Load-bearing ideas
Concept · 6 min read
Architects know in advance whether a wall can hold a roof. You can test a creative idea the same way in an afternoon.
Most campaign ideas fail at the second channel, well before launch.
The film works and everyone loves it. Then someone asks what the idea looks like as a banner, and the room goes quiet. Six weeks later there’s a banner with the logo, the colours and a line that sort of rhymes with the film. The idea never made it in, because it was only ever built to carry the film.
In architecture school you learn early that some walls divide a room and others hold up the building. They can look identical, and you find out which is which before you knock one down. (Ask anyone who has renovated a flat in Belgrade without checking. Actually, don’t. They’re still upset.)
Creative ideas split the same way. Some are decoration: a nice line, a striking visual, a clever execution. Others are structural, and every channel can rest its weight on them. In a pitch meeting the two look exactly alike.
So this is the stress test I run before an idea gets anywhere near a deck.
1. Say it without the execution
Describe the idea in one sentence without mentioning the medium. Skip “a film where…” and say the idea itself.
If the sentence collapses into “it’s really about the feeling”, the idea is the execution. That’s fine for one beautiful film and a problem for a campaign.
Didn’t Go passes: people regret the trips they didn’t take, so end every film on the person who stayed home. The sentence names no channel, and you can already picture five.
2. Hand it to the worst channel
Every idea has a channel it hates, usually the 6-second bumper, the poster read at 50 km/h or the in-app notification. Take the idea there first.
If it survives the worst channel, the good ones are a formality. If it only survives the hero film, you have a hero film.
3. Give it to someone who wasn’t in the room
Explain the idea to a junior designer in two minutes, ask for three executions, and look at what comes back.
Three different directions means the idea is too vague to hold weight. If you get back the three you would have made yourself, the idea is doing the directing, which is what you want.
4. Ask what the tenth one costs
The first execution is always expensive, so look at the tenth. A structural idea makes each new piece cheaper because the decisions are already made. A decorative one makes every piece as hard as the first, because someone has to find the magic again each time.
Grip, the tyre series in my portfolio, runs on one structure: a person, the thing they hold on to, and a tyre that only turns up in passing. The tenth film needs one new person. The first one needed every decision.
5. Try to break it on purpose
Find the most sceptical person you know, ideally someone from finance (they’re very good at this), and ask them to kill it. Don’t defend it. Listen to where they push.
Structural ideas bend and come back. Decorative ones crack at the first “but why would anyone care?”
None of this takes long. An afternoon and one sceptic cost much less than finding out in week six, when the banner is due.
Engineers have known the underlying rule for centuries. Load goes wherever the structure is, however the wall looks, and if there’s no structure it ends up on the floor.
So does the budget, incidentally.