SCABs

The Post-it note book – by @MrBenGolding

Ben Golding

By Ben Golding

 

The Post-it note book

It’s last Tuesday. The day before the final final final D&AD hand-in on the Wednesday. Our video is looking pretty good, its taken a week to come up with an idea and get the thing made, so we’re feeling pretty chuffed. Ready to upload. Ready to be done with it all.

It’s 8AM and we are sat in Costa, like every day, talking about work.

Then a wild idea occurs. What if we do another one? A 24hr sprint one? That ‘Brave’ one seemed pretty open and interesting. One of us calls up the briefs and we have a quick read through. Yeah, that seems do-able. Only if its something with a short time scale for a reason. Could we get through all the briefs in a day? That’s been done before. But what if we could go from nothing to a placement in 24 hrs?

What if…

Let’s do it.

And so this is how Mikey and I found ourselves traipsing around some of London’s finest agencies with a book of hastily scribbled post-it notes. I sent a bunch of emails all over the place asking for some last-minute help and thank-god some people replied. I won’t give you the long version of what happened at MrPresident, Albion, W+K and RKCR but there are some good learnings. So listen closely.

  • Just because it’s a difficult idea, doesn’t mean its a good idea. (The two can be easily confused)
  • You can put a book together on the tube if you need to.
  • Never put yourself in a position where you need to make a book on the tube.
  • People buy people – everyone asked us to come back with REAL work
  • Getting out there is always good – hopefully they told their friends and colleagues about us
  • Having great strategy is important, but you’ve got to have great executions as well.
  • Sometimes you just need to DO something.
  • It’s important to know when to cut your losses.
  • You can’t land a placement with a post-it note book.

As much as people rave about the ‘big idea’ being the most important thing, they also want to see as much of your thinking and creative work as possible. In a cut-throat industry like ours where there seems to consistently be teams ready to jump into every available slot, you need to have every string on your bow taut and ready to fire from the get-go. For me, thats not a post-it note book, but I hope I learned some things the hard way on the journey to finding that out.

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