How to Have More Ideas (Without Losing Your Mind) | Brian Krenzer

[00:00:00] Brian: Hello, hello. I am Brian Krenzer, and I am a creative director and a copywriter. And what that means, this is what I say to people, it means my job is to come up with lots and lots and lots of ideas. Like, lots of them. They never end, right? And whenever I say that to people, especially to people who are not in the industry that we’re in, who don’t do what we do, they always go, “Oh, that must be so much fun.”

[00:00:31] Brian: And then I smile, and I’m like, “Sure it is.” And I’m, like, gritting my teeth, and I’m like, “Yeah, it is fun to come up with ideas.” But then you’re not thinking about all of the pressure, the fact that you have to have new ideas every day, all the time, new ideas that something no one else has ever had before for a client who couldn’t figure out the problem themselves, so they brought you in to figure it out for them.

[00:00:51] Brian: And then you have to do it all on a timeline, and you have to do it all on budget day after day after day, right? [00:01:00] So over the course of twenty-five years, I’ve actually been doing this now twenty-five years. I know you all thought I looked twenty-eight. Um, over twenty-five years, I have come up with literally thousands of ideas.

[00:01:14] Brian: I actually think the number is hundreds of thousands of ideas because… but hundreds of thousands looked ugly in the typography, so I cut it down to, uh, thousands. But that’s the truth. Uh, in fact, like, earlier this year, Miro did, like, a year in review, like, you know, they’re like Spotify. And Miro told me I was in the top one percent of people generating Post-its.

[00:01:33] Brian: Like, that’s how many ideas have to come out in order to do what we do, right? And of course, some of those ideas turn out really good, and some of them actually get produced, like this one. This was the Give a Honk campaign that I helped Petro-Canada produce, uh, to help support unpaid family caregivers.

[00:01:56] Brian: This started in my notebook with a little tiny [00:02:00] scribble where I wrote, “Give a honk.” And I was like, “Oh, that could turn into something.” And luckily, it did. But today we’re not gonna talk about ideas that actually got produced. Today, I’m actually gonna throw out a whole bunch of ideas that actually got thrown away because I thought that would be more honest and more real.

[00:02:20] Brian: If we’re talking about how we generate ideas, we have to acknowledge that most of the ideas we come up with as creative professionals end up dead. You think about it, hundreds of thousands of ideas for Give a Honk. Even when you go into a client presentation, everybody knows this. You don’t walk in with one idea.

[00:02:41] Brian: You walk in with three, sometimes four. Those other two are getting killed, which means already sixty-seven percent of the ideas you came up with, the ones that were good enough to actually go into a deck, the ones you were good enough to write up, the ones you were good enough to make designs of, gone before anybody sees it, right?

[00:02:58] Brian: Like this one. [00:03:00] This is one of the ideas that we pitched for a client that went nowhere. It got killed. It was the message from the future. The brand was Zeno. They are a solar panel installer in Alberta and Ontario. And we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if a time-traveling polar bear could come back in time to appear on the front doorsteps of Zeno customers who didn’t know they were Zeno customers yet?”

[00:03:26] Brian: And the polar bear would thank you for choosing to go solar with Zeno. And I was like, “Oh my God, I love this idea,” and it was gonna look super… It was gonna be like The Terminator. He was gonna appear and, like, the lightning bolts and the whole bit. It got killed. Like ninety-nine percent of the ideas we work on do.

[00:03:45] Brian: It’s just a reality, and we have to survive it. This billboard poster, transit poster. I love this poster, right? It’s for an urgent care provider called GoHealth in the United States. Look at that illustration. [00:04:00] That is that ugly orange-blue gradient. That is what chest congestion looks like. No one should blend orange and blue together in a gradient.

[00:04:08] Brian: Don’t do that. But here it worked. And the headline, “There’s no award for coughing all night.” And the favorite tagline I’ve ever written, “Just go. GoHealth.” Like, ugh, perfect. And of course, killed. And it killed me. And it kills me every single time an idea dies. That one got very far in the process. Most of our ideas don’t get that far at all.

[00:04:34] Brian: So it’s no wonder that when a new brief comes in, I am excited like this for all of two and a half seconds because I’m traumatized, and then I’m in a sheer mode of panic. How the hell am I gonna come up with enough ideas to get to three ideas that are good enough to show to the client, let alone one that they’re actually gonna choose?

[00:04:53] Brian: How are we gonna come up with more ideas? Again, every day on this pressure. What if I don’t have any [00:05:00] ideas? Seriously, what happens? Is AI gonna replace me? What if they figure out I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing? I’m making it up as I go. Will they hire me again? Will anyone hire me again if I don’t come up with ideas?

[00:05:16] Brian: Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, right? Like every creative professional I’ve ever talked to, we all suffer from this. I call it the fear of the blank screen, you know? And it’s inevitable. Is today the day I’m going to suck? Like, legit. Like, that’s what I think about. So I’m gonna say stop. Literally stop spiraling.

[00:05:35] Brian: What today is gonna be about, um, of course, I’m gonna show you some ideas that died, but I’m also gonna give you my secrets for avoiding and confronting, really confronting that terror of the new brief How to have more ideas without losing your mind. This is a lifeline to that traumatic panic and the pressure to have new ideas, and it starts with my [00:06:00] very first secret.

[00:06:00] Brian: There’s gonna be 11 total. Don’t worry. Uh, the first one is a bit of a mindset, and you’re gonna g- have to say this with me in a moment. But the mindset is that I have succeeded before, and I will succeed again. Now say it with me. I have succeeded before. I will succeed again. One more time, louder. I have succeeded before.

[00:06:26] Brian: I will succeed again. Now stand up. Seriously, stand up. I want your whole body to feel this. No, because I know what the trauma feels like. This is like… This is real, okay? I have succeeded before. I will succeed again. Okay, you can sit back down now. See? That felt good, right? There’s a little bit of confidence in there.

[00:06:48] Brian: There’s a re- I mean, a little Alexis in there. You have no reason, no reason whatsoever to believe that you will not succeed. Think about this. You are all creative professionals. [00:07:00] Prior to today, every other project you have ever taken on has ended up in some way, shape, or form as a success. Think about it.

[00:07:09] Brian: So why would today be any different than those pr- those previous briefs? Why wouldn’t today be a success? Why not think about those successes when we move forward? Because actually, today, you are the most qualified you have ever been to take on a new brief. All of that experience, all of that expertise is now ready for you.

[00:07:38] Brian: You just have to believe. So that’s actually the first step. The first step to tackling that blank white screen is believing that you’re going to succeed, because you have before. So now I’m gonna back us up, and we’re gonna go a little story. Let me introduce you to baby twink designer Brian, like [00:08:00] in his 20s, about 20 pounds lighter, a whole lot more hair.

[00:08:03] Brian: This is me at the beginning of my career, and somehow somebody thought it was a good idea to put me in charge of other people and that we were gonna together solve this brief. So they gave us a war room, a little room with a whiteboard, and they said, “Now figure it out.” And we’re like, “Okay.” We get in there, and it was horrible, absolutely horrible, beating our heads up against the wall.

[00:08:23] Brian: It’s like torture. Like, um, who has an idea? Where am I gonna put it? Like, I don’t know. And it’s awful, right? After three days of that, my project manager, she pulls me out, and I’m like, “Oh, thank God. She’s gonna give me some hint. She’s gonna br- tell me there’s more resources. She’s gonna give me more time.

[00:08:39] Brian: She’s gonna give me some sort of help.” And instead, she says to me, “What’s your process?” Oh, fuck. Like legit, I’m like, “

[00:08:49] Attendee: Uh, uh, uh, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” 

[00:08:52] Brian: And then she goes– And when she sees that blank look on my face, she goes, “Brian, what is your cheaper, faster, better process for coming up with ideas?

[00:08:58] Brian: Because what you’re doing right now [00:09:00] isn’t working.”

[00:09:03] Brian: She’s like, “It’s too expensive to put all of you in a room like this. We need to be able to move it faster.” So I said, “I’ll get back to you.” And I did. I legit. So I went home, and I did some thinking, and I got to thinking and looking at it, and I says, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What do I do?” So I just started to look back on what I had done before, and I was like, “Well, when I’m by myself, sometimes I do word maps.”

[00:09:29] Brian: So I was like, “All right. So then why don’t we tomorrow morning at nine thirty, we can do word maps, and then at ten o’clock, we can try this other little thing.” And then before I knew it, I was getting confident because I had a plan. And that leads us to secret number two Map out your process. Like legit.

[00:09:53] Brian: Remember when I said that you have succeeded before and you’re gonna succeed again? Well, if you map out your [00:10:00] process and write down what has worked for you, legit, like write it out, all the things that you’ve done to be successful, next time you reach that freak-out moment, you just look over to the instruction manual you have written yourself and you are ready to go.

[00:10:16] Brian: So legit, write out what is your first step? How long does it take? What materials do you need? I’m serious about this. You actually write it out. Like what’s your first deliverable? What’s your first step? You know what mine is? My first thing when I get a new brief, I pull out a calendar in Miro and I put Post-its up on the days that mark today’s the day we’re gonna do a workshop, this is when one-pagers are, this is when this thing is, and instantly my anxiety level goes down, not because I need to know when things are due, I don’t care, but because I now have a plan.

[00:10:46] Brian: So that’s what I want you to do is write out your process. Do you have templates? The answer is yes, ’cause if you’re gonna repeat your stuff, if you make your templates beforehand, it makes it so much easier, okay? And then at the end of this, I’m gonna give you my [00:11:00] templates, so don’t you worry. You do all that, it’s no more panic.

[00:11:05] Brian: It’s no more terror. You have a plan. You have the experience and the expertise. You can move forward, okay? So for the rest of the presentation here, we’re gonna talk about my process. This is what baby twink Brian wishes that he knew all those years ago. Seriously, how young was I? Like want some of that collagen back.

[00:11:25] Brian: Okay. Now some of this process, this is what, what works for me. I am by no means the absolute expert. There are days when I freak out. There are days when I fail. It happens, right? So take this with a grain of salt. Apply what works for you. Leave behind what doesn’t. I think the bigger lesson is make sure you have process, and mine is secret number three.

[00:11:48] Brian: Generate, sort, define. My process for ideation breaks down into three phases. We’re gonna start with the generate phase. That is the biggest type I [00:12:00] have ever stood next to. Okay I process is that secret number four. Okay, that slide was the wrong slide. All right. That’s okay. All right, secret number four, when we get into generate.

[00:12:14] Brian: Generate is where you actually use the right side of your brain to come up with as many things as you possibly can. Notice I said things and not ideas, because the secret is that I want you to generate nuggets, not ideas. I’m getting cute with words here purposefully. An idea has pressure. An idea solves the problem.

[00:12:36] Brian: An idea is the idea, right? Everyone wants to have the idea. Well, you’re never going to have the idea when it’s the first thing you write down. And if you’re worried about is this the right thing, you’re never going to get that idea out. So what I do is I call them nuggets. Nuggets are sort of formed ideas.

[00:12:57] Brian: They’re baby ideas. They’re little seedlings that are gonna [00:13:00] grow into bigger ideas later on. But the point with them is that they are less pressure. Nuggets are less pressure. We are tricking your brain to be less critical of itself, get past the point where you’re saying, “No, no, no, this couldn’t work.”

[00:13:13] Brian: It’s just a nugget. Put it out there and then throw it away, literally. Take the pressure off. Nuggets are loosely formed and barely thought out pre-ideas. Nuggets take on different shapes. Nuggets can be headlines. They can be scripts. They can be little sketches. They can be screenshots that you pulled off of somebody else’s website.

[00:13:34] Brian: They could be a video that you found. It’s this thing where you say, “Ooh, this might work for this brief. I don’t know what it is, but I’m gonna write it down, and it’s gonna turn into something maybe.” You take it, you log it, and you keep moving. And of course, in the generate phase, there are never enough nuggets.

[00:13:54] Brian: The goal in generate, the goal at the beginning of this creative process is to put out as many [00:14:00] nuggets as you possibly can. Volume is success. You could never have enough. The good ones, the bad ones, the half-baked ones, put them all out there because perfection is the enemy of good nuggets. You’ve all heard the expression perfection is the enemy of good.

[00:14:17] Brian: Like, I’m kind of borrowing it here and applying here ’cause it totally works. When you’re in the generate phase, if you spend three hours trying to write up the perfect ad or the perfect script, you have just missed out on three hours of other nuggets, of other kernels, of other good thoughts, because you were being too critical trying to write or design or draw or think up the most perfect idea.

[00:14:41] Brian: Don’t be critical. Don’t chase perfect. You’re gonna get time later on to refine it. Right now, just get as many out as you can So let’s share another nugget that got killed. Like, this is a pa– a look back into Brian’s creative trauma. [00:15:00] This little guy, uh, I found him on the internet. I love him. He was like, he’s like chaos and mischief and all these things, and then I saw him.

[00:15:07] Brian: It was… I was working on a brief for, um, uh, Sandbox Mutual Insurance. Delightfully simple insurance was their tagline, and I was like, “Oh my God, this guy is delightfully simple,” right? It turned into this idea, which was a billboard, “Mischief is gonna mischief,” and there’s that scribbly guy reimagined with a cactus in his hand, and he’s the one who fucked up your tire, not you, and it’s okay because you have delightfully simple insurance.

[00:15:29] Brian: And of course, it got killed. Happens, right? And that’s okay With that out there, and I’ve told you what a nugget is, and I’ve told you how many you want, now it’s like, well, how the hell do I come up with more nuggets? And that’s what this part is about. Secret number five, pen and paper. I know, shit, Brian is giving you all this basic stuff.

[00:15:53] Brian: Like, oh, use a pen and paper. Oh, all the… Trust me on this. When you actually write, and y’all [00:16:00] are doing it right now, which I love, you’re actually using a different part of your brain. You’re opening up synapses and connections that most of the day when you’re sitting at your computer typing or responding to emails, you’re not actually using the rest of your brain.

[00:16:13] Brian: So the simple act of changing to a pencil and a paper helps your brain think differently. It puts you in a little bit of discomfort. It creates friction that you’re not used to, all of which is good for you. Your laptop is a tool for production, a tool for perfection. And as I said, generate is not about perfection.

[00:16:37] Brian: You think about it, right? You spend all day writing emails. You spend all days doing things, accomplishing things. And in generate, that’s not what it’s about. You want to be free thinking, and the laptop forces you to follow rules and all these things you don’t want. So leave the laptop behind. Your phone, it’s a distraction.

[00:16:54] Brian: I know some people are like, “Oh, I leave voice memos.” I’m like, “Girl, voice memos don’t work. Not for this.” Because you [00:17:00] got to be able to have this thing that you can touch and you can hold and manipulate. At the same time, like, you can’t, you can’t generate quickly with your thumbs brutalizing that keyboard, right?

[00:17:11] Brian: Like, come on. Like, nobody can type quickly on that phone, so don’t try. Instead, get out your paper. I like grid paper or blank paper. I’m being super prescriptive here because it works. Do not force yourself into somebody else’s horizontal lines that force you into linear thinking because nuggets aren’t linear.

[00:17:30] Brian: They happen randomly. They build off of each other, spawn off the page. So give yourself the space to do it. I will allow the exception for iPads if you turn off all the interruptions, if you get rid of Instagram and all the other things on there. And what I do like about it is that infinite white space, right, of a whiteboard.

[00:17:48] Brian: That is okay. But not if you’re sitting at your desk, not if you’re sitting there like where you wear your laptop. Nope, nope, nope. Not allowed. I told you that was basic. We’re gonna get a little bit more complicated now. [00:18:00] Secret number six This one’s gonna get interactive. I’m gonna ask you to answer some questions as we get there.

[00:18:08] Brian: Secret number six is to use mini briefs to generate nuggets. I know you’re thinking, “Oh, I saw you doing it. I saw it.” You’re like, you’re like, “Mini brief? What the fuck is a mini brief?” Yeah, uh-huh. I knew that was gonna happen, right? A mini brief is a simple thought that could solve parts of your brief. A mini brief is exactly what it sounds like.

[00:18:30] Brian: It’s taking your creative brief and distilling it down to one single sentence. No ands, no buts. And here’s the thing. Y’all have seen creative briefs before. The last one I got was six pages long. Why we call them briefs, I don’t understand. I guess because we’re being briefed, but again, it’s not brief, right?

[00:18:52] Brian: When you get that six pages, it’s like, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that? That’s where a mini brief comes in. You’re not gonna try and distill six pages into [00:19:00] one sentence. You’re gonna write four or five of them and think of them as thought starters, as entries into the generate process. So, for example, I gotta step back to read this.

[00:19:12] Brian: I have rehearsed this speech probably like 10, 12, 10, 12 times. I wrote this. I still can’t tell you what these words are. This was the brief I was given six weeks ago. I changed the name of the client, and I changed the city so you can’t figure out who it is, but create a brand that shows how the new 1,000-room Conway Hotel in Vancouver inspires energy in the hub of the city and connects with new business and vacation travelers in the peak summer cruise ship season.

[00:19:45] Brian: Okay, sure, whatever. Um, I legit, I could not read that. I could not recite that if I tried. Now, I’m saying that, and I’m, and I’m giving the strategists a hard time, but this is actually a really smart brief. There is nothing strategically wrong [00:20:00] here. Everything in here is smart marketing. Who do you wanna talk to?

[00:20:04] Brian: What do you wanna say? I can’t argue with that, but I also can’t turn this into nuggets or even bigger ideas ’cause it’s just too complicated. So this is where the mini brief comes in. That big old glob over there on the left turns into, “The Conway Hotel is the hub of the city I can do something with that.

[00:20:28] Brian: There’s like cool words in there like hub and like city and like it’s simple. My brain starts to move. That’s how you know you’ve got a mini brief that works. And of course, that word, hub of the city, it’s right there in the hub of the city. Like it’s okay to borrow from the strategist who already did the hard work.

[00:20:48] Brian: Okay? Next one, because I said we write a couple of them. The Conway Hotel makes the city more vibrant. This is an instruction manual for you [00:21:00] now. Come up with ideas that make the city more vibrant. Like, okay, this is easier than that. The mini brief totally helps. So now you see what they need to do. I’m gonna ask you guys to fill in the blank.

[00:21:17] Brian: Who’s got a mini brief? Who’s got a way to simplify and hopefully inspire from what was over here on the left?

[00:21:31] Brian: I see you in the back

[00:21:38] Brian: Yeah. Connects the Conway Hotel connects with business and vacation travelers. Yes. Good. Who’s got another one? There’s a secret here. There are no wrong answers

[00:21:58] Attendee: Okay, well so next [00:22:00] 

[00:22:02] Brian: Yeah, but I bet we could go simpler

[00:22:07] Brian: Bingo. There you go. A mini brief that’s easier to get into. There’s nothing, there’s nothing hard about it. I got another one on here. The Conway Hotel connects to the city. Yeah, like again– Oh, green. Sorry. What’s your name? Emily. Emily, thank you. 

[00:22:28] Attendee: Hotel. 

[00:22:29] Brian: Yeah. Oh, inspires what? Give me a little more

[00:22:34] Brian: Boom. There it is. The Conway Hotel inspires energy

[00:22:42] Brian: It’s often helpful when you can put in words that are gonna give you a little bit of an emotional response, right? So things like energy, totally helpful. So of course, mini briefs don’t prevent ideas from dying. This was the mini [00:23:00] brief that we used for the brand called Roomy. Uh, Roomy is a home improvement brand in Alberta, um, and I love this mini brief.

[00:23:10] Brian: I actually lifted this from the actual brief. I didn’t even change the words. Roomy maximizes homeowner happiness. Like, I don’t know what the fuck homeowner happiness is. Like, I don’t own a home. But also the word maximizes, like that’s one of those emotional words where you’re like, “Ooh, there’s something here.”

[00:23:26] Brian: Because it’s not just creates, it’s maximize. I’m like, okay, now I know that whatever I do from an idea in a nugget place has to be extra, right? So the extra thing that we came up with was take back your Saturday. It’s like that’s what homeowners want. They don’t want to mow the lawn, paint the fence. They want somebody else to do it so they can go out and do whatever.

[00:23:45] Brian: That part of the idea actually went live, the tagline and the headline. My suggestion that they should debut the campaign by floating hot air balloons over Edmonton and Calgary for four straight weeks, you know, the epitome of giving back your, taking back your Saturday, floating [00:24:00] free in the wind, that didn’t happen.

[00:24:02] Brian: There was no budget. It got killed. Okay. Secret number seven Use a timer. Use a timer to generate. I know what you’re thinking. You’re like, “But Brian, creative is really pressure-filled already, and now you want me to put a stopwatch and a timer on my work so it feels like more pressure?” And I’m like, “Yes, I do.”

[00:24:26] Brian: And here’s why. When you work against a timer, a ridiculous, implausible deadline, the part of your brain that says no, the part of your brain that gets critical of your ideas stops working. It can’t get in the way. So putting a timer on forces that no part of your brain to go away, and you lean into the part, right side of your brain that’s just gonna generate as many nuggets as possible.

[00:24:52] Brian: What I do is I work in 10-minute sprints. I take a mini brief, whichever one I had. I set my stopwatch to 10 [00:25:00] minutes. I legit, I do this all the time, 10 minutes, and then I go as many nuggets as I possibly can. I keep going until the timer stops. If I still have nuggets in here and the flow is still happening, I reset the timer for another 10 minutes.

[00:25:14] Brian: This sounds like torture, but it totally works. Then after that 10 minutes’ up, when I finally run out of nuggets, I grab another mini brief, ’cause I wrote four or five of them, remember? And now I go 10 minutes. I’m working these 10-minute sprints over and over and over again, so I get more nuggets out in 40 minutes than I would if I had spent four hours in more of a free flow waiting for inspiration.

[00:25:36] Brian: It works. Your mini brief plus timers, guaranteed lots of nuggets. Try it. What’s the worst that happens? You lose 10 minutes. You’ll be surprised what actually comes out. That sense of urgency totally works

[00:25:53] Brian: Y’all ready for secret eight? Okay, I feel like I’m flying through here. Okay. Secret number eight. [00:26:00] This one’s gonna be even more interactive. Don’t worry, you don’t have to raise your hands, but you’re gonna have to do some thinking. All right. Secret number eight is generate nuggets with wordplay. Once again, you’re like, “Wordplay?

[00:26:15] Brian: What is that?” I’m like, wordplay is a game, literally a game that I came up with, with some help from some outside sources, to give you more random entry into the brief. If mini briefs are very logical and they’re a deduction of what was in the brief, wordplay is more random and playful way to get into the brief To do this, I need you all to get out a pen.

[00:26:41] Brian: Can’t take notes on your phone for this one. Okay? Then you’re gonna need your paper. Okay? And of course, I’m gonna put you on a timer ’cause why wouldn’t I? And it’s gonna be 90 seconds. In 90 seconds, you’re gonna feel both the pressure and the [00:27:00] impossible length that is 90 seconds. It’s gonna be simultaneously short and simultaneously fast.

[00:27:05] Brian: And what you’re gonna do, okay, the instructions are up here on the top of the screen. You’re gonna write down as many single-word characteristics that come to mind for this brief. Single words. I want nouns, I want verbs, I want adjectives. It doesn’t matter what they are, as long as they are tangentially related to the brief, and you’re gonna number them as you go.

[00:27:23] Brian: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, whatever. Remember, we’re in the generate phase, so volume is the goal. Turn off the part of your brain that is super critical. And here’s your brief. You’ve seen it already. Create a brand that shows how the new 1,000-room Conway Hotel in Vancouver inspires energy in the hub of the city and connects with new business and vacation travelers in the peak summer cruise ship season.

[00:27:45] Brian: You have 90 seconds. Write down single words that are tangentially related here. Keep them to yourself. Work solo. Ready? Go. Your timer’s at the bottom of the [00:28:00] screen. Five, four… Oh. I don’t recommend you put a sound effect on your actual watch or stopwatch when you’re working on your own, ’cause that is– you don’t want it running all the time.

[00:28:14] Brian: Okay. Who felt the pressure? Ninety seconds. Did it feel long? Did it feel short? Did you feel exhausted? Just take note of that feeling, okay? Next, raise your hand if you got more than 10 words down. Good. Good, good, good. That means that you turned off that critical part of your brain, and I know I told you not to use the critical part of your brain, but that’s important.

[00:28:38] Brian: And I’m guessing– Let me ask you, did anybody get more than 25 words down? I got one. Good. 27, okay. Good for you. Awesome, I love that. Free-flowing. All right, so now the next step we’re gonna do, all right? Each of you is gonna turn to somebody sitting next to you that you don’t know. Introduce yourself, okay?[00:29:00] 

[00:29:00] Brian: Then I want you to tell that person what was your number. How many did you get? And then that person is gonna pick a number within that range, zero to whatever your number was, randomly. And you’re gonna look at your list, and you’re gonna circle that word. You can tell them what that word was, right? Okay?

[00:29:18] Brian: So go ahead and find somebody you don’t know and tell them your number and tell them… and have them pick a number. Okay. I now want you to do it again with a second neighbor. Introduce yourself to somebody new, tell them your number, and pick a random word off of that. Okay. Newsflash, I need you to do it a third time.

[00:29:42] Brian: Find a third person and share your numbers, and c- choose random numbers. You should all have three words circled. Okay? Now, we’re not– we’re not gonna get to do the full activity ’cause it’ll take too much time. But [00:30:00] just so I know, and I’m gonna– don’t worry, I’m gonna tell you how it finishes. I wanna hear some of these words: intersect, welcome, and host.

[00:30:07] Brian: Okay. So if this were your actual brief, and this were your actual assignment, what you would do next is you would use at least one of your random words, bonus points for two, or in Jay’s case, three, um, for… as jumping off point to solve your brief. How do flip-flops and sunscreen and sun hats apply to this brief?

[00:30:32] Brian: That’s what you would jam and generate nuggets on. I told you this was totally random, right? It’s also playful, and play is an extremely important emotional state. When you play, there are no rules, right? You can… Your brain goes freer. So now Jay has got three fun words to play with in this space to [00:31:00] generate nuggets.

[00:31:01] Brian: So this is just another way to get into the brief. Your mini brief was one way. The stopwatch is another way to help out. This is using random coincidence with those words. Legit, you had no strategy whatsoever as to how those words got chosen. You can do this by yourself. Generate your list, put the list of the words, tear them up and put them in a hat, pull out three words, boom.

[00:31:24] Brian: Go, right? The whole point is to give you a new way in to generate nuggets, because as we all know, nuggets aren’t the idea. They’re just thoughts to get you started, right? Okay. Time for another creative casualty, a death along the way to, uh, to, uh, big ideas. This one for the crypto security brand Casa. They secure and anonymize, whatever that means, your Bitcoin.

[00:31:57] Brian: The headline, “What [00:32:00] villa?” And then it just says, “Secure your crypto and your privacy.” I loved this ad. I was like, ugh, that blur, the color, the type, what villa? And of course, the client said, and they nitpicked it to death, “Our customers are more likely to have a cabin than a villa.”

[00:32:23] Brian: Dead. So that’s the generate phase. The goal is use the right side of your brain. The goal is to generate as many nuggets as possible. Don’t put pressure on yourself to make it perfect. Now I wanna talk about sorting. When we sort, you’re sorting your nuggets. That’s obvious, right? You’ve generated all these nuggets.

[00:32:42] Brian: Sorting is an interesting thing. There is no methodology for how you actually do it. The reason we do it is because sorting is a logical action. Everything that we just did in generate was on the right side of your brain. Sorting is applying [00:33:00] rules, is applying order, the rules and order that you’re making up, but you’re using logic to do it.

[00:33:06] Brian: Now you’re activating the left side of your brain, which means that other half of your brain finally gets to play and finally gets to contribute for you, right? Sorting is that logical thing. It helps. When we sort nuggets together, you wanna form bigger nuggets. You’re looking for common threads. There is no rule.

[00:33:24] Brian: You’re making the rule. You’re figuring out which pieces go together to form the ultra nugget, the bigger nugget. That’s what you’re going for, right? Which brings me to secret number nine You’re gonna have to sort your nuggets digitally. I know I told you earlier, work on pen and paper, and now I’m giving you extra work because the first thing you have to do is you have to digitize your nuggets.

[00:33:47] Brian: Sorry. Um, uh, but it works. You can’t– If you wrote on paper, and sorting is literally a mechanical movement of things, creating proximity, creating associations, you have to be able to move your stuff, and you can’t [00:34:00] tear up your notebook. You can’t, you can’t move those things around. So you’re gonna have to take the time and clean up your nuggets.

[00:34:04] Brian: Maybe you put them on a Google slide real quick. Maybe you take a photo of your sketchbook and load that photo. I load everything into Miro. I love Miro. It’s faster than Figma. It allows copywriters and other people who don’t know how to use the design tools in Figma to play along. Here’s the QR code so you can get my template.

[00:34:21] Brian: Don’t worry, it’ll be on all the screens, and it’ll be at the end as well. What I do is I set up this template where I load all of my nuggets into the starting bucket. Look at this. There’s no shadow. That’s an… amazing. Anyway, you load all your nuggets into the left bucket, and then one by one, you load them into the boxes.

[00:34:41] Brian: Every nugget that stands on its own ends up in its own box. As you move along, you combine related nuggets into that same box. So you start giving some order and some sorting. So that green hat, the gray shirt, and that yellow thingamabob up there, they’re somehow related, and I’m figuring it out as I go.

[00:34:58] Brian: And of course, you add [00:35:00] in new nuggets because when I saw the green hat and the gray T-shirt together for the first time, I thought, “Well, God, they need brown shoes,” right? So I added that in there When you’re done, you’re gonna have all your nuggets spread out across the board, and you’re gonna have half-baked nuggets, you’re gonna have bigger nuggets.

[00:35:14] Brian: And, uh, what’s amazing about it is now you finally get to pat yourself on the back because you have the breadth of all these nuggets coming together, and you’re gonna be able to pick your favorites. And literally, this is where you actually go ahead and you put a star next to your favorite ideas. This is like a hearkening back to, like, kindergarten and preschool.

[00:35:30] Brian: Like, yay, you figured out you did not eat paste. You get a star for the day. This is what you’re doing. You’re putting stars next to the ones that are sparking, the ones that feel like they’re starting to get big, and you’re like, “This is working.” All those nuggets, all those little points of inspiration are coming into something bigger.

[00:35:47] Brian: And sometimes they get bigger, and they still get killed. This was for UCLA Health. We needed to do a campaign to, uh, to educate people on the difference between primary care, emergency care, and immediate care. So we [00:36:00] turned to songs. No, seriously, Annie, are you okay? Or then, again in sorting, we found the other headline, “Ring of Fire, burn, burn, burning.

[00:36:09] Brian: Immediate care right away.” Doctors are the worst clients ever. They said our copy was too smart and that regular people wouldn’t get it, and they wanted us to be more plain. It’s like, “Thanks. Read boring. Thank you, doctor.” All right, so that’s sorting, where you apply logic. Generating is about generating the volume of nuggets.

[00:36:29] Brian: Sorting, you bring logic to make them bigger. Finally, we get to define. In define, you actually kick the tires of your nuggets and figure out why they work or why they don’t, as it might turn out. This is where you prove the fact that they are ideas. Now you’re finally allowed to say that you have ideas.

[00:36:49] Brian: That’s secret number ten: define your ideas. And me being me, I, of course, have a template for that First thing you’re gonna do with this template when you define an [00:37:00] idea is you give your idea a name. Names are important. A, you have to have one. B, it forces you to distill that nugget, that idea, all the way down to four, maybe six words at most.

[00:37:14] Brian: It’s kinda like a billboard without the actual image. What are the four words? This was message from a future, right? This made sense. I was like, “Oh yeah, the polar bear is coming back. Oh yeah, there’s other things that are in here that are all from the future because you made the right choices for your solar,” right?

[00:37:28] Brian: Next thing you do after the naming it, you describe it. I put it in there as concept in a nutshell. Concept in a nutshell is like fifty words, maybe seventy-five max. It is the rule. What is this idea? What isn’t it? What isn’t in it? In this one we wrote that letting off– let’s offer homeowners compelling short glimpses into their personal futures, ensuring they make the right choices today.

[00:37:50] Brian: Like, it’s explaining the idea. It’s forcing you to really understand what it is and more importantly, what it’s not. Because next up you’re gonna write down the [00:38:00] tactics. These are all the nuggets, the headlines, the scripts, the photos, the layout ideas, whatever they were, you put them in here, and you have to run them through the filter of the concept in a nutshell.

[00:38:11] Brian: Oh, that headline that I thought was right, maybe it needs a tweak or whatever. Now here’s the thing, you’re like, “Brian, I’m not a copywriter.” And I was like, “Yeah, I know that,” but we all know how to use words, and what you’re really doing here is applying the critical thinking to the nuggets to turn them into ideas.

[00:38:26] Brian: A copywriter’s gonna come in later on, and they’re gonna rewrite it and make it better. Right now, it’s about you understanding why it works. Seriously, do the writing. And finally, the last thing you write is why we like it, why it works. The answer should be already in your creative brief, right? If you look back at the assignment and figure it out, you should be able to map this idea you just created back to it.

[00:38:55] Brian: And a little help, the reason we do this, again, it’s so you think critically about your [00:39:00] idea and you know that it’s actually working, but it also gives you ammunition for when you go to talk to the creative director or you gotta talk to your client. You’ve already done the thinking about why this works.

[00:39:08] Brian: Like it’s basic. It’s helping yourself out. And of course, like I said, there is a template Of course, you can also have ideas that get defined to death, right? This is my last dead idea, and this one just, I mean, oil and gas, limited time offer. Our future is solar for Zetto. Loved this headline, right? Brutal.

[00:39:36] Brian: Brutal. Then we went in and we pitched it because it went with the, it went with the polar bear, the whole message from the future. You like, you get it, right? We pitched it. The client is based in Calgary and like if you ever tell an Albertan, even if they sell solar panels, that oil and gas is dead, well, doesn’t fly.

[00:39:57] Brian: They’re like, “We can’t run that ad. It’s too controversial.” [00:40:00] We’re like, “Well, that’s actually the wrong slide. It’s not too smart, too controversial.” Anyway, so that’s my process. Generate, sort, define. Which leads me into my final secret. Sometimes that process doesn’t work. Sometimes you’re still left with nothing.

[00:40:20] Brian: That’s when you turn to the experts, okay? And for me, first expert’s turned on its head, so you can barely see it ’cause the screen is so big, is a book called “Gamestorming.” I highly recommend this book for anyone in creative practice. This book applies the principles of play to facilitation and ideation.

[00:40:40] Brian: It’s where I learned about the stopwatch. It’s where I learned about sorting. It’s where I learned about the foundations of what turned into wordplay. I use this book all the time. Look at all the Post-its and stuff that I’ve got in there. There’s a reason for it. Turn to the experts. Another resource, the “Think Pak,” uh, by Michael Michalko.

[00:40:59] Brian: [00:41:00] There’s about 50 cards. Each card has a question on it, a question that helps you reframe the brief or the problem that you’re working on. Every once in a while, I just pull a card out and I was like, “Oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.” And all of a sudden, the nuggets or my problem-solving sol- starts moving again.

[00:41:17] Brian: You don’t have to do this on your own. There are experts out there. Use them. Those are my secrets. I didn’t promise to change the world. They’re simple secrets, but hopefully they help you have more ideas without losing your mind. And hopefully, after all that, you’re a little less stressed the next time that big screen, that big brief comes along.

[00:41:42] Brian: And, uh, remember, if there’s only one thing you remember from today, it’s that you have succeeded before, and you will succeed again. All right? So fuck the blank screen. All of my, uh, [00:42:00] templates and the like are there at that QR code. Email me if you ever got questions, you wanna work together, whatever it is.

[00:42:08] Brian: Go out and create cool things.

[00:42:15] Attendee: Hi there. Thanks so much, Brian. That was amazing. Um, when was the last time you saw a slideshow that was 161 slides long, and it felt like it went by in about 10 minutes? Um, I’m Chris. I’m one of the other, uh, volunteers here at Creative Pulse and, um, I think I’ve probably seen you speak at least four times and blown away every single time ’cause you keep coming back with great, more, m- more ideas, more ideas.

[00:42:38] Attendee: So it’s just so great to see. I’m a fellow creative director, so I feel your pain sometimes when we’re going through this stuff because we hit these walls. So, um, I’d love to have some questions from the audience, but certainly one question I have is what do you do when you do hit the wall? What, what are, what are some other things that you do?[00:43:00] 

[00:43:00] Brian: Um, I… This was a theme from last, one of the presentations last year. I go for a walk. You know, I step away, I change my space. It’s so easy to get trapped in your notebook, at your computer screen, and you just beat your head against the wall, and then you realize sometimes just changing the scenery can be enough.

[00:43:19] Brian: Getting the blood flowing. That’s usually what works for me, um, if I have to. And then I also, in that walk, I remember, oh wait, more often than not, what I already have isn’t crap, right? Like, you have to acknowledge that. Like, oh, I actually have something, you know, and now I just need to look at it differently.

[00:43:38] Brian: And creating space away from it is usually how I break that logjam. 

[00:43:45] Attendee: Nice. I’m sure everyone can feel for that. Um, who has any questions here from the audience? Scarcely.

[00:43:56] Attendee: Hi. Um, when you’re working with a team, how does the [00:44:00] nuggeting phase change? 

[00:44:02] Brian: Yeah, that’s a great question. I actually have another presentation which is more designed for teams, but the nuggeting process itself doesn’t actually change that much. I am a firm believer that you need to work on your own first.

[00:44:17] Brian: And so when you’re working on one of my teams, everyone does solo nuggeting first. Then we do sorting collectively in what I call a workshop. We don’t do brainstorms because I don’t think they work, right? They’re a waste of time. Instead, y’all get the brief, y’all get, I like seventy-two hours, sometimes over a weekend, right?

[00:44:38] Brian: Then you’re supposed to come back in with ten, twelve, fifteen nuggets that are worth sharing, right? And the thing is, at the end of– I don’t wanna stretch it out to a whole week because we’re gonna, A, waste most of that time, right? And I want you to come back in thinking, “I don’t have anything,” right? I want you to push yourself as hard as you can in that time that you have to then be like, “Oh, I don’t know if anything’s in here.”

[00:44:58] Brian: ‘Cause inevitably, [00:45:00] every time you come back, every time we go through that sorting exercise and we fill that board, every single time everyone goes, “Whoa, there’s way more here than I thought we had.” So I believe in solo work before teamwork, and I believe that you have to come in with accountability and show up with those nuggets ready to share, and then we sort them, and then we define them together.

[00:45:22] Brian: So that– So the process is very much the same. It’s just putting more accountability on that solo work

[00:45:33] Brian: And back in the white

[00:45:39] Attendee: Thank you. Hello. Hi, Brian. Hi. Thank you for the presentation. Uh, I was wondering, have you– have any of your i- dead ideas had a revival in a different company or a same company at a different time? 

[00:45:57] Brian: Shh. Don’t say that. I [00:46:00] have pitched the same idea, and I didn’t put it in the deck. It was in the deck, and I cut it out because it was hard to explain.

[00:46:05] Brian: I have pitched the same idea to, like, three different clients, and I swear to God it’s gonna happen someday. I wanted– Originally, it was for Sleeman Beer. Um, they are– Their tagline is, “Notoriously good.” So what I wanted to do is we wanted to put hotel key cards into the, their 12-packs because they were losing at shelf to Budweiser and Labatt, who could afford to put T-shirts and hats and coolers, right?

[00:46:29] Brian: So we were gonna put hotel key cards in the cases of beer, so when you took out that key card, you could scan it with your phone, and you could instantly win a night in a penthouse hotel room in your city. I’m like, “That’d be so fucking cool,” right? That’s notoriously good. Well, there’s a million reasons why we couldn’t do that.

[00:46:45] Brian: But like, but I’ve been rehashing that idea, oh, absolutely. Like, there’s definitely a vault of ideas that are so good you can’t let them go. And part of your job as a creative is to know when the idea is right and when it’s not. And then as a creative director, [00:47:00] sometimes I have to be like, “I know we love this, but this doesn’t really belong here.”

[00:47:04] Brian: Um, so yes, I hate to admit it. There are ideas that do get recycled, um, but only when they satisfy that why we love it, why we like it, why it works, um, example. Busted. Uh, Carolina, right? In the orange. 

[00:47:23] Attendee: Hey. Please don’t hate me for asking this, but, um, have you tested your generate phase against, like, what AI generates?

[00:47:32] Brian: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:47:33] Attendee: Yeah? 

[00:47:33] Brian: Um- 

[00:47:34] Attendee: Who came up with it better? 

[00:47:36] Brian: Uh, me. Of course. Um, no, here’s the thing. Uh, AI is there. Um, I definitely– I don’t like to go to AI first because I feel like it hems you in. Um, we’d be fools not to use that tool. Um, sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll throw a mini brief into it. Um, I find a lot of what AI generates tends to be more obvious [00:48:00] and more simple.

[00:48:01] Brian: Um, and maybe I’m gimmicky, um, but I find that they’re a little bit shallow. I will say that it comes up with some good tactics, which I have borrowed once I already have the bigger nuggets forming. Um, so it is part of the process, but I certainly wouldn’t rely on it exclusively. Where it is super valuable, I find, especially because I’m not a trained copywriter, I find if I’ve got, like, one headline, like, um, which one was it?

[00:48:31] Brian: Like, Annie, Annie, are you okay? Like, like throwing into AI, “Hey, can you give me 12 songs that are about medical conditions secretly?” Or whatever, right? That does that way faster than I could do. Like, that– So that’s where I find that it is super helpful 

[00:48:50] Attendee: Following up on that, what do you think about using AI for the sorting phase where it’s not- No

[00:48:55] Attendee: taking away? No. 

[00:48:56] Brian: I would– I, I, I– Well, first of all, I don’t even know how that would [00:49:00] work. Um, secondly, sorting is almost as magical as generate. It’s like you walk in there saying, “I don’t know where these things are gonna be,” and then you start moving them together and things… And only in sorting do you actually start to realize which ones are really the good ones and which ones are the bad ones.

[00:49:16] Brian: It’s like you falling in love with the ideas all over again. It’s like you’ve been with your partner for like 10 years, and then you saw the way that they ta- th- you, you saw them at their work, right? Which you never get to see, right? That’s what this is like. Sorting is seeing your ideas from a different perspective, and then they come together.

[00:49:33] Brian: So I would never trust AI to do that. You saw it. 

[00:49:40] Attendee: Thanks. Thanks very much for a great talk. Um, so when you fall in love with an idea and then it gets killed- Yep … there’s, I think, always a tendency to spiral back to that idea. Do you have any practical tips on how to let go of an idea that got killed and you really fell in love with?[00:50:00] 

[00:50:00] Brian: Not really. Um, no, and here’s the thing. It’s like, for me personally, I am a problem solver. That’s why I’m in this industry. Like, I’m a creative person who wants to solve problems. Years ago, I worked at an agency and inevitably the creative brief was do something cool, and I fucking hated it. Like, what the fuck does that even mean?

[00:50:23] Brian: I actually have to solve problems. So when I am given a new brief, I’m falling in love with that problem. Now, if the, um, key in the beer case fits with that problem, then yeah, then it might make a comeback, but only because I’ve fully engrossed myself in that problem that I’m solving first. And I know that, I know I’m not the same as every commercial creative in that mindset, but I’ve learned that about myself after 25 years.

[00:50:53] Brian: It’s like it doesn’t matter for me the industry, it doesn’t m- matter for me the product. I just want to solve a [00:51:00] good, difficult problem. Um, and so that’s how I approach it, and then the ideas have to fit for that solution for me

[00:51:12] Brian: Anybody else? 

[00:51:15] Attendee: Hi again. Um, out of curiosity, how many ideas would you present to a client? ‘Cause I’ve worked in places where they tend to focus on maybe three. Yep. It’s kind of like an expected- Yeah … unexpected, and then, like, a bizarre kind of like- Yep … oh, I left field kind. 

[00:51:31] Brian: Totally. That’s a, that’s a super common framework.

[00:51:34] Brian: Mm-hmm. Uh, I would say 75% of the time we’re presenting three. Only when we love them so much do we go up to four. Anything more than that, and the client’s gonna lose attention, and you’re just wasting your time and resources, is my opinion. Um, so yeah, I try to keep it to three, max four. 

[00:51:53] Attendee: Thank you. 

[00:51:54] Brian: There’s a question over here in blue.

[00:51:55] Attendee: Yes.[00:52:00] 

[00:52:00] Brian: Oh, 

[00:52:01] Attendee: thank you for the talk. 

[00:52:02] Brian: No problem. 

[00:52:04] Attendee: When you are, um, creating your nuggets, um, let’s say you’ve got an idea, a, a nugget starts to unravel into a, uh, an idea and- Yeah … you’re just, do you, how do you restrain, do you restrain yourself or do you let that go? 

[00:52:19] Brian: No. I go as far as I– Like, I try to never stop the flow.

[00:52:23] Brian: That’s why when I stopwatch, I repeat the stopwatch. Um, inevitably, there are nuggets that just turn out bigger on the page even before I get to sorting. So if I’ve got a headline or a script idea or whatever, I’m spawning off of it, right? It’s hard not to see the big idea, um, right away, right? Um, or I shouldn’t say right away.

[00:52:44] Brian: It’s hard not to see the big idea in the nuggets when they’re coming together, right? And so I let that happen. Um, and then inevitably what happens is I then have the same big idea like six more times, but I’ve called it something else or I’m working it in some way, which is why I go through sorting and realize, “Oh, [00:53:00] wait, these are actually the same idea.

[00:53:01] Brian: They’re just a different treatment,” right? Um, so yeah, I go with it as far as it’ll go. So don’t stop yourself. Whenever you’re in the flow, don’t stop. Ex

[00:53:18] Attendee: I think we’ll take a couple more questions if anyone has. Very Hi. Um, I found it really interesting when you shared insights about why some of your darlings were killed. 

[00:53:30] Brian: Yeah. 

[00:53:30] Attendee: Um, I’m curious about the “Just Go,” um- Yeah … health ad with the lungs. What was the rationale for killing that one? 

[00:53:39] Brian: See, I wish I knew.

[00:53:41] Brian: Um, no, I mean, there’s a lot. Healthcare in the US is extremely complicated. Um, then you throw into that the reality with many clients is that if they don’t have buy-in all the way up the chain to do something different, to do something challenging, then they’re not gonna be able to do something that’s uncomfortable.[00:54:00] 

[00:54:00] Brian: That illustration, that direct headline was very different than, “Come in and we’ll take care of you,” right? So the brand manager on board. CMO, less so. CEO, definitely not, right? So this was a case where the brand manager got out ahead of the organization, and the organization just wasn’t ready for it. So they, it, they just left it to die on the vine.

[00:54:26] Brian: Um, and what they ended up doing is just running more of the same. “Got a fever? Call us,” right? And it’s like, eh, eh, great. Right? Um, they were just, they just weren’t ready, which sucks ’cause we poured our hearts into it, and it went nowhere 

[00:54:42] Dan: Last question? Yeah, last question. Last question. Great. Um, I got a question.

[00:54:46] Dan: So, uh, when you’re pitching these ideas, the ones that get killed, um, do you have the other ideas, the other three ideas, whatever? Are they gonna pick one of those, or are you pitching with other agencies, or how does that [00:55:00] work? 

[00:55:00] Brian: Uh, it depends. Um, hopefully there is one of the three gets chosen. Uh, usually what happens is they’ll choose one, sometimes they’ll choose two, and they’ll be like, “Here are the revisions.

[00:55:12] Brian: Here’s the things we’re not sure about. Come back and make revisions on them.” Um, I have not had to work in a competitive pitch in a long time. Um, but that you– I mean, I don’t even know if they still go on, to be honest. It’s a lot of resources and a lot of cost. Um, and in Canada, that doesn’t make as much sense because the ad budgets aren’t as big.

[00:55:33] Brian: Um, ideally, they choose one of the three concepts. Often there’s a round of revisions that follow. Every once in a while, the- if they like none of it, well then usually it’s me going to talk to the lead strategist to being like, “Hey, there’s some disconnect,” because if we agree that the three concepts were on brief, then there’s something wrong with the brief.

[00:55:58] Brian: The client is not on [00:56:00] board with the strategy that you pitched. Let’s come back with alignment before my team goes in and executes again. That’s the whole, like, client management side of being a creative director. It’s like, yeah, you gotta think like they do