How To Work With Your Agency’s Innovation Lab
Over the past decade, agencies have begun to build out internal hubs of digital and tech innovation in order to foster new ways of thinking and show clients that their capabilities go beyond traditional formats.
More often than not though, these innovation hubs don’t have an impact on the day-in-day-out creative process and are instead used sporadically, mostly for new business.
As clients are now looking to their agencies for new ways of thinking and new types of output, comms planners should be looking for opportunities to incorporate the innovation lab into our usual process in order to make an impact on creative development.
8 TIPS FOR WORKING WITH YOUR AGENCY’S INNOVATION TEAM:
1. Meet them!
Many times the innovation lab is behind closed doors and most people don’t even really remember it exists — find it and go introduce yourself!
2. Understand the specific skill sets of the individuals who work there.
If your brand (let’s imagine Swiffer, just for fun) wants to build a housecleaning robot, but no one in the innovation lab knows how to build robots, they’re not going to be able to help you. Just because their titles might include words like technology or inventor doesn’t mean they can do absolutely everything; tech is of course a wide-open playing field and there are many specific skill sets people specialize in.
3. Be willing to invest in them.
To get them started on ideating, you will likely need to invest a bit of internal budget. But this should pay off later when you can increase your scope by selling through an awesome incremental idea!
4. Brief them & include them in creative reviews.
Just like your typical creative team, this tech team will need a brief. Should it be the same brief? Probably. But you may also want to include some more specific direction about the type of solution you are looking for from them. Should they be briefed at the same time? Definitely. An argument could be made that you don’t need to bring them in until later on, after you have a big idea for the campaign, but this could lead to the tech team’s ideas feeling disconnected from the work, when really, if what you are trying to get to is an integrated digital-first campaign, you want the tech idea to be integral to the campaign idea.
5. Make the tech idea integral to the campaign.
Clients see cool ideas that are easy to dismiss all of the time. If you make the tech idea a core part of the campaign, that’s less likely to happen. Make a killer TV spot that they fall in love with, and make it all about that Swiffer house cleaning robot–that way, you have to make the robot to make the TV spot.
6. Make sure they are working with the creative team.
The only way you are going to end up with integrated ideas between the traditional creative team and the tech creative team is if they work together. To write the TV spot about the house-cleaning robot, the creative team needs to have the idea about the house-cleaning robot–and that is what the tech team brings to the table.
7. Ask them for a prototype.
If it makes sense to build a prototype, do it. It will help you, and the clients, understand the idea and make it more likely to sell.
8. Make it feel real by putting a number on it.
Tech ideas need budgets and project timelines just like TV spots do. Some innovation labs have their own producers who can help with this, but if not, bring in a producer who can help to estimate what it would take to make the project happen. Having this number on hand will help sell the work because you will easily be able to answer what is sure to be the first client question–“Great idea, how much does something like that cost?”
