Many larger “full service” advertising agencies, through no fault of their own other than growing, can end up as a collection of siloed P&Ls. This wing is for the advertising team, that wing is for PR, and that wing over there is for digital. Oh, and media? You’re on a different floor completely. While this built-in insularity is good for the health of the respective disciplines, it’s not always good for coming up with the best ideas for an agency’s clients. And that’s because ideas are generated within those disciplines and not across them.

An in-house agency at a major retailer is extremely talented but their creative people are incredibly busy with the day-to-day retail output and even if they weren’t their teams admit they can get pretty close to their business. Too close, sometimes. Like they’re inside a wave and can barely see beyond the plunging breaker. So they want some outside thinking to help break out of past creative paradigms. Specifically, they really want this fall’s TV campaign to be different from anything they’ve done before.

What this use case illustrates is that Ideasicle X can be a powerful weapon in a time-constrained pitch to jump start an agency’s creative process. Within days Amy had forty ideas she wouldn’t have otherwise had. And her favorite ten ideas inspired her own teams to come up with new ideas. Amy could have started the creative process organically with nothing or she could have started with ten ideas on the wall. She chose the latter and within a week had four tight, fantastic ideas ready for presentation. And enough time to flesh those ideas out further than the client required.