I want your brief to feel impossible.
If the answer’s obvious, then you probably haven’t gone deep enough to identify the right problem. In fact, most briefs I’ve been handed (unintentionally) have a solution where a problem belongs. While that sounds like a win for creatives everywhere, it’s a dangerous convenience and at the center of most inadequate creative or worse: well-produced, enticing creative that doesn’t solve any problems for anyone.
When you hand over the brief, we should be baffled – all staring at each other with blank stares (at least at first). We should be so stumped that we can’t even begin to offer up solutions, but only clarifying questions.
That’s the magic of a great “problem to solve.” It doesn’t always inspire immediate answers. But it inspires immediate curiosity and investigation. Digging down past the surface into that insightful underworld where our audience’s actual experience exists.
For best results, toss in extra constraints: a tight timeline, some budgetary woes and a dash of inconvenient PTO just to keep things interesting. Because it’s in that tension of limitations that our minds stretch beyond expectation and arrive at real insightful solutions.
In other words: Baffling Problem + Impossible Constraints = Insightful Creativity Give me that unsolvable problem…as impossible as you can get it.
From there we’ll get the cogs turning and the bridge building toward a strategy that moves actual needles and achieves grander objectives.
