The Dead Pile. Once ideas are killed, they stay dead forever. Usually.
Every creative at every advertising agency has a dead pile; their collection of ideas killed along the way by various clients in the pursuit of that one campaign that would, ultimately, get bought. The dead pile is no longer behind the door, but instead stored in the cloud or copied onto a hard drive, just in case you have to make a break for it.
The thing is, on the way to the dead pool, every idea sits in purgatory for a period of time because the client (we’ll call them God just to keep the metaphor going) the client/God says something like,
“Maybe we can do that idea next quarter or if there’s money next year.”
So the idea hangs on, foolishly, on life support, as the chosen idea heads into production. But dead ideas almost always stay dead because only one of two things can possibly happen:
Either the client has chosen an amazing campaign that is flawlessly executed and is a huge success so everyone forgets about the other ideas. (This is the norm at Division of Labor.) Or the executed campaign fails, the agency is fired and no one gives a shit about the other ideas. Either way, once an idea is dead, it almost always stays dead.
Except for this one idea. Because this one idea was presented to one of our favorite clients of all time. (We wrote about them in another blog post you can read here if you’re a true Division of Labor devotee or just have a lot of extra time on your hands.)
The client is 15Five. And last year we presented four ideas. They killed two, loved two, and ultimately chose one. But they said, as previously stated, “We love this other idea too. We’ll do it next.”
To which we thought, “Bye-bye idea. Off to purgatory you go while we go crush it with the chosen one.”
And we did. The ad campaign was a huge success. We launched in San Francisco, saw great results, then increased the media spend and started planning the campaign for other cities.
It was then that Julia and Greg, our clients, said something I’ve never heard another client say before. They said, “Remember that other ad campaign you presented?” Wait, was an idea actually getting out of purgatory?
They continued: “We always loved that idea. Let’s do it.”
So we did. We hired photographer Cody Pickins to shoot portraits of HR people. But with “The new HR” HR doesn’t stand for Human Resources. It stands for things like Hiccup Rectifier, Holistic Reviews, Humongous Reformer and Huuuge Receipts.
Our “Welcome to the New HR” tagline continues through the new ad campaign and NYC is going to be introduced to the new HR next.
Thanks to Julia Stead for uttering those words we’ve never heard before. And Congratulations to Greg Hewitt who always kept the campaign alive and just had his first baby!
Huge thanks to Dustin Smith who originally developed the idea with Division of Labor.
And to all the creatives with their own dead piles; keep the faith.