The Awen Group

Sometimes a visual is so strong it conveys all the meaning and emotion needed for a campaign. Small children and animals generally fall into this category. So when The Awen Group was asked to produce the Cleveland County Health Departments Spay & Neuter campaign, we knew we were in for some big puppy dog eyes, pulling at the heartstrings, fluffy, cuddly images.

An exercise we like to use to get the creative juices flowing is First Impulse Headline. Amy selected a number of stock photo images and passed them around to get our gut reactions. There was lots of “awww how cute” and “don’t you just want to take him home” to be heard around the office and some great ideas came out of the exercise.

On the other hand, some ideas were definitely on the “that’s hilarious but we could never actually present that to the client or we would be so fired” end of the spectrum.

Here are some of our favorites from both sides. Be sure to leave a comment to vote for your favorite.

Just like you shouldn’t run a marathon without stretching, you shouldn’t start a creative brainstorming exercise without stretching your mind. It’s bad enough to pull a hamstring, can you imagine pulling your frontal lobe?

Here’s an exercise we did yesterday before beginning a brainstorming session for naming a new real estate development project. You start with a word, any one will do and ones related to the project are even better. Then you write a sentence where you use the letters of the original word for the first letter of each word in the sentence.

Did you follow that? Check out the examples below for some clarification:

FARMER

Frank and Rene made edgy rhymes.
Frank ate red meat eagerly, really.

MARKET

Must Amy risk kicking every tourist?
Me and Rob kept everything together.

BANNER

Boys are not nice ever Rachel.
Bob annoys Nancy nearly every reunion.

Want to play? Leave your own sentences in the comments section, we’d love to read them.