How to explain an idea.

When I was doing AWARD school, my second agency was TBWA, and my tutor, Jarrod Lowe. He was impossible to get an idea past. Hated everything. Even though we were greener than Shrek, he pretty much treated us like senior creatives when presenting work. Nothing was ever good enough. Some of the other students struggled with it, but I loved it. It made me better, and fast. (It’s also why, and I will stand by this to death, a lot advertising students that come out of four-year university degrees, are still not ready - because they’ve been coddled instead of critiqued like this.)

I still remember, maybe 3 briefs in, when I finally presented something he liked. But even then, he still got incredibly frustrated by how complicated I was making the idea sound as I fumbled to explain it. Words skating out of my mouth like Bambi on ice with buttered hooves.

From memory, the brief was to promote the movie ‘World War Z’ via a ‘non-traditional’ idea. But my idea, or more so, rambling mess of a thought at the time was something like this:

“So, like, everything to do with the zombie apocalypse is about survival, right? Like every zombie movie is about heroes surviving through the zombie apocalypse, and people watching it are supposed to somehow imagine themselves as these amazing people with survival skills that would make it through a zombie apocalypse. But, to be honest, I wouldn’t last 5 minutes. I wouldn’t be surviving that shit. I’d be a zombie. And if I’m gonna be a zombie, then I’m gonna have to eat brains. Like, we’re all gonna have to eat brains. So maybe, to prepare, we need to make eating brains more of a normal thing, maybe we need to make eating brains cool.”

Jarrod then, from memory, told me to ‘shut the fuck up, stop talking, that’s it’. He then pointed out that it’d taken me like 3 minutes to explain something that should’ve been a sentence or two. This is when I really learnt the age old format of:

INSIGHT, IDEA, EXECUTION.

If you cannot break your thought down into this structure, with maybe a sentence or two for each, at most, you don’t have a simple enough idea yet. Or, you just don’t understand your own idea well enough yet. You haven’t whittled the wood down enough. It’s still a clumsy blunt club. And what you need is a spear with a razor sharp pointy tip.

Insight: When the zombie apocalypse comes, it’s likely we’ll all just become zombies.

Idea: If we’re gonna become zombies, we’re going to have to get used to eating brains.

Execution: We make eating brains appealing by getting a bunch of celebrity chefs (Gordon Ramsey, Nigella Lawson, Marco Pierre White etc…) and turn them into zombies while they cook brain-inspired dishes.

Now, probably not the world’s greatest execution, let’s remember I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but enough to demonstrate the point.

Over the years, especially with junior creatives, but even so with those with more experience, succinctly explaining/selling an idea is an elusively rare skill. I cannot tell you how many creative reviews I’ve sat through while a bunch of people ramble on and on and on for multiple paragraphs and slides while I sit there trying to decipher just what the fuck the actual idea is. And if I can’t figure it out, a rando on the street walking past or scrolling past it hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell.

Breaking your ideas down into insight, idea, execution is still to this day one of the best ways of not only explaining ideas, but pressure testing them to see if they’re ready. It’s fine to even frame them that way. ‘The insight is x, so the idea is x, and we’re going to execute it by doing x’. Perfectly fine for creatives with 20 years under their belts to still use this structure. However, you can also streamline it by connecting the three in a couple of sentences.

When the zombie apocalypse comes, let’s be honest, none of us are gonna survive and we’ll all just become zombies. And if we’re gonna become zombies, we’re going to have to eat brains, so to drum up hype for the release of World War Z we’re going to turn Gordon Ramsey into a zombie and have him cook delicious brain meals on TikTok.

There you go. That’s a pitchable idea in two sentences that you could fit on a single slide. You could even shorten it further if you want to pull out some of the personality.

One of the reasons why this format is so nice is that it shows days, weeks, months of thinking in a sentence or two. It contains strategy, it contains truth, it contains insight, it contains a creative leap, it contains media, everything a client needs to understand the idea is baked into it.

And this isn’t just an advertising thing either. It’s just how ideas work. I was listening to Rick Rubin chatting with the legendary RZA on his podcast, and he asked him to explain his creative process. He paused for a moment and said, well, there’s my observation, my imagination, and then my inspiration.

Observation, imagination, inspiration.

Insight, idea, execution.

And this was the same in any event. For the uninitiated, RZA is the brains trust behind the Wu-Tang clan. And, unquestionably, one of the most notable creatives of the modern era. A producer, a rapper, a poet, a writer, a multi-intrumentalist, a filmmaker, a composer, an actor, a leader, a visionary, amongst many other expressions.

So, before your next creative review, take a moment to look through all your scraps of paper, google docs, and decks - and try to boil your thoughts down to insight, idea, execution, and see how tight you can get them.

Because if you can’t, the idea probably isn’t quite there yet.