The concept of invention – creating something that has never been created before – gets a lot of agency folks excited, but incorporating invention culture into traditional agency culture is about as easy as getting an ECD to give up his beloved Panerai watch for a Pebble. As Thomas K. Grose of Time so eloquently put it, “ad agencies, after all, are supposed to be in the business of selling products invented by others.”
But who would turn down an opportunity to bring a new line of business to their agency and inspire their people to look beyond the ad campaign? Who doesn’t want to bring proactive thinking to a client’s business? What client doesn’t like a little extra for their retainers?
And, really, who doesn’t like just building stuff?
The key here is in treating invention as a support for a larger cultural underpinning – understanding not only what is currently missing from a client’s offering, but what is most desired by the client and their target audience (not necessarily in that order).
Do Your Homework
The lowest hanging fruit is often found where there are gaps in a client’s product/service, or a client’s competitors’ offering that you could evolve or make better. This is a great place to start. It requires a lot of research and hands-on time with your clients to intimately understand their business models and overarching goals. This exercise also helps break you out of the “campaign to sell” mindset that works as a default trigger to idea generation.
The other side of the coin is looking at the cultural relevance of client’s business. What elements of their business (or of their competitors) have made their way into the zeitgeist of your target’s day-to-day world. What is top of mind? What do they aspire to do? What are they talking about? From there you can find some key insights and then set goals around filling those needs. In more cases than not, the target audience doesn’t even know what they want or desire, and sometimes it takes a new product to fill a need they didn’t even know existed.
The quote “Find a need and fill it,” was first coined by Ruth Stafford Peale, the wife of author Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking back in the early 1950s. It’s been one of the core principles in how we work to integrate “invention thinking” into each and every step of our strategy and ideation processes.
In context, it could be as simple as “We need to fill the need for greater customer/product engagement while in store.” Or as challenging as “Our brand needs to be cool again in the eyes of multiple targets across a number of independent market sectors.” Certainly as a goal, invention doesn’t always have to incite a global paradigm shift in consumer engagement, but it should put your client in the lead as far as progressive thinking and consumer end value.
Tools and Prototyping
Inventions can certainly take any form. It could be a new platform for storytelling, or a yet-to-be-created piece of technology. Hardware- and software-based inventions seem to be the areas that have the most ground still to cover – arduino boards, Raspberry Pi and dissected XBox Kinect sensors oh my!
This element of invention can be the head spinning part of the learning curve when it comes to actually bringing some inventions to life or squeezing out a working prototype for client demonstration purposes.
Really, you have two options. Look to partner with fabricators and technology partners, or dive right in by looking internally at those who are closest to the technology that you already have in your agency repertoire. Believe me, it’s a much shorter leap to evolve your software developers into hardware builders. In a lot of cases, you will find lots of closet tinkerers in your organization if you build them the space to play.
Ultimately, we all recognize that the advertising industry continues to evolve at a faster clip each day, and while we are all at different development stages, invention needs to have a role in our collective evolution. After all, we will not succeed (or survive) by continuing to do what’s already been done.
Cameron Wykes is the Chief Invention Officer at KBS+
