Tag: viral marketing

How can you reignite your creative spark?

Prioritize fun! Great creative output is always an outcome of fun, freedom, and happiness – not the other way around. The more you’re having fun, the more your mind flows freely. Ideas happen when dots connect naturally.

You can’t force it. Just go for a walk, play a game, chat with a friend. What’s that one activity that gives you joy? Do that for 30-60 minutes and come back fresh.

Creative roles aren’t like traditional jobs. Your success depends on the quality of ideas you produce. And that’s always an outcome of fun, freedom, and happiness.

I remember working on a video once.. which went on to become the one with highest engagement in Asia a few years back… Before we finalised it, we just took a break for a few hours.. filming slow-motion shots of toy cars falling off the table For an hour we made Hollywood style footage with our phones.. After that, we got back to work.

About deadlines, break projects into manageable chunks with mini-deadlines, one brick at a time. Don’t get overwhelmed about building the entire wall. You need progress, not perfection. Celebrate the tiny wins. The more it seems like an adventure, the less overwhelmed you’ll feel.

In my experience, the best ideas come when you’re not trying so hard. So loosen up, have fun, and let creativity flow!

How can you ignite creativity within your team?

Your team is accustomed to strict protocols and feels boxed in with office structures and processes.
Here’s how you can ignite creativity within your team and what worked to produce killer content in the last ten years…

1. Fun

Great ideas are always an outcome of fun. The more fun we had, the better our output. We played TT, charades, watched shows, jammed to music together… Always Prioritize Fun.

2. Break the rhythm

Disrupting routine sparks fresh thinking. Once, I had the team stand on chairs for a meeting. It looked ridiculous but broke the monotony, jolting minds to the new… Another time we drove to the airport together just to return… got stuck in a jam… we had our brainstorm in the car :) Shake up the routine.

3. Free flowing jam sessions

We held unstructured brainstorming where ideas flowed freely. These ‘jams’ allowed for wild, unconventional thinking, often leading to breakthroughs. No idea, no contribution is wrong, and everyone must feel safe to share freely without judgment. Magical dots connect when everyone is in the flow… jamming.

What’s your craziest example of shaking off routine to ignite ideas? Do share… :)

Viral : gimmick vs method

If you look at viral as a gimmick, it will always be out of reach… but if you look at it with a method… it’s the best way to market your brand.. :)

Everyone loves a viral, the uptick in engagement, talk of the town, 15 sec of fame… but loving the outcome and not the process is a dangerous path in my experience.

It’s not about viral, it’s not about the outcome; it’s about the process. The goal is driving engagement regularly, so we are part of our audience’s life as often as we can because branding today is about relevance.

How many conversations can we start? How many are we a part of? It’s not about recall, where we keep yelling at the user.

With the goal of engagement, the way we look at content becomes crucial—the only thing that matters is “share-worthiness” in my experience. If the content is not worth sharing, it just dies down, or you need to spend a lot of money to bring it in front of people.

Viral is just an outcome; like laughter on a joke is an outcome, But what’s the process? Are we obsessed about if people will laugh or do we work on our setup and punch line?

It’s the process of creating shareworthy content, the creative culture to enjoy the game and not be under pressure to hit a six on every ball… so we can focus to create ten pieces hoping two will work.

I feel everything a brand creates, any marketing communication must be shareworthy, period.

Learning from the trenches over 10 years has taught me to focus on only one thing which matters in all of marketing mumbo jumbo :)
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Thanks for the poke Sandeep Balaji on Arindam Paul ‘s post.. suno fir ;)

Ads vs. Content – Capturing Roller Coaster Experiences at Imagica Behind-the-scenes 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TMcT8eNVrI&pp=ygUOYWFzaGlzaCBjaG9wcmE%3D

Ads focus on the brand, the USP—how cool we are, look at our shiny logo or products. Content that is share-worthy starts from the audience, is made for them, and the brand goes along for the ride when it goes big. The content shouldn’t be about the brand or category but about the people, the audience who would use it.

Not about roller coasters, but about the people who take them.

To get a sense of the place and the rides, I took a cab from Pune all the way to Imagicaa, an incredible theme park near Mumbai. Spent hours going through it all, and then came back, jammed with the team, and settled for a simple one shot taken with a GoPro tied to the roller coaster, compared to fancy drone shots or showcasing how cool the place is.

That simplicity of idea and execution made all the difference. The roller coaster was an amazing metaphor for life. The team worked and deep-dived on the list of pointers many times until the flow seemed natural; then it was ready.

It’s not about how fancy the production is, it’s about storytelling—about how simply we can connect A to B and make it for and about the audience, and that starts by exhaustive deep dive, looking at the audience from multiple vantage points, creating for them :)

Proud of how the team executed, shot, and stitched it together with multiple rounds of reviews.

Now, imagine this format for your brand or your audience, what real life experiences can be metaphors for your audience’s pain points or user journeys.. fill in the blank, and you may have content that is truly for your audience