Back in November 2013, Scott Burns and I spoke at the Event Tech Conference in Las Vegas. If you’re not familiar with Event Tech, it’s a conference developed by Event Marketer to celebrate all things experiential marketing. Each conference builds on a theme and November’s was specific to digital with an emphasis on social engagement. A few months prior, Switch’s marketing/PR group had volunteered Scott and I to discuss the trending topic that warrants much debate, but yields little answers from agency folk … How do you create the right balance between physical and digital engagement at events?

Those of you who have attended a session by Scott and myself already knew it was going to be awesome and couldn’t wait to take your seats. But in case you were stuck at the black jack table, the bar or even behind bars, here’s a little insight as to how our last presentation came to be.

Obviously, every agency has a process that guides how a project deliverable is crafted from start to finish. Regardless, once the brief is delivered, at the end of the day, there’s a group of people sitting in a room trying to figure out how to put it all together. What’s the strategy? Creative concept? Activation plan? Success metrics?

With these questions in mind, we decided that the presentation might be a good opportunity for us to develop a framework that provides our teams a more efficient approach to brainstorming, problem solving and even brief writing. In the end, we determined that we needed to create more structure around the brainstorming process without, well …creating structure. Knowing that the least inspiring path to creativity is a checklist, we had to make the structure a part of the process, but not dictate it.

The end result? A collection of open-ended questions that Scott and I realized we were often asking ourselves. To avoid the creative-stifling checklist, our series of questions were designed to either work in a linear manner or to be referenced as need be in any order.

In addition, we felt that the best use of this collective brainstorm would be to open source it. So, for our faithful readers, feel free to download the guide, print it out, shuffle it up and share it with your team. Hopefully, you will find that it helps you just as much as it has helped us. Thanks for playing!

To learn more about the Experiential Formula Guide, please contact Chris at chrisd@theswitch.us.