I am increasingly convinced that the creative ideas your agency generates are exactly what your clients and prospects want most from you.

I spoke to an agency principal the other day and she said they had been invited to pitch a major consumer product company’s business based simply on the fact that her agency had pitched a bunch of new ideas that the client just couldn’t seem to get from their current agency.

Now get this… the pitch was for promotion agency of record and our member did not have any sales promotion experience. To add the finishing touches to the story, the client offered them $7,500 to pitch. Twenty years ago, this agency could not have made it past the guard at this potential client. Now their ideas are so good, the client is willing to overlook their lack of sales promotion experience.

Creative counts. Ideas are important. Your agency must, and I repeat, must become a creative entity.

I was reading something Roy Spence, chairman of GSD&M, the iconoclastic Austin agency, had to say about the creative process at his agency. Following are the highlights.

Spence feels that everyone is creative at his agency…not just creative department people like art directors and copywriters.

As their agency prepares for a pitch, they gather full teams from their 800-person agency and invite a variety of paid and volunteer consultants to sit in on the creative process. In other words, the more the merrier. You would do the same at your smaller agency by inviting your whole team to sit in on the session.

The GSD&M creative process is very interesting.

The account planners, research people and account people get up first and set the stage for the brainstorming. Initial brainstorming is not done verbally. Instead, each person has a laptop and all the laptops are hooked into a single projector.

The facilitator then calls for brainstorming. Everyone “takes off” on their computer, with all ideas entered anonymously and transferred to the screen. Not only does this help people express themselves, it enables them to synergize new ideas from things they see on the screen. Literally, hundreds of ideas come forth in a relatively short period of time.

Are all of them great? Hell, no, but having a plethora of ideas in front of you tends to help you narrow them down to a workable few.

After the session, the planners and creatives sift through the ideas looking for the jewels.

I’ve always felt most agency creative/brainstorming sessions did not produce enough raw ideas to succeed. This process seems to encourage ideas to pour forth.

Try this techno-brainstorming approach. I think it will help you turn your whole organization into a creative machine.