The Big Jam

In 2004, while working in Moscow, I was challenged with a global pitch for Campari but did not have the talent nor the time to approach it. A Danish colleague called Patrick Isaak told me of an approach he used in his agency about creative brainstorming where he eliminated time for creative development making colleagues work LIVE.

I took this thought and elevated it to a multi-cultural creative sprint for global audiences.

I invited a planner and 4 teams composed of a copywriter and art director from 4 different countries and immersed them in Rome where we ideated for 3 days.

The first presentation of ideas was only 20 minutes after briefing and then 40-minute sessions there on after. This resulted in about 100 ideas on the first day while the second day yielded 80. A global campaign needed more than just a television spot, so this process helped identify and qualify a big idea to span across a few other touchpoints.

Thanks to their different cultural origins, the teams brought in ideas other teams would never have considered. Together, they inspired each other and the ideas were amplified  to create global relevance and cut-through.

Together with my then boss & mentor (and friend) John Pallant we expanded this process across Europe and the rest of the Saatchi & Saatchi footprint. We kept the name “Tribe” as was originally coined by Patrick Isaak for his local Danish agency work.

Apart from leading national agencies, my roles have mostly been regional and global, so I spent time perfecting this process and evolving it to suit the changing landscape and growing time pressure.

Early on in its development, I realised that when teams are live and relentlessly delivering creative ideas on a brief you need to feed them with inspiration. I felt it was important to have speakers join and give them a perspective from outside the agency world.

In the beginning my choices were the obvious ones of film director or musician. However, depending on the topic of the brief, I felt the need to widen it to start-up founders (B2B), fitness instructors (movement), opera singers (breathing), industrial designers (hotel development), art collectors (art investment for private banking) and so on.

Seeing this dynamic development in action and the scale of the creativity, began to sow the seeds of what would later become my philosophy of ÜberCreativity*.(see the section)

When I moved to the Serviceplan Group, I took my methodology there and called it the ÜberJam. Serviceplan´s House Of Communication structure where all disciplines were under one roof allowed me to amplify and accelerate the approach bringing media experts, digital geeks, planners and even clients into the mix. It was like having a full box of “toys” at my disposal.