How to hack creative efficiency

If you’re working in communications right now, you’re part of a new golden age.

According to the Bellweather report for Q4 2024, provisional marketing budgets for 2025/26 are anticipated to grow 25.6%. The UK advertising market value is expected to be worth $27.74 billion in 2027, with a projected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.45% from 2023-2027. Within this boom, creative teams are put under increasing pressure to produce ideas for campaigns that excite audiences and hold true to a brand’s core identity. But time isn’t on their side.

Creative efficiency is the concept of delivering a brilliant campaign idea on time and within budget. Sounds simple, right? However, many fail to understand how to achieve this efficiency, using the time given well and blocking out unnecessary distractions.

Back in the day, creatives could spend weeks at a time honing their ideas. Now, the industry is under more time constraints than ever, yet expected to keep delivering the goods across an increasingly diverse media landscape.

We can develop processes for ourselves to build brilliant creative content within these new parameters. But we need to understand what creates creativity, how our brains make something out of seemingly nothing and figure out how to do it quicker. The deadlines aren’t going anywhere, so we need to find a way to hack creative efficiency.

Understand your left and right brains

I know it’s more complicated than this, but at a simple level, the right side of the brain is used most when we create. It’s where our emotions, imagination, memory, and social understanding come from. The left brain hosts our logic, analytics, and reasoning functions. Both are needed to master creative efficiency, but traditional creative approaches mean both sides are fighting and stumbling over each other.

By isolating the functions, the right side of the brain has the freedom to create without the constant reasoning of the left side doubting your ideas. The good news is there is a simple way to practice this.

Apply the 20/20/20 method

Letting your creativity train loose is not about ignoring the brief. The brief is the tracks on which your train will run. You can have lots of fun with trains, they can be different shapes and speeds, but they still need to run on the tracks you’ve been given by a brand. The 20/20/20 method is a great place to begin.

Turn everything off. Shut down the laptop. Find a quiet corner. Get into the zone (I like to listen to music that fits the genre), and get the brief and a blank piece of paper in front of you. Yes, paper. Free from distractions and connected to the page.

For the first 20 minutes, you question and query the brief, make notes on it, scribble illegible words and highlight the most important things to remember. Left brain in action. This is the time to understand, investigate and really drill down into what the brief is asking you.

For the second 20, write down as many ideas as you can. Let the right brain run free. Don’t worry about spelling, repetition or about the validity of the ideas, just try and isolate that creative thinking machine. Flood the page with whatever falls out of your brain. Try to keep the pen moving and writing but resist the temptation to re-read what you’ve just read or look back at the brief. Stay in the zone.

Now, put down your pencil, and you re-read the brief. Spend the final 20 minutes objectively highlighting the best ideas with the brief. You’ll end up with at least one idea that works and a catalogue of ideas that may need tweaking but are ultimately on the right track. Then, and only then, share your ideas with your colleagues and develop them in the cold light of day.

Open up your culture of creativity

A common problem with creative efficiency is that the tighter the time frame, the more pressure it puts on creatives to be right the first time. This can generate self-consciousness around sharing creative thinking. It’s the agency leaders’ job to build a culture of openness and playfulness, reducing the pressure on their team.

If there is anxiety around sharing ideas verbally, writing them down is a great way to tackle this.

Take the 20/20/20 method. It’s written and only takes one hour. If everyone in the creative team did this for a brief, you could all come together for a brainstorm (I hate this term, but you know what I mean) without fear of saying the wrong thing because there are 15 pages of ideas written down to tinker with and build on.

For agency leaders, fostering creativity is the most important thing when tackling creative efficiency. It’s not the role of the creative director to be the most brilliantly super-fantastic creative that always has the winning idea. It’s about harnessing the creativity within the agency to find that chef's kiss idea that hits the brief and delights target audiences.

So, create space, give your creatives room to breathe and let them get into their own head space. That pitch-winning idea isn’t going to fly through the window. It’s something you need to work hard on. Although it sometimes feels like a bolt from the blue, it’s not. The creative brain never turns off. All the time you’re out and about, listening to music, watching movies, walking in the park, your brain absorbs stuff, so when you get to that middle twenty-minute patch of creative freedom, that’s what your brain is pulling on. This method isn’t about limiting your input and turning creative offices into ideas farms. This is about taking time away from procrastination and that dreaded blinking cursor.