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LEFT-BRAIN CREATIVITY

How Sharp is Your Axe?

Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
ABE LINCOLN

Left-Brain Creativity is an incredibly concise way to describe an incredibly in-depth process. It starts—like so many of the best solutions—with a lot of questions. We ask them of you. We ask your audience. We ask ourselves if we can think of any more questions. We look at both sides of the same coin (e.g. the problem you think you’re solving for your customers versus the problem they want you to solve). In other words, you get some time with the sharpening stone, too. So get ready.

Creativity starts long before the creative team does.

Now that we have all these answers and observations and insights, our strategists study them. Draw connections. Look at them through the lens of your goals. Always searching for the nugget that can truly differentiate your message, and then crystallizing it all into a plan of attack.

Figure 1: A sharper axe cuts deeper.

As a fulcrum of that plan, our media team blends traditional planning and buying with digital specialties to constantly explore new ways to pinpoint audiences and maximize tactics. Are TV and online video the right outlets for your audience and budget? Is social smarter? Maybe online display complemented by both terrestrial and streaming radio that all drives to a landing page? (Again, more questions lead to better answers.)

When the axe is sharp enough, the creative department finally takes a swing. And while the metaphor is about cutting something down, what they’re really doing is building something more powerful than the tree ever was. Something compelling. Something to help you blow your goals out of the water.

When we swing the axe, it cuts deeper.

Oh, and did we mention that despite our best efforts, there’s always room to improve? That relying on 20/20 hindsight gives us even better foresight? Enter: the analytics team. We track results and analyze data to learn what worked, what could’ve worked better, why, and how to improve on it the next time.

You’ll notice that this particular step in the Left-Brain Creativity process, seemingly the last, is geared toward making the axe even sharper for the next round. That’s because the end of every project is really the beginning of the next one.