Fun @ Work

When did you last see an idea that made you laugh out loud?

24 of 60 could name something from this month. 21 had to reach back a year or more.

The most absurd idea I ever presented that never got produced

• making slimfast the rebooter for the goodliving
• In the early 2000s, MIchel Gondry invented the concept of "Sweding," which is to make cheap, homemade versions of popular films and TV shows. This was all from Please Be Kind Rewind. Cheez-Its was coming out with its new baked line and wanted to be thought of, by consumers, as the go-to TV or movie watching snack. So I pitched that Cheez-It should recreate popular scenes from TV shows and movies where all the characters are the new, baked Cheez-Its. IP laws aside, I thought it accomplished the brief perfectly.
• Spicy paint (boat owners mix cayenne in paint to dissuade mussels so why not sell it industrially?)
• One armed man painting a house.
• Potato or bum. A visual guessing game for a pesticide company.
• Start A New Species - for Diesel jeans. All about casting and creating anything but humans. Weird aliens, odd creatures, ghouls, men in black type oddities. It was amazing.
• For a few years, we were trying to kidding/not kidding get Whiplash the cowboy monkey into a spot.
• A parody christmas-themed horror movie for a teen fast-fashion brand
• getting people to eat a meal above niagara falls
• 6-month paid paternity leave
• A live video challenge to list all the animals.
• A PR stunt idea for the launch of the very first Microsoft Xbox in Europe in early 2002. Microsoft should announce that they have been hacked after declaring another delay in the launch date for the Xbox. This would have resulted in the Xbox launch making it into the national news.
• Patty Labelle sells outdoor deck furniture as a talking deck named Patio Labelle.
• the crazy stuff never gets produced
• Turning a comment on Reddit that a specific gym was “paid unsexy dungeon torture” into reality by rebranding accordingly.
• purposely crashing a truck on the 405 to create space to do a freeway jump stunt
• An ad where baristas throw pandas into a huge machine to make coffee.
• Putting giant earmuffs on abandoned telephone boxes [healthcare campaign to show need to keep children's ears warm in winter]
• A promotion to win the chance for you and your friend to have your heads cryogenically frozen for Bud Ice called “buddies for life”
• We had a global shipping client that was trying to convince their customers to switch from paper airway bills to online (this was easily over 15 years ago). The campaign was tied in with halloween for some reason I can't remember. Anyway, one of my ideas was a severed finger in a box with the line "all you need is a finger"... which of course had the room in hysterics but understandably didn't get produced. I did however end up using the line on a parody print ad last year.
• Stevie Wonder driving an autonomous vehicle to pick up chips for a super bowl party
• making a Anthony Davis unibrow instagram filter
• A special pajama for Christmas whose printed design had patterns made of seasonal QR codes that could be scanned to buy in a marketplace (with special discounts) and thus escape the usual chaos of Christmas. We'd send those pajamas to some influencers who were wearing and activating their pajamas in the comfort of their homes while doing their content.
• B2B Steel manufacturing client + metal band on tour.
• I'm a strategist, I don't understand the question. ;-)
• Pitched the idea to a music streaming platform to turn what’s app “Generic Happy Diwali GIFs” into a QR code/ embeded music files that would help people send Diwali Music Playlists instead.
• Condoms to illustrate a product differentiator.
• a non-trackable online marketing campaign
• Verizon-flavored Doritos
• 1000ft poop emoji
• We didn't actually pitch this in the end, but I still think about it. We wanted to raise awareness of a very boring Highway Code rule, which was to open the door in the car you were in with the hand furthest from the door. In doing so you look over your shoulder and so can spot on coming cyclists who often get 'doored'. This is called The Dutch Reach. You might be thinking that sounds quite sexual, like a reach around. We thought our audience (largely 18-24 year old men) might think that too. As a result, we wanted to play into this. The idea was to get a Dutch porn star, wearing a detached car door to go up to people on the street and either a) ask them what they thought a dutch reach was or b) perform what they thought the dutch reach was. Film it. Bam social content!
• For an HR association and regulatory body > a campaign where we used a “squid-games-esque” environment to demonstrate the worst workplace in the world. Clients loved it. We produced it. Their board refused to let it air.
• Parent Porn for a well-known baby brand.
• :-( Nothing presented. Creative Directors have reigned it in
• the future of content consumption, what if we stopped reading.
• A scratch and win contest based on scraping random car windshields in winter, looking for a golden ticket on one car.
• A sitcom about employees at a McDonalds
• An annually changing logomark
• Idris Elba dressed in PJs reading a bedtime story to calm sleepless money anxieties
• For McLaren cars to represent "the future of feeling...."
• Maybe I need to try presenting more absurd ideas. But mostly, I need to work for parties that would listen to them.
• A metaphor for our product, one that came through as an acquisition and would be white labeled as our own. Effectively, if we were Costco, this product would be our “Kirkland”
• Homer Simpson to replace Jennifer Anniston as the smartwater ambassador
• I wanted to create a tecno-tuna band for a band (not the fish, but a Spanish tuna: https://www.laregion.es/asset/thumbnail,1280,720,center,center/media/laregion/images/2023/05/12/2023051217033111829.jpg)
• It’s actually staggering how blank my mind is on this point!
• advertising sodas outside of healthy peoples routes/gym etc; like handing out donuts in front of equinox
• Tinder fish photo idea for a fish brand
• For a car company (ten years ago pre-Tesla) - giving buyers the 'ultimate' test drive, where they could take the car home, rent it to pick up their kids when they were in a pinch, or even take it on a roadtrip for 48 hours to test it before they bought it.
• To train a parrot to showcase some Amazon Alexa voice commands. Due to a SAG issue, which is too dumb to explain, we weren’t allowed to use any human performance for the spot. This meant no actors, no voiceover, no puppetry, no silent mime work, etc. Now AI exists and I will never get to spend billable hours on something this exquisitely stupid.
• An app that facilitates organ donation (for a healthcare company)
• it was some kind of pun/wordplay (rash from acne sounds like a exact place in my country of georgia, and i tried to connect skincare with that mountain place because of the healing characteristic of the fresh air) the idea itself wasnt serious from the start. but anyways
• A floating flame on the Seine
• Branded extra-long dehydration pee sticks as an awareness/prevention measure. The client made a drug that treats pancreatitis in dogs.
• A cult
• Fisher Price hires toddlers

The most fun I've ever had doing work

• most days
• Photo assignment for a city visitors guide. Just me, the camera, and hearing origin stories from storied local hot spots and businesses.
• Being on set, fixing lines, pitching jokes.
• Pitches with a good creative director
• Web series when the digital world had nothing todo with performance.
• Internal creative workshops at my last agency.
• Making something that felt genuinely useful as a tool. A digital tool helping teenage girls chose the correct sports bra dependent on activity and personal shape and development.
• brainstorming one on one
• Writing a script for a branded sketch comedy
• a store walk for a retail account we won earlier this year. we were only supposed to be there for an hour but ended up spending the whole afternoon there. meeting people, sharing stories, trying products and then getting a bunch of free stuff.
• Putting tags on a concept with total freedom
• Doing communications for the entertainment industry, traveling internationally, and, for example, flying through the hall of the Disney Tarzan musical on a rope.
• Late night creative/strategy presentation creation for ASICS' biggest, most tech forward running shoe in decades.
• probably during a night time production on the streets of Barcelona
• concepting with my team
• Any time the flow hits, basically. When you’re riding that wave, everything just clicks.
• Writing a script about fertility medicine from a chaotic toddler's point of view.
• When I started in a small agency that was intent on doing everything no one else was doing (see above)
• We had to produce an ad for a Volvo Trucks UK that was promote a brake disc offer, whereby you got a free spanner set. I was given complete free-reign and came up with the line "STOP, Spanner time!" using a little MC Hammer silhouette on top of a brake disc. Not an award-winner but it brought a massive smile to my face and surprisingly the client bought it.
• Brainstorming and developing strategy-cepts (creative-ish idea things) to help sell in a brand positioning. Strategy + kicking ideas around + scamping = what's not to like
• Doing social media for an nba jersey event
• Probably use some oracle or tarot cards to get to some word, concept or twinkle that would serve as a starting point for some ideas.
• Turning off slack notifications and stay in a room for hours with my favorite creatives, a whiteboard, lots of snacks and some beer.
• Seeing creatives coming up with something silly that actually works!
• The most fun I had was designing a walk-in exhibition for a pitch to help them buy how much we know about their consumer. What I loved the most was, the print pieces and artefacts enabled us to view link their digital behaviours in the context of their daily routine activities. Allowed us to make our insights a lot more actionable.
• Anytime I’m working with good people getting what needs to be done, done. When ego and politics are checked at the door. Any project can be fun, it’s the people that make it fun.
• creating concepts in in-person brainstorming sessions with diverse group of colleges
• mocking up telecom-branded rolling papers
• Songwriting
• Drinking in the pub after work? Going to brainstorms that are not my own.
• So many times I can’t count. It’s when we’re all in a flow, laughing, bouncing ideas around with each other. Often just being silly and serious at the same time.
• Working on the above baby brand that wanted to be "unhinged"
• Coffee shop brand - day spent in the food testing lab making concoctions. Also spent a day driving airport vehicles once.
• Surprisingly explaining design thinking to a legal team so that they could implement it for their department
• Working until 2am on a campaign idea that got killed with two people who are now good friends.
• E-Sports tournament with clients in Texas
• Crowdsourcing insights via typeform while researching for a conference panel topic.
• Running up a skyscraper
• Photo shoot for a yacht brand. Lolling around on deck for a week in Majorca.
• Collaborative projects. Where the lines between roles are less visible.
• Traveling to meet customer who were using our products.
• Going to Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in hospitality - just to get to know the club for a commercial project
• When working with creatives, at brainstormings
• Recently it was during an ice breaker at a workshop where people had to reveal things about themselves
• working at miami ad school and going against the norm
• a couple of days ago while working on an asthama campaign, the insight came from a dark joke about drawing parallels between being breathless and a song named breathless
• Just hanging out talking to my colleagues at the desk.
• Honestly, sounds crazy, but on pitches. Even though it's intense, you get everyone in a room, going a bit mad because it's 1 am, but everyone is throwing ideas around and having a drink. That's where camaraderie is built!
• I can’t nail it down to one: I’m just tickled whenever I get to be an idiot with smart people. However, one time my partner spent the weekend watching Jim Henson YouTube videos, and learned how to make a functioning puppet for a client presentation. I still think about Tom.
• Strategy for a dog food brand
• Helping a creative get unstuck -- and it working!
• such experiences mostly occurs while developing the creative idea. i dont exactly remember one
• Gloving up and helping with a holiday themed charcuterie board with a cannabis brand. Hand-selecting nugs out of a 10 gallon tub, arranging vape carts 'aesthetically', and trying not to knock over a beaker of oil that was worth about as much as my car at the time.
• During proactive work!
• Jut jamming with my creatives, without a looming deadline or nervous energy from everyone else around us.