Formulaic and not awful?

There’s a great fear in creative pursuits, the fear of being formulaic. Formulaic work happens when the outcome of habits and tendencies overtakes curiosity. It’s not the fault of the tendencies and habits. It occurs when the creative stops exploring nuance and lets the habits dominate.

But what does this have to do with advertising? Everything in a world demanding a continuous flow of content.

A formula, or framework, can provide a foundation of known components to explore and build upon. With that, curiosity has room to work and develop. That’s when something interesting can be found and developed.

A framework can free creatives from having to focus on many impediments that get in the way of finding the unique. A framework is an arrangement of components that establish an effective platform to work from to achieve a desirable outcome. It removes the time and effort spent considering all the options and allows that effort to be focused on what’s truly important.

Using this approach, I created a series of organic social videos for Jewel-Osco. The series has a simple objective — help people avoid food waste by providing useful food storage information.

These are four videos from the series:

By developing a framework to use for the project, the creative and production was accomplished quickly. Creating each video simply required choosing an item and finding the relevant facts, then sourcing the photos and quickly animated within the predefined style. This approach allowed for numerous videos to be created quickly, while still allowing for engaging content.

So maybe it’s time to be a little formulaic? We might just get to great faster and easier.