New Creative Activity

Today we, the Communications Team, did a new project in our staff meeting to help boost our creative juices. We each went through a pile of creative ads and individually answered the following questions, then shared the results with the team.

1. What is the product?
2. What is the message?
3. How did the advertisers creativity in coming up with the message?
4. How could we use the same process to help promote the church and the value of a relationship with God.

Here's an example:

Product: Land Rovers

Message: With our product you'll be able to learn the back country better than the natives.

Creative Technique: Show a 'learned person' being schooled by a owner of your product. This goes back to a concept of not focusing on 'how your product rocks' but instead 'how you'll rock with our product'.

How we could apply it: OK, these may not fly but you get the point.... Show a member instructing a yoga guru on peace, or a monk on scripture....

What's more important than the initial output of ideas is the creative process that was used by the advertisers. Product -> Attributes of Product -> User better person because of the product attribute. Then, incorporating these processes into our everyday thinking.

We came up with quite a few ideas many of which may turn into actual projects (this is not one of the best, but it's one of the only ones I have in front of me right now...). I'll post more in the coming weeks. If this one sparks an idea, post it in the comments.

It's also important to point out that this process doesn't just help the creative types (i.e. church communications). IT folks can use these same techniques too. I'll post an example of that soon also.