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Amanda Joly

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We all have the same job: making better ideas

Published by Amanda Joly on June 24, 2010.

This sounds like such a simple, basic, notion.  Unfortunately we don’t always behave in a way that is conducive to actually producing better ideas.

How do ideas percolate?  There are many ways to develop and facilitate building ideas but at the heart of building successful ideas is successful COLLABORATION.

Collaboration, according to Wikipedia, is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together toward an intersection of common goals…by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. We all talk about collaboration, after all it is it is one of our 5 behaviors at GSW (#4 working collaboratively), but how each person approaches and practices collaboration can be vastly different.

I am by no means the expert on this subject but I do know this, when I am engaged in way where my thoughts and ideas are respected, when I feel part of something that is bigger than me, I am more motivated to develop and share ideas.  When I feel like I am brought into something at the last minute, or better yet, when I sit in on a meeting to kick-off a project, leave the room with no clear direction, and then receive a note asking for my piece of the presentation, I don’t get that same motivated, engaged feeling.  In fact, it is sometimes de-motivating because you don’t see the entire strategy or the ideas to support it.

So, using my own experiences from other agencies and GSW, I jotted down a few quick tips to guide us all in being more collaborative…and to help us all get to what we do best more often – sharing and making better ideas.

  1. Collaborate early, often, and consistently.  Not just at the beginning of a project but at the beginning, in the middle, at the presentation, and at the end.
  2. Assemble people who offer different perspectives of varying disciplines/skills.  If you only talk to colleagues with a point of view similar to our own, we’re only cultivating a portion of the knowledge and experience available to us.
  3. Use collaboration as a means to build team connections and raise morale.  If you have a really difficult problem and the team collaborates to solve it, it fosters the importance of team participation and let’s everyone know their ideas are valued.
  4. Turn “outsiders” into stakeholders.  By collaborating with clients, customers, and other agencies we strengthen their belief in our ideas and lessen the “us versus them” mentality that is sometimes pervasive in our industry.
  5. Don’t forget to listen and be authentic.  Many times people use the guise of collaboration as a means to further their own ideas or agenda.  To truly collaborate you have to be open, honest and unbiased.

No matter how hard we try to foster the behavior of working collaboratively (and most of the time we do it well), let’s face it were all human and we get stuck at times, we behave badly, and we start over…

Making better ideas isn’t always easy, but it is our job.

Categories: New ideas and approaches
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ajoly

Two questions to refocus your media strategy

Published by Amanda Joly on April 16, 2010.

The Ad Age Digital Conference took place in NYC the week of April 12th. While much of the coverage and discussion was focused on digital strategy, one article in particular struck me as highly relevant to our business.  The article was different because it focused on striking the right balance of “old” and “new” communications channels.

Within the piece, the president-CEO of NPR (yes, National Public Radio), Vivian Schiller, discusses their approach to embracing and adopting digital channels such as blogs and smartphone apps and how a strategy of striking a harmonious balance between the use of “old” channels (e.g. TV, radio, print) and “new” channels (e.g. social, blogs, Apps) has delivered success.

“Ms. Schiller tries to strike a balance between going ‘back to basics’ and jumping on ‘every bright, shiny object that comes along’.”

NPR has realized that they have to be extremely selective when thinking about the channels they use to promote and distribute content related to their stations and the network as a whole.  Let’s face it, they rely on the public for their operating budget so they cannot be wasteful or mesmerized by every new digital idea or tactics that presents itself to them.

Each and every channel idea whether “old or new” is approached in the same way and they ask the same questions:

  1. Is it useful to the NPR consumer?
  2. Will it produce quality content to engage that same consumer?

So, how do we take this best practice into action within our pharma-focused world where, let’s face it, things are just more complex than in the consumer advertising world.

As complex as we tend to make our work, the same two questions that are asked above can and should still be applied to everything we do:

  1. Is this or will this be useful to oncologists?
  2. Will it help to produce quality educational or brand-specific content to engage oncologists and oncology nurses?

Answering these questions at the inception of the planning process when we are thinking about appropriateness of channels will help focus our efforts and will even help answer the burning client question, If we only had one dollar to invest, where would you put it?

When we adopt the mindset of our target audience we have a much better chance of building a cohesive, connected communications plan where the recommended channels and tactics are most relevant to our audience versus a list of 350+ tactics that have minimal connection or foundation to what our audience wants or needs and instead are based on the hot marketing trend or are trying too hard to include the newest channel on the block.

Throw out these two questions and see what happens.  At a minimum, your colleagues and clients will appreciate being re-focused.  At a maximum, we can improve our ideas and output.

Categories: New ideas and approaches
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