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A new client has been onboarded; everyone is excited for a new challenge, a new way to put their skills to the test. The client arrives for the briefing meeting, disregards all the questions, and says, “Surprise us. No idea is a bad idea.”
At first glance, this is the dream brief: no red tape, no strict obligations or blueprint, and no cooks spoiling the broth before it’s even made. Pure creative freedom.
Everyone rejoices at the fact that they’ve finally found a client who won’t be a barrier to their creative expression. They go to the drawing board and then, nothing. Where do we start? In actuality, this “brief” ends up wasting exactly what it was meant to save: time.
The Brief That Isn’t a Brief
While “Surprise me” might come across as a vote of utter confidence, in reality, it is an incomplete instruction packaged as a complete one.
While the client and the agency might truly believe the “No idea is a bad idea” concept by simply throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks, the client actually has an idea of exactly what they want to see. Their idea of good is there in their mind, but just hasn’t been articulated or expressed. They might have a kernel of an idea from something a competitor did, a style they want to incorporate with their quality, or a statement they want to make about the brand that they just aren’t confident enough about yet. Not giving a brief doesn’t eliminate the internal evaluation; it just puts the onus of scratching an unidentified itch on the agency.
When actual surprising work is delivered, the client says, “Maybe not this,” and steps back, waiting for the agency to figure it out.
Constraint Is a Creative Gift
Restriction is where creativity is born. Infinite resources often lead to unfocused “blue sky” ideas, whereas constraints can lead to focused choices and practical development. As the old adage goes, it takes two to tango; creativity needs something to work against: a word limit, a set palette of colours, or a deadline.
Take Fevicol as an example: for decades, the brand communicated one message to the agency: Fevicol holds things together, permanently. No ever-changing market positions, rotating campaign ideas, just one slick mandate. That constraint gave birth to some of Indian advertising’s most talked-about work: the “Joint family” ad, “Pakde rehna chodna nahi”, and “1959 A Love Story”. The limitation of one clear message meant the creative team were forced to keep coming up with newer, sharper ways of saying the same thing. Complete freedom to say anything about the brand would have likely produced forgettable, run-of-the-mill work, since there’d be no singular vision to build the humorous concepts around.
Setting strict parameters like “must work within 5 seconds of a scroll”, “no use of the colour red” or “must address a middle-aged man in a small town” gives birth to smarter, one-line thinking.
What Actually Happens in the Room
When teams lack a defined endpoint, the first concepts fly in all directions, since everyone has a different brief in their mind and a different idea of what the client needs.
Since there was no objective brief given, the idea generates emotional feedback such as, “I just don’t love it”. Feedback like this is non-actionable, as this comes down to taste and subjectivity enters the evaluation stage.
The project ends up requiring more rounds than was projected, even when freedom was given precisely to save time.
The Real Ask Behind “Surprise Me”
“Surprise me” can sometimes serve as a shortcut to bypass the unattractive work of defining objectives, target audiences, and success criteria, which some clients prefer to hand over to the agency for execution.
Helping out with the briefing is a sensible request in itself; however, it must come with the precursor of being a separate deliverable, and an agency can conduct market research and test campaigns with focus groups in order to find the right way ahead, as opposed to going into campaign development full steam ahead with no defined end-goal.
Final Word
“Surprise me” works best when it comes attached with a “within this”, with the client’s real task being attaching tangibility to “this”, and attaching real meaning to it is what makes the surprise possible from the get-go.
The blank page is dreaded in every creative profession; some ideas can be born from it; however, some of the finest creative ideas arise from the borders closing in; a limitation, whether self-imposed or not, in hindsight, seems imperative for the idea’s success.
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