Thinking · Newsletter
Where our concepts actually come from
Not brainstorms. Four specific inputs, in rough order of how often they produce something that runs.
This piece is now part of a longer guide: Hooks and creative briefs: the complete guide.
People imagine concepting as a room with a whiteboard. In practice ideas that survive contact with an account come from four places, and the whiteboard is the least productive.
1. The comments
On the client's own ads and their competitors'. It is the only place buyers describe the product in their own words, unprompted, including the objections nobody on the brand side wants to write down.
2. The support and review backlog
What people complain about is what they cared enough to expect. Reviews are a list of promises that were made and not kept, which is a list of promises worth making properly.
3. The existing library
What already worked, decomposed. Not "run it again" but "what was the mechanism". A hook that worked usually worked for a reason that transfers.
4. The category next door
Gaming borrows from commerce and vice versa constantly, and the borrowed device is fresh precisely because the audience has not been trained on it yet.
The rule
A concept enters production with a note on which input produced it. If that field is blank, it came from the whiteboard, and whiteboard ideas have a worse hit rate than any of the four above.