Walking down Canal Street in SoHo the other day, I felt an unexpected thrill tinged with nostalgia. Living in a new, vibrant city (albeit a chilly one) at a certain age has its charms, but this feeling was different. Here at One Minute to Midnight, we’re having a strong finish to a fantastic year, with the team buzzing, new accounts rolling in, and deeper relationships building with our long-term clients. But this was more than just excitement about the business.
As I thought about it, I realized I was finding the work increasingly inspiring, fresh, and stimulating. There was something familiar about it, almost like a return to something I hadn’t seen in a while.
For the past 25 years, I’ve worked with creative ideas across a range of categories and countries, often on the ground with some of the world’s largest brands. In the last decade or so, much of that work has been close to campaign launches, checking if the ideas resonate with their intent, or sometimes post-launch to analyze what went right or wrong...but qualitative research has always had so much more to offer in terms of delivering creative potential.
Over the past year something’s shifted at One Minute to Midnight. Increasingly, clients are asking us to get involved earlier in the creative development process. And that’s where this excited nostalgia was coming from. Early in my career, a lot of my work involved helping to shape ideas in their early stages – experimenting with creative constructs, developing initial scripts, and nurturing ideas rather than testing or evaluating them. Back then, it wasn’t about testing but about developing something meaningful.
When “testing” and “evaluation” became the normative language, consumers were asked to critique and judge creative work. But they’re not qualified to do that. This shift took a lot of the fun – and, frankly, the inspiration – out of the process. There is of course some role for this in a robust, thorough process but it has been given way too much emphasis in the last decade or so.
Yet, when great qualitative research is used early in the creative development process, it brings a host of benefits, particularly in four interconnected areas:
Strength – Early-stage qualitative research helps build the intellectual integrity of the fundamental creative idea. It gets to the heart of why an idea resonates with audiences, making it resilient against the doubts of new MDs or the opinions of a CEO’s partner.
Power – It ensures that the creative construct designed to convey the big idea resonates with the audience. By understanding deeply how the concept works with consumers, it can be optimally refined for maximum impact.
Inspiration – Listening to the language of the audience and observing how they engage with the idea can inspire creatives, helping them spring-board further into the oceans of their imagination to come up with truly original work.
Confidence – Early-stage creative development research done well de-risks the creative process as creative ideas are given the oxygen they deserve early on to be their best selves and are thus more likely to get through with flying colors any testing / evaluation processes closer to launch
This is what’s bringing back my enthusiasm – and yes, that nostalgic thrill – as we seem to be experiencing a renaissance in creative development in its best form...qualitative research being used early on in the process as ideas are being developed as opposed to finished. By focusing on nurturing ideas rather than testing them to death, the work is becoming more inspiring, robust, and resistant to subjective feedback from internal stakeholders.
Early-stage creative development feels like a lost art making its way back. And I couldn’t be happier about it. It’s fostering a more engaging, creative environment filled with big ideas, strong constructs, and inspiring executions. Bring it on.
For all your Creative Development Needs why not reach out us at weallarrived@oneminuteotmidnight.life.
Peace,
Paul Laver, Co-Founder of One Minute to Midnight
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