What is a creative theme?

Creative themes are the foundations of the campaign that help keep things consistent throughout the project. It’s the “big idea” that delivers a memorable message to capture your audience’s attention typically through a headline, tagline and visuals.

The idea is to create a few different creative themes or concepts to help you gather your ideas, research and facts enabling you to determine whether your campaign will or won’t work and how effective it will be. It’s best to have options – you can always whittle it down later.

Where do I start?

There are no wrong ideas when it comes to your planning. Providing they are relevant and not about what you’re going to have for dinner.

Next, determine what you’ll use to tie the whole campaign together. Here are a few things to consider:

• Who are you targeting?
     o Men, women, young, old, office workers, construction specialists, mechanics, accountants…
• What do you want to achieve?
     o Establish your goals and what actions you want your audience to take
• Who are your competitors?
     o What are they providing and how do they deliver it? Don’t copy your competitors, learn from them.
• How will you communicate your campaign?
     o TV ads, billboards, social media, leaflets, direct marketing, or another means
• What’s your budget?
     o Set realistic goals, adjust spending to keep within your regularly reviewed budget

Once you’ve figured these out, dig a little deeper into your target audience and how your campaign will impact them. Any research you already have will be your friend, anecdotal stories in the business will help and if you need to, carry out some research directly with you target audience to learn what will engage them.

How do I refine to the strongest ideas?

Like we said earlier, you should end up with 2 or 3 of your best ideas to become your final creative themes. Take the points above into consideration and determine which idea(s) will work best for your campaign.

To make it a little easier, here are a few points to reflect on:

1. How will this idea work throughout the campaign messaging?
2. Is it relevant to your target audience?
3. Is it engaging?
4. Are you able to expand on this and use it elsewhere?
5. Does it address your objectives?

I’ve done all of that, what next?

If you’ve established that you have everything you need to get started with your campaign, you can now start bringing your ideas to life.

This is all about the elements of your campaign that people will see, it is what will engage them and make them think. It helps your target audience make the choice between you or a competitor. The human brain finds it easier to remember and process images, so you are taking advantage of this by creating memorable and consistent visuals that tell your campaign story, consistently, no matter what the channel.