In Episode 5, Gareth, Head of Content at Social INK, talks about creativity and especially One Minute Briefs. If you haven’t heard of OMB before, it’s a simple premise. Creatives from around the world get together on a daily basis to create a concept ad for a brief in just 60 seconds.
Here at Social INK, we’ve been involved in OMB now since March and in that time, we’ve had a few successful wins, including for KFC for the #ILoveYouBaconBurger brief, something we’re all really proud of.
You see the creative part of your brain is like any other muscle in your body. To get stronger and faster, it needs to be trained, it needs regular workouts.
We hope you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe and as always, let us know any feedback you might have.
Read the transcript
[00:00:09] Hey everyone. I’m Gareth Head of Content here at search link and welcome to the latest episode of the All About Digital Marketing podcast.
[00:00:19] Today I’ll be discussing creativity and OMB (One Minute Briefs) and how it’s proved transformational for both me personally and for Social Ink as a team and an agency. So let’s get straight to it. What exactly is OMB. One Minute Briefs. If you don’t already know One Minute Briefs is basically a Twitter platform whereby daily brief is posted Monday to Friday and invites creative individuals over on Twitter to submit entries in response to that brief. There’s only one rule which is you have one minute to create an add in response to that brief that’s it and that the responses can be as wacky as varied or as on point as you could imagine from a whole bunch of creatives. It has a significant following online going into the tens of thousands.
[00:01:25] I’ll just double check my figures now. As of today we’re looking at over twenty thousand followers for one minute briefs on Twitter so that’s twenty thousand plus people who are regularly seeing the content that’s being created by the One Minute Briefs community or engaging with it and every day there are new followers new people contributing to the creative process over on Twitter.
[00:01:52] Sso as a concept it’s a very accessible one for anybody. All you really need is a Twitter profile and the ability to sort of scamp on a piece of paper or submit some notes from your phone or you could go a little bit more technical and actually create something using Photoshop or InDesign or just something a little bit more polished more finished then the idea behind it is that the idea is king. There is no rubbish response. It’s all about creativity and seeing how you respond to a brief within a short time frame to really focus your mind and remove that fear of failure if you will because you don’t have time to self edit effectively in one minute you’ve got to digest the brief and come up with a response to the idea and the whole purpose behind it is to really really focus the mind and get you thinking quickly without fear of sort of turning a blank. You just don’t have the time to think so anything goes so long as it’s an idea and response to that brief. Not bad is a creative concept and the amount of traction it gets on a daily basis it gets is significant but we’ll come back to that later.
[00:03:18] You know without wanting to eulogize about it I started contributing to One Minute Briefs a long time ago back in 2013. So that’s a significant time that I’ve been taking part and the reason for that was I was just looking for a creative outlet somewhere to engage with a community of people who shared my enthusiasm and sort of penchant for all things marketing and advertising people who I could learn from people who I could share with and that’s exactly what it is. It is a community of online creatives and that goes from people with eons of experience to you know students to people who don’t even work in the creative industries you’ve got award winning creatives that you’ve got people just starting out on their advertising or marketing journeys. So it really is a whole melting pot of people with ideas, sharing daily and you know regularly supporting each other and giving feedback and critiquing each other’s work in a sort of nonconfrontational way designed to help people just improve.
[00:04:48] I’ve never come across anything else like it online. So there is no there are no egos which is really refreshing and people do it because it is fun and it is maintained as such is kept fun. So. I mentioned at the beginning my introduction it’s been quite transformational and when I started out I actually remember the first brief I ever responded to to do with loo roll, toilet paper and looking back at that first response I did, you know I’ve come a long way in in my abilities a wish with photoshop, with idea generation under pressure. You know being able to craft concepts and I think that you know as an exercise in creativity it’s very good for honing your creative skills.
[00:05:46] It forces you to think and think quickly and react. And I think all too often we can self edit before we’ve even allowed an idea to germinate to percolate. So it’s all about getting the ideas down. And the good came about because you can enter as many times do you like which gives you a great opportunity to get rid of all the ideas that you might have floating around in your head and then out of that bunch you know a really good one will sort of come across and may even win.
[00:06:25] So in terms of what you gain from OMB you gain a sense of community you get almost mentorship, or mentoring from from experienced creatives or people who participate daily and you know ultimately it’s a good creative exercise to do especially if you find that you may have or may experience the dreaded writer’s block or creative block or whatever if you’re if you’re stuck at any point if you find yourself stuck and it’s a good way to distract yourself and re-engage your brain and do something different.
[00:07:08] Do I saidy it’s been transformational for me and that’s and that’s true enough. I’ve won multiple briefs I’ve managed to win various prizes for some of the live client briefs prize winning briefs all of which I’m very very proud of. And you know over the last several years since I’ve been taking part I’ve seen how I’ve developed personally by engaging in this creative activity daily.
[00:07:39] But what have Social Ink gained from OMB where we started back in March 2019 after I’d sort of convinced everyone on the team of what a great idea would be to take part in OMB daily and to really sort of get our hands dirty with some regular creative work because you can get bogged down in in the day to day quite easily quite quickly but if you make time to do sort of something creative then it adds that kind of extra dimension to what you do on a daily basis. So I managed to convince the team that was what we should do. So we started off by running our own 1 minute brief we created. We run our own competition a prize brief which was to advertise social media marketing and it was a great day. It was really sort of showcased the power of the potential of using one minute briefs as a marketing tool but also it showed the potential the power of social media as a marketing channel. We wrote a case study on it with all our data. You can find that on our blog make sure that it’s in the description, in the show notes there is a link to that blog so you can check it out for yourselves.
[00:09:05] But what else have we done since then.
[00:09:07] Well we’ve also taken over OMB we’ve given Nick Entwistle who is the founder the CEO of One Minute Briefs and the Bank of Creativity. You know we asked if he would mind if we took over for a couple of days give him a break. After all it is a fairly full on sort of activity. Manning one minute briefs. So we took over One Minute Briefs for a few days and yet again we gained a lot from that. Making connections with people talking to people networking. We learned a lot from you know participating as well as managing. And as a result we created a partnership with Nick at One Minute Briefs looking to sort of use or kind of create a model whereby we all work together to help each other out.
[00:10:10] So in that way our clients can benefit from the impact that One Minute Briefs can have as a marketing. Tool but likewise One Minute Briefs can benefit from our supports and our insights et cetera et cetera so everybody is pulling together there.
[00:10:29] Social Ink has won prizes at One minute Briefs, we famously won a KFC sort of sponsored brief which was to advertise the I love you bacon burger. And yes so the team created an ad that was chosen by KFC as the winning ad for that brief. So you know that’s what we’re very proud of that. Personally I sort of represented One Minute Briefs. I’m sorry. I represented Social Ink during a World Wildlife Fund the WWF brief on which I got a runner up prize again. It was all part of the day whereby you know we were coming up with ideas for ourselves and for Social Ink and sharing that on on Twitter. So again you know being able to say that you know we can create we’ve created work for these massive brands is you know something that we are particularly proud of more and more so recently we won a brief that was run by City To Sea which is a charitable organization set up to help raise awareness of plastic pollution and help lobby and reduce the impact of plastic waste on the environment. So a reallypowerful brief which was to engage people in thinking about single use plastics when they go on holiday and try to explore options for plastic free travel. Trying to get people to think differently about the way that they use or purchase or dispose of plastic because of the impact that they can have on the environment. So as a result of that we’ve created a partnership with City To Sea after having won that brief and we’re looking to work on a campaign for them on social media using some of the materials that we produced for that brief and hopefully but that will come very soon possibly, it already exists. If you’re listening to this after the fact so do check out what City To Sea have pushed out on social media in terms of the Plastic Free Travel campaign.
[00:13:08] As you can see there are many many many positives to be taken from engaging with One Minute Briefs. But ultimately what it’s all about is finding time daily to do some creative work. Having a daily creative exercise that you pencil into your diary that you schedule and you make sure that you keep to One Minute Briefs has done for us here at Social Ink is to give us that platform almost to force us to engage creatively on a daily basis and we’ve been doing it daily as an agency since our OMB in March of 2019 and we’re going to maintain that because we can see the benefits of doing this. We’re getting quicker we’re getting sharper the ideas are flowing and it’s just making us better and those benefits just get passed on to our clients.
[00:14:05] So we see it as a win win. So, if you’re in need of some sort of creative inspiration some motivation even do check out One Minute Briefs on Twitter it’s just @oneminutebriefs and take part and contribute daily. We’ll probably see you there. So yeah I think that kind of wraps up this episode of All About Digital Marketing.
[00:14:35] Remember to subscribe leave us a review leave us some comments. It all helps towards helping us grow. It drives us to create more useful content and to share valuable insights with you things All About Digital Marketing. [00:14:53] OK so until next time, catch you later. Thanks for listening.
