“Working with Mark enabled me to switch from account management to become a creative. He’s a magpie with the unique ability to draw insight and inspiration from so many places. Thanks to him, I learned there is genuinely no such thing as a boring brief.”​
Tom Hills, ECD, John Doe​
POP! TRAINING
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Do you find brainstorms lacking in results?
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Are you looking to transform your creative culture?
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Do you want to deliver bold, disruptive work that will win awards and new clients?
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Are there ‘hidden creatives’ among your team waiting to be discovered?
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How can you prompt the RIGHT idea to ‘POP!’ into your head, even when you least expect it?
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Do you want to learn the art of disruption?
“There is no such thing as a bad idea!”. There really is. And the problem is that far too many of them see the light of day. So, why run a creative session with a cliché, a platitude and a call to mediocrity?
None of my ideas, none that you will see in my portfolio, came from a brainstorm. Yet, how much time do agency teams spend brainstorming ideas each week without ever really nailing the brief?​
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Creative training for business and brands is also fundamentally flawed, tending to focus on the abstract (“What would Beyonce do?”) or random connections, rather than practical approaches, questions to ask and focused connections. We don’t need ideas. We need the RIGHT idea, because the flip side to creative thinking is critical thinking.
WELCOME TO POP!
The very first practical training that takes groups through the process from brief to campaign activation. Using real-life examples of many tough briefs I’ve tackled, plus many inspirational campaigns I admire from all over the world, POP! will change the way you and your colleagues think and empower you for future challenges.​
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A key part of the session is Five in Fifteen, an exercise in which groups will receive a seemingly impossible brief, then discover they have the know how to come up with five amazing, earned media ideas in just fifteen minutes.
Times, channels, audiences and brands may change. The POP! method remains the same.
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Interrogating the brief / problem to be solved
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Why there is no such thing as a dull brand, business or sector
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The importance of being a magpie and checking out what has been done before
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Why all great work is disruptive
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There IS such a thing as a bad idea
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Why you should forget about the client (yes, really, but only for a bit)
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Why you should never, ever forget the target audience
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Never start with ideas, find the hidden TRUTH
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Heroes and villains: how can we be a force for good?
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Finding your creative assets to work with
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Cracking the toughest briefs – with award-winning examples
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The Magnificent Seven: the creative techniques you need to know
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Building up / stripping back tactics for maximum ROI and impact
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How to act when the ad agency launches a really dumb idea with zero earned value
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Critical thinking: when you’ve got what you think is a great idea, try to kill it
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Who will give a shit about your idea? And what could go wrong?
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The inside story on how the PR Week Campaign of the Decade was created from scratch
“Every time we came to Mark with a challenging brief, his response was exactly what we wanted and nothing like what we expected.”​
Joanna Dring, Head of Media and Communications, Heineken UK