No shopping carts: Design thinking for ad creatives

As I prepare to exit the agency world and move client-side for the first time, my team asked me to prepare some thoughts on some areas of my experience. I agreed. This is part two of a several-part series on doing creative work in the world of digital-first advertising, and a distillation of what I’ve learned over 8+ years of agency life at Essence and beyond, as a designer, writer, and all-around creative problem-solver.

Ghosted by Design Thinking

Underpinning every TED talker, every creative director, and every over-enthusiastic whiteboard artist is the chillwave slowjam that is Design Thinking. That spectral force, that lucid dream, that process, through which an infinity of perfect solutions are not only possible, but right-in-fucking-front-of-us.

Ok, so maybe I’m being too harsh.

But while Design Thinking, a five-step problem solving methodology made famous by product design and engineering firms like IDEO, is a beautiful, logical and fascinating system, I’ve found that no one in my field quite knows how to apply it. And like any language or software, becomes benign when not applied in the right way, to the right situations. And no amount of IDEO idolatry can change that.

While the five step process seems to mirror a traditional creative studio’s process, in practicality, it tends to break down. When every brief is different, when client feedback demands amends before you get to prototype, and when teams are paid by the hour, it just doesn’t work:

This is a lie.

Wax on, wax off

In my quest to figure out how to apply Design Thinking to our creative process at Essence, I ended up using Design Thinking principles to dismantle Design Thinking principles. (Surprise. We’re getting meta.)

Design Thinking asks us to first observe our users and empathise with their experience; to look for hacks and workarounds, and to identify where they struggle. When I attempted to apply Design Thinking to my process end-to-end, I found that it had too many steps to apply consistently, and as a result, I was only applying phases of the process in isolation. On the bright side, I found that I had the most success with the ideation phase.

Our next task is to define the problem: I needed a way to turn an iterative process into a method that worked sans-iteration; as Brad Leone says, “One shot, one kill.”

I’ll spare you the gory details of three years of ideation, prototyping and testing the perfect way to spin this process, and skip to the good part:

Design Thinking is how we think about what we think about.

I know, I know. *masturbatory hand motion* but stay with me here.

Design Thinking is really a set of guiding principles that are meant to help you think laterally. Outside the box, and outside the brief. And that is a very good thing.

Watch this absolute delight of a time-warp video, and you’ll see what I mean:

I mean, for the fashion alone, am I right?

There’s one really important thing in there. Did you catch it?

“We’re not actually experts at any given area, we’re experts on the process of how you design stuff.”

Here’s where the important connection comes in. As advertisers, we shouldn’t consider ourselves experts at selling (in my case) subscriptions to the FT and hardware for Google, we have to be masters of creative thinking.

What the Chief Moustache Officer of IDEO teaches us is to set down our briefs and our copies of Campaign Magazine, and to actually think for ourselves.

Instead of drawing inspiration from campaign work in your sector, or even campaign work in general, ad creatives benefit massively from channeling the puzzling powers of lateral thinking (Design Thinking’s stoner cousin).

If this feels like an SAT question, you’re on the right track.

I ended up distilling the grand vision of Design Thinking into one good question I could ask myself and my team:

What lives outside the world of our brief that could inspire us?

And then you just channel your inner James Joyce and consciousness the shit out of vague tangents and wild free associations for a while. The result ends up being something like this example for Custard Creams:

Here’s a bunch of stuff that’s connected BUT NOT CONNECTED to Custard Creams

If you’re any good, you can see at least four or five viable campaigns in this board. My personal favourite is the hieroglyphs–– see? They’re like the little swirls on the biscuit kinda.

Flare, then focus

The other critical bit of this method is knowing when to reign it in. We ideated above, and now it’s time to prototype (sort of) by applying the constraints of the brief back to your idea. After thinking outside the box, you’ve got to be able to fit it back in the box.

For me, a quick storyboard is a good stress test.

He likes it! Hey Mikey!

This storyboard is a good jumping off place. It’s not perfect, but it works. We have taken our brief from insight, to lateral thinking, to idea, to a simple execution (relatively) painlessly.

We’ve used a five step process to unpick a five step process, and develop a new two step process: question to prompt lateral thinking, then test. Give it a shot with your next creative brief.

And, if it doesn’t work for you, maybe even apply a bit of Design Thinking and perfect your own process.