A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there’s somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they’ll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you’re going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it’s going to take a long time — six months, nine months, a year — to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.” By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse — anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition — the ideation phase — a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners. Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world. Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dol

With the creative process, the key is to create a lot and edit a lot.

Make more than you need, then remove everything that isn't exceptional.

To increase the speed of innovation here, we want to increase the number of people who can contribute ideas to the creative process. … We structure programs so that we can have diversity of involvement from universities to small businesses to large businesses to garage inventors. You're looking for the maximum number of folks who can contribute ideas to the process. So we're trying to catalyze and grab the best ideas no matter where they come from, leveraging the most modern concepts of crowdsourcing and harnessing creative power. Look at the semiconductor industry. Those companies could only keep up with Moore's law by going from hundreds of chip designers focused on eking out every last electron, to hundreds of thousands of designers throughout the industry who could excel at various pieces of the design. When you open up the process like that, the number of people and the diversity of people who can participate goes way up.

The price of productivity is creativity.

Thankfully, the give : ask ratio has been well-studied. Television averages 13 minutes of advertising per 60 minutes of air time. That means 47 min are dedicated to ‘giving,’ and 13 min are dedicated to ‘asking’. That’s roughly a 3.5:1 ratio of giving to asking. On Facebook, it’s roughly 4 content posts for every 1 ad on the newsfeed.

Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend,the more you have.

In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant — it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.

The Idea Generators So let’s open the net wide and get down to generating ideas . . . I mean problems! Here’s what the process of coming up with a million-dollar business idea does NOT look like: Getting on TikTok or YouTube and mindlessly copying whatever the influencers say is working for them Getting struck with the perfect vision for a genius new product Meditating, following your passion, and brainstorming Following any other woo-woo method that promises inspiration in a box Here’s what the actual process looks like: What’s the most painful (aka valuable) problem you can solve for people . . . That you also have passion for and/or unique expertise in . . . For the largest niche possible that you belong to and understand . . . Simple enough, but takes some light and fun brainwork. Remember to focus on your Zone of Influence here (your existing community): the 150 followers you have on TikTok, the 200 in your local Taco Aficionados group, the 300 in the WhatsApp group for your mountain biking club (not to mention the 143,000 in the subreddit r/mountainbiking). Your job as a problem seeker is to go to a community of yours. You can access all the idea challenges and more examples at MillionDollarWeekend.com. Now it’s your turn. Use the following four challenges to come up with at least ten potentially profitable ideas:

Well, as a producer you always have to try and balance the creative with your finances and so it’s always a constant battle trying to give as much as you can without breaking the bank. You deal with a lot of personalities and creative ideas. But you realize it’s a collaborative process and you have to bring everyone along.

The creative process:

1. Discover – Read a lot. Observe the world. Notice.
2. Collect – Immediately record anything that strikes you.
3. Generate – Build on your notes to brainstorm lots of ideas.
4. Combine – Connect previously unconnected ideas.
5. Refine – Edit, edit, edit. Select the best.

Every 12 months we produce 8 million new songs, 2 million new books, 16,000 new films, 30 billion blog posts, 182 billion tweets, 400,000 new products.

You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.

We have the goods and we should show them. While half a million may seem like a lot of money to spend for advertising, and while it is possible that Oregon can make a creditable showing on less than that, I am sure that it would be bread upon the waters that would come back to the fold, and I shall introduce an appropriation bill early in the session calling for that amount. I notice that a similar bill, for a like amount, will be introduced in the Washington Legislature.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.