Tired of staring at the blank page and running campaigns through email and messaging apps, Paul Charney, CEO and founder of Funworks, knew there had to be another way.

He found it by blending the corporate marketing world with improv comedy to create a TV writer’s room-like setting. In a workshop at The Conference 2017, Charney and Creativity Architect Erica Fortesque turned an entire ballroom into a giant writer’s room, inspiring everyone to take part in creating a litany of TV show ideas revolving around a random crowd-voted on product (shoehorns).

While companies and agencies are always obsessed with technological innovation and pumping their messages out to the world through every new app, channel or scheme, Funworks focuses on process innovation.

“Don Draper is dead and so is his ad model,” Charney said.

Funworks believes how we get to ideas has not been addressed in the same way as their distribution models. Whether outsourcing to agencies or by working internally, the model is inefficient. Funworks takes people out of cubicles, off exhaustive email chains, and into the room together. It shows the industry’s leanings that this might sound like a novel concept.

Going against traditional business practices, Funworks brings the clients into the room at the very beginning, to generate ideas creatively and strategically together. This is seen as suicide for most agencies but for Funworks it’s essential. Not everything shows up in a brief, Charney believes, and these clients have been thinking about their products for a lot longer than you have. They have ideas, and with the help of “insightful cultural observers,” AKA sketch and improv comedians, Funworks promises “a smarter, faster, funner, creative process” that hinges upon extreme collaboration and design thinking.

Funworks has found that clients will take risks, and give ideas that they normally wouldn’t in front of their colleagues, and the tried and true “Yes and” model of improv helps build upon these.

The company has worked with a number of brands, including 20th Century Fox to bring Deadpool into the public eye in advance of its release date. Through their sessions, they came up with the idea of marketing the film as a romantic date night movie for Valentine’s Day and giving theater goers the opportunity to sit on Deadpool’s lap like Santa during the holiday season.

Funworks also helped inject life into Just Dance 2017, and life into the attendees of the panel, by getting everyone up to dance to kick off the session.

This wasn’t just a goof. Scientific evidence shows that movement improves cognitive function, and even more, that it helps us have more inventive and unusual ideas, according to Fortesque.

From there, with the help of speedstorming (a hybrid of speed dating and brainstorming) and graphic recorder Michelle Boos-Stone (of Five Elements Consulting), partners and groups came up with titles, slogans, loglines and hashtags for our imaginary shoehorn TV show.

“When we relax, get loose and laugh, we tend to gain access to a broader number of ideas,” she said. “We call it having a beer in the shower with your colleagues,” Fortesque joked.

“This is faster and more efficient than creative isolation,” said Charney. “We just need a process to achieve it, and one that’s enjoyable.”

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