One Minute Briefs

One Minute Briefs is an idea created by Nick Entwistle and James Clancy - The Bank of Creativity. The rules are simple, you have one minute to create one idea for one advert.


This morning I sat through another Curated By... lecture at my university and this week it was delivered to us by Nick and James, creatives working at McCann Manchester. During their time at university they were in the middle of working on their projects when they set up an activity whereby they asked people to come up with an idea for an advert in just one minute. After discovering that this is a successful way of generating ideas, they developed this as a project in itself and now run One Minute Briefs. They got the idea when considering the amount of time we spend at the beginning of a brief pondering about what we are going to do. It is only when we are faced with a looming deadline and nothing to show for it that we really get moving. The idea behind One Minute Briefs is to cut out that wasted time and energy at the beginning of a project and to get you generating and developing ideas from the word go.

Their argument is that chances are you will come up with a rubbish idea because you only had 60 seconds, but it would only take you 10 minutes to do the activity 10 times over, thus increasing your chances of coming up with an idea that could actually work. Beyond this they also believe that it is a way of getting rid of the fear we all have as designers of our peers not liking our ideas. Most of the time we are frightened to generate quick ideas for the fear of them being awful, but this exercise forces us to get anything down that remotely relates to the subject. We may think the idea is awful, and there is a chance it is, but there is also a chance that somebody else can see something in it that you hadn't, and a fresh perspective could make it a successful outcome.

I am personally awful at idea generation, especially coming up with innovative ideas, and I am diabolical when put on the spot to do this. Even today in the lecture we were asked to complete this exercise and even without sharing it with anyone I still couldn't do it. However, I do think that it would be a good practice to get into. It may take me a while to do this activity with other people, but I definitely think I should consider completing it on my own for all of my projects, as it generates lots of ideas fast and cuts out a lot of that time wasting at the beginning, which is what I am most guilty for. Take the project I am working on at the moment, I have been stalling for three days now because I am coming up to the point where I need to design an advertisement, and because I don't have any ideas I am just slacking. Maybe I should consider this activity as part of my development!