts. 24 hours, the moment you say, 24 hours, I think, half of us start freaking out, I definitely do or I did until I discovered this process. And the idea is that each person on the team, including maybe the director themselves, fills out a sheet with 40 boxes with 40 unique ideas or ways to sell that campaign.

So if you pick, for example, a shampoo, what are 40 different ways of making shampoo? So you can go as creative and as wild as you want there. Like there are no bad ideas. And the benefit I have realised of doing that is that firstly, you have 40 ideas so you’ve broken through that barrier of saying, oh my god, now how do I come up with something in 24 hours?

But the interesting thing there and let me actually ask you Subha, if you were given 40 boxes, and you had to do a campaign on something that you knew you were familiar with, how many ideas do you think you would come up with?

Subha: I mean, surely not 40 that seems like a tough task, I’m thinking, I’d be lucky with a dozen or so.

Hasita: A dozen is brilliant. A dozen on a box is actually good progress. And even to break through through that. Because the idea is that the director will not take a meeting until everyone’s finished their 40 boxes.

So to that end, I think one of the things that you can do, and this is also suggested by Niranjan is that you can just open a dictionary, pick a random word and use that word as your jump-off point for further ideas and further concept roots. Or you could just look out the window and you could say this is the first object that I’m spotting and use that as a jump-off.

So the idea, I think, is to give your creative stimulus enough room to grow. Because beyond the point, the brain is like, Okay, I’m done heading in this general direction. Now, where else can we go? And then you say, Hey, here’s a road. And you can actually kind of go take this road, you know, by saying that I was looking out through the window, and the first thing I saw was the lamppost. And I’m like, Oh, God, I have boring windows.

But I think I like this parable way to have about the monster who just wants work like he cannot sit still, you have to constantly give him something to do. I think in some ways, the brain is very similar to that like it constantly needs stimulus, and it needs it in as many different ways as possible. And funnily enough, the moment he gave us all of these different jumps of points, we had more than 40 happening.

And there was a point in time where two ideas merged and became one and between me and another girl we exchanged and we came up with something really cool as well. So I would not have come up with that, at the beginning of that, I would not even have believed that I could have come up with that at the beginning of that session. So yeah, I think we can all take some comfort in knowing that there is a process.

Subha: Yes, and it’s a very doable process. It doesn’t take away from the fun and joy of what we think creativity should be. And yet it gives you something tangible at the end of it.

Hasita: And it’s interesting, you say that, because I remember that day I was not keeping too well, I went very low on energy. And we did this exercise, and I felt so good on the inside. Like suddenly, my heart was so happy that the rest of me started feeling just fine. So I think there are other ways to derive joy as well out of these processes, I think.

Subha: Yeah, it puts your faith back in creativity.

Hasita: Yeah, in some ways, which I was losing a little bit here and there for sure. And I think also, what it really helps you do is to say that out of 14, we all know that there will be probably 20, 25% good ideas, but 10 good ideas are still better than one good idea that never appeared. And that’s where I think we can apply the filter of okay, what can and cannot my brand say, what will not I be saying. So these are certain filters, which will actually make it easy to maybe even remove some of those ideas, take them out. And the rest of them still have the potential to do just as well.

Subha: So I think this helps Hasita that one doesn’t get frustrated with the notion of you know, that creative burst coming or not coming, there is a process there are different I’m sure you know even more tools that you can apply or different ways to get to this much larger generation of ideas, and then be cognizant that because you do have like a bigger basket now 100% of it is definitely not going to be suitable or work for you.

So again, you have to filter, you have to pick from that, and then you use your expertise to say, what’s going to work for the output that I need. I don’t know, there’s a mix of, you know, being very cognitive. And then I think I’m still stuck on the part of it that’s supposed to be very sudden and inspired. So, what’s really happening in the head there?

Hasita: No, I think frankly creative output is finally one half of the equation because there are so many intangible associations we ended up making, for reasons that maybe when the creator didn’t think of, but it just happened to work that way. Like, I’ve been on a bit of an online ordering spree, suddenly, these last couple of days.

And somewhere, I realised that I have this feeling that if I pay on Razorpay, then my orders will come very quickly. Now, this is so irrational, because firstly, Razorpay is not an order fulfillment platform. It’s a payment gateway. But in my mind, there has been an association made that firstly, once payment is done, then the next thing to do is to just wait for the thing to come.

And I think somewhere the word Razor has triggered in my mind this association, that it is going to happen very quickly. And also, to some extent, I think the way the letters are bent forward probably has a bit of an impact as well. And the moment I realised, I thought like, how many of us are, frankly, so irrational about the whole thing at the end of the day, like, I mean, the reason we do certain things or take certain actions is because finally, the brand has transcended its transactional value, honestly.

It has managed to do something that’s so much bigger, I mean, honestly, let me ask you, this actually, and will know which brands have transcended and which have not. You Subha, much like myself, watch a lot of OTT content, right? So on average, if, say, Disney, Amazon Prime, and Netflix made 10 shows, who among them do you think would have made the most number of good shows just off the top of your head?

Subha: So I’m going to go with Netflix.

Hasita: So did I. But the fact is that they all have their phases. I think Disney had a phase over the last one year or so when they started making really good shows. Before that, in the early days of OTT, it was Netflix, that produced a lot of interesting content. Prime also had its moment in the sun, by the way, we’re in for a six, seven-month period, and with Daisy Jones and the six coming out, it’s expected to have a good summer run. So there is no quantitative evidence that it’s Netflix. But still, that’s what the brain defaults to because Netflix is the first OTT platform in our heads.

Subha: Like when you say binge or when you say chill, yeah, they’ve kind of cornered that market in our mind.

Hasita: And the same thing with finally your Swiggy, Dunzo as well, like, at least in the Bangalore context, between Swiggy and Dunzo, who, in your mind, delivers more orders on time?

Subha: Interesting, because if I think food, I think only Swiggy. Like, if you would have asked me Swiggy, Zomato I would just say Swiggy hands down for anything, I still can’t get myself to use Swiggy for anything non-food. And for me, anything which is non-food is Dunzo. Like they will safely take it from point A to point B. So there have been so many times when I’ve got an alert on my phone saying there is incoming from Swiggy and I’m thinking I haven’t ordered food, but it’s somebody else.

Hasita: Sending you a parcel. Which is where actually if you think we’re just purely from a delivery standpoint, I think most of us would say Dunzo. Because in our mind Dunzo delivers. That association has become so strong that no one else can deliver. It’s just not a thing that other people do.

Subha: Like I now say, I’ll Dunzo it to you, I don’t say use an app or a courier service or something.

Hasita: And in fact, when GooglePay was first launched, and I downloaded it, I thought, what a stupid name like GooglePay. But then you realise you’re asking people can GooglePay you? You’re not saying can I PayTM like that’s usually because the pay is part of the offering.

So I think yeah, it’s about frankly, knowing that human beings will continue to be irrational in the association’s that they make, which is that I think simplicity of messaging finally, like you may have the most creative idea on the planet. But you have to, I think, measure it on three different levels in my mind.

One is obviously the context in which you’re doing the advertising, like, are you doing it to damage control? Are you doing it to build a brand? Are you doing it to launch something new? So these are all different contexts in which you want to obviously think about different campaigns, they’re not going to be all the same, and probably the 40 boxes exercise there, it has the risk of becoming too simplistic because for products, it’s easier, like sell a shampoo bottle, sell a mic, sell a phone case, it’s a lot easier.

But when I have to say Vim is launching a new product in the market, which has XYZ attributes, now that’s what you have to sell, which is where the complexity kind of builds, and you have to constantly remember that your ideas are towards that goal and context. Then the next thing, obviously, is understanding your customer, which I think in some ways is still the context conversation.

But just to say Hey, if I say this, and I say this on the platform, in the context of whatever it is that I’m trying to communicate, will they get it? Is it simple enough? Is it resonant enough? And I think finally you have to AB test. And it’s a combination of experience and data I think so, you know past campaigns and past circumstances have either worked or failed for these reasons. So you use that as a launch pad for doing the rest of your work.

Subha: You know, when we’re trying to get something going for our business and our work, some kind of methodology or some kind of okay, if you do these three things, or if you include these two things, then you’re closer to getting the output that you want. That always helps even in creative things, it definitely helps.

Hasita: Absolutely. And in fact, even in slightly more abstract roles, which we ended up playing over a period of time, just a little bit of input into what direction people want us to take makes such a difference. You know, when we do workshops, are we doing that workshop to give people comfort that they are on the right path? Are we doing that workshop to ask the tough questions? Are we doing that workshop to just lay the cards on the table and then decide what the next these are all very, very, very different contexts and mindsets, so it makes a huge difference how you go into it?

Subha: I saw something interesting today on my LinkedIn feed, and someone had shared that HDFC says, Okay, why we only have OTT, kind of dropping 10 episodes at a time. And apparently, they’ve dropped an ad series, or maybe it’s one ad which is 10 ads at a time. So it’s like, there’s an overarching story of some bridegroom who runs away. But I think it’s a series of maybe 45-second ads, just one after the other telling that story, which is very different from having 10 ads and saying that over a two-week IPL, I’m going to show you…

Hasita: All of these. No, I think the logical fallacy there is just having called them ads. See, that’s the difference between a brand that actually transcends its value as a business, and a brand that is trying to do that in active ways, because frankly, I have Dunzo notifications turned on, you won’t believe just because they make me laugh.

Like, frankly, it’s not their job to make me laugh is not the mandate. But somewhere in the language and the way they’ve shown themselves have been very friendly and approachable they’ve transcended from being just a business in it to make money to a utility that now I can’t live without. See, in fact, it’s interesting the article where they said 71% of brands run boring ads, 90% of people don’t trust the banking industry any more now than they did 20 years ago.

Subha: Like they try to sell me something. So that’s very different from dropping 10 episodes at one time because there’s a story that I look forward to being entertained by.

Hasita: Exactly, I think some brands have achieved that in the process of creative storytelling. I think Tata Tiago did that with a series called Tripling, it was a collaboration with the Viral Fever. But it is possible to do that it’s possible to do interesting brand placements when you remember that you’re not the center of the universe, I think that’s what it finally comes down to.

Subha: Like you don’t have to have these bursts of doing something extremely unusual. And you feel like you don’t, you know, you’re not that for me, so don’t try it.

Hasita: Frankly, that’s where the creative director’s experience also kind of comes into the picture and to say how much of this campaign is going to demand that I fundamentally change my DNA. And sometimes you have to do that, like you know, you’ve got a bad product, you have to make it a better product. So to that extent, you have to, but in some cases, genuinely you don’t have to be the alpha in the room.

You don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room. You don’t have to be any of those things. The reason we look up to or we relate to certain brands is simply because they felt a lot like us finally and if we remember that, then I’m sure our 40 boxes will look very pretty for sure. Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of the Damn Good Marketing Podcast.

We did talk about creativity because I’ve realised over a period of time that creative output could just be the difference between a very successful marketing campaign and a not-so-great marketing campaign. I’m sure we will be discussing more of this in the coming episodes. If you like what you heard, do give us a review on Apple podcasts and give us a follow on Spotify. We really appreciate it so much. Thank you.

Subha: Bye.