Over the years many clients have asked, "where do you come up with your ideas?" We understand how people could think this... seems that the agency takes notes, goes away, then shows up with no real explanation on what it took to solve the marketing challenges.

Frankly, there are many unique approaches to inspire creative problem solving, and since coming up with ideas is a big part of what we do, we thought we'd share a couple of our ideation techniques that helps Geared develop effective solutions.

We'd like to add, we are media neutral. Whether it’s a website, direct mailer, television commercial or social media solution we’ve worked in it. Whichever is the most effective medium – that’s the right answer. Ideas drive the medium, not the other way around.

The Morphological Matrix

A technique for organized thinking. Developed by the Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974). This method requires you to consider all the logical possibilities. It may appear difficult but after a few attempts you may find it very effective in organizing visual elements.
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Osborn's Checklist

Alex Osborn created a type of checklist to stimulate new ideas. Coming from advertising himself, he originally conceived it as a method of improving and expanding on existing products, but then retooled it to generate more ideas specifically for advertising.
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Associational Thinking

This technique was created to help new creative minds understand how to approach a marketing problem in a practical way. In fact, Geared's founder, Bil O'Neill, has been teaching this "visual and word association" technique to college students for over 10 years. Many of his student's work has be recognized in the industry's creative advertising awards shows
Click here to see an example