How Formulaic is the Creative Industry? Consult the Wheel of Concept
July 10, 2011 by Nate Winter
You’re pitching a deck of big ideas to your client tomorrow. Problem is you have no big ideas and no deck. What’s a creative to do?
Consult the Wheel of Concept, of course.
Click here to try the Wheel of Concept now.
It’s great. Just leave the contents of your presentation up to a quick spin of the wheel. No thinking necessary.
Of course, this site wasn’t meant for actual presentation use—at least I hope it wasn’t. Most creatives aren’t lazy enough to actually use the Wheel of Concept for client work, and most clients aren’t naive enough to be impressed by the results. Even so, there’s a guilty pleasure in seeing what’s it’s like to break the rules. Kind of like the faux fraudulence suggested in Expense A Steak, a fun microsite developed for Maloney & Porcelli’s steak house in Manhattan.
So Wheel of Concept is ultimately a joke, but I think it provides more than just entertainment value. It’s a smart comment on the clichés of the marketing business. This little site boils the entire creative industry down to eight trendy and embarrassingly ubiquitous tactics—Go Viral, Crowdsource, Online Community, App, Check-In, Social Gaming, QR Code and Augmented Reality. That on it’s own is poignant enough.
But then the site uses the brand you typed in to churn out a ready-to-go presentation document, explaining the tactic. Your brand’s name and logo are part of the design and copy of the document. And the copy is saturated with tired marketing buzzwords you've heard a thousand times. Even the creative industry deck slide is pretty accurately represented as a landscape-oriented page showing sans serif copy and the client’s logo in heroic full color. The execution in this web experience is spot on.
Ultimately, Wheel of Concept points out the predictability of our industry. Most of us don’t consider ideation a multiple choice game, but this helps us see how narrow our thinking can be at times. That’s not to say that we’ve exhausted all the original and worthwhile uses for a QR code or an app, but they’re well-worn tactics. So let’s innovate and develop new tactics—ideas that aren’t on the wheel. Idea big enough that they’ll be on the wheel five years from now.
