Welcome to another episode of the series METHOD® Breakdown, this time featuring Bianca Guimarães. As a creative and creative director, Bianca has made cultural-driven work for brands like Tinder, Coors Light, Goldfish, and Tubi. Below is what we covered in this episode.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:37 Even When in Doubt, Lead with Confidence
04:10 The Most Important Piece in Every Brief
05:30 Don’t Filter Yourself in the Beginning
06:26 Try Everything Before You Choose Anything
08:15 Let the Project Lead the Style
09:40 Tweaking the Strategy Can Unlock the Ideas
13:22 If You Can’t Say the Idea in One Line, Start Over
14:41 Make a Question List You Use on Every Brief
15:41 When You Get Stuck Is When You Keep Going
17:11 Loop in a PR Partner Early in the Process
19:05 PR Needs to Be Orchestrated
21:38 Great Names Do Half of the Selling
22:40 The Most Important Thing to Sell an Idea
26:01 Focus the Pitch on What Clients Care About
28:33 Filming Yourself Goes a Long Way
30:07 How to Save an Idea Clients Are Dismissing
31:40 The Fastest Way to Earn Client Trust
35:13 Find Clients with Appetite for Responsible Risk
36:14 As a CD Learn to Get Out of the Way
37:44 Seeking Approval Won’t Make You a Good Creative Director
38:44 Don’t Focus the Creative Review on What’s Wrong
39:59 Trust Your Team and Let Them Own the Project
40:58 When the Work Is Not There, Step In
42:13 Bianca’s Way to Craft a Case Study
44:26 Build the Case as You Build the Work
45:27 Letting Go of Control as You Grow
47:28 Outro
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Selected Work
If you’re not familiar with Bianca’s work, here are a few standout pieces from her book:
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Transcript
Below is an automatically generated transcript from the video. Minor mistakes can occasionally slip in.
Even When In Doubt, Lead With Confidence
BIANCA GUIMARÃES: It’s like I think no matter how much confident I act, I still feel like I’m not confident for some reason. I remember being in jury rooms where after the jury, someone pulled me aside and was like, “Oh, you spoke so well.” I was so impressed by your take on that. And I’m like, I will talk in therapy about I can’t articulate myself well.
I know this is also maybe it’s because something that I felt for 20 years of my life, and it kind of came from not from me being a professional. So it was always me having a hard time expressing myself in general. I think I did get much better and maybe I just... And sure, I can recognize sometimes. I can get out of an interview and be like, “Oh, okay. That was good.” Or I’d be like, “Oh, I mumbled a lot.” I recognize that, but I still would have never described me as a confident person. And I think that it’s funny that it might just be something where I worked really hard on it, and I get better. But I think it’s the most important thing is that you make people feel your confidence in my position. Because sometimes people just want a point of view in regardless of is it the right answer or not. You just kind of like knowing this is what we have to do. It’s very important and people need to feel that. And that’s going to make it... It will make things, I think, much easier for everybody. Obviously, it’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” And I’ve done that before. I’ll be like, “I don’t know yet. Let’s think about it. See, Marani, let me run it by someone.” But I remember also having...
There was a friend of mine who I used to work with, and he was the best, the most confident person. And he would come to you and tell you an idea, and he would be like, “Yes, let me tell you this.” And you’re like, “Wow, that’s great. Yes, I love it. That’s amazing.” And then I would tell someone else, I’d be like, “It’s not that great of an idea, but he made it sound amazing.” And I think there’s something about it. As you’re presenting your idea to the client, you want to be confident. You want them to see that you believe in it. So maybe it’s because I know the importance of it. I also become very critical myself, but I recognize that I’ve become much better. And I show more confidence than I think.
The Most Important Piece In Every Brief
BIANCA: I think it would be sort of like the one-liner that you put on top of your page that you keep looking back to when you’re brainstorming. That’s like, “This is what I need to tell people.” It’s almost the takeaway in a way, but in a very simple way. So it’s exactly what I’m trying to say. So in the Sandy Hook case, it was we should stop teaching people how to survive shootings. We should be showing how to prevent.
I guess that case, that was the callback to school thing. So that maybe wasn’t the best example. But I think the main takeaway in a very clear way, in a way that it felt to me like I could already go off. During the brief, I would already be thinking about ideas or just ways in. Or just like, I feel excited to go and create the
going to my brainstorming process. And probably throughout the brief, I was like, “I don’t, my wheels are not turning. I don’t feel like I don’t get nothing. And I’m talking about like, you know, this vacuum cleaner is going to make your days brighter. I’m like, what are we doing?”
So I think it was that one line that it would be clear, but also that would get me to already see how I can have like a bunch of ideas out of it.
Don’t filter yourself in the beginning
It’s better to not filter yourself too much in the beginning. Just kind of like let things come and like write down. And as you kind of like go down in the document, like it gets, you see it’s going, getting deeper and deeper and getting better. Probably like some of the beginning stuff, you’re not even going to like go back to. And just kind of like a look, I’d be like, yeah, there was nothing. That’s not to say that you can’t come up with like a great idea right away. That’s fine.
But I, yeah, to me, it’s more just write down and then you figure out later. But I don’t think I am the person that will like think visually first either, which is funny because I’m an art director. I would think more about the concept and then I would think about, okay, how can we bring it to life visually? Sometimes here and there, there will be something that will come up. But I wouldn’t, I don’t think I’m the most sort of like, I think about visuals and then an idea come from it.
Try Everything Before You Choose Anything
BIANCA: My approach to art direction has always been very much that like, I need to try everything, which is good and bad.
But I’m almost like, I’m never done and I’m always doing different versions. So like the amount of versions that I always did of everything was kind of crazy. And that’s the way like I would experiment with kind of like color and style and like the, you know, if I’m using photography, it’s just typography and type. And just like if it’s type, what are the different ways? No way that’s not like I see now it’s not productive. I think like you don’t have to do that. Probably when I was also younger, I was like, you know, in the beginning of probably like my first year and a half in the US, it was more me helping people craft things. And so I had more time to experiment and like, until I started being able to contribute and understand what’s an idea and how to, you know, be able to add value there as well. But I just think for me, it was part of maybe my mentality also of like going down all the like rabbit holes and like testing all the things and thinking about all the outcomes, all the possible outcomes so I could like be in control of them. That’s that. Like when I’m looking for an image in like a site, I have to go into the very last page to make sure that nothing was better than the one I found before.
And so for me, it was always about like experimenting and trying different things and trying maybe the opposite of like what I thought was even right for that idea.
And just getting to just basically kind of like look with fresh eyes in the morning and just reevaluate and then keep going. So there’s just, it feels like a lot of experimenting.
Let the Project Lead the Style
I think there are a lot of creatives that have like their own styles and sort of like, oh, that person is like really great at that thing or that person like, oh, I can’t see this is a XYZ type of spot or a type of like, oh, that was like, feels so up like someone like that person’s alley. And I’ve always tried mostly because generally I was interested in like different things to not have like one specific thing that I’m like kind of this is my formula, this is my style, this is my thing. And I like when people look at my portfolio or before, you know, and it was like, oh, I feel like it’s just kind of like tonal, like tonal shifts every project I click. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m laughing. I’m like, whoa, I did not see that coming. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m laughing. I’m like, whoa, I did not see that coming. I’m like, and I just lie and this is so silly, so stupid, so like whatever it is, I like that it feels unexpected in terms of it doesn’t feel like the same formula. So for my own creative process, I mostly try to just kind of like have knowledge of different things that I can tap into, like different technology, different like, whatever, like mediums just keep it different than what I’ve done before. Because I think for me, it’s really important to not be sort of like one style or one kind of like specific way.
Tweaking The Strategy Can Unlock The Ideas
BIANCA: I was part of the team running Sandy Hook, so I had a partner, Peter O’S something was great, and he and I ran a Sandy Hook account. Every year we would do a PSA for their anniversary, which was December, which was when the shooting happened. So I remember that year, like, okay, we’re getting close to the anniversary again. And the brief, we would brief kind of like middle of the year because it was always like, you know, we needed enough time to get it right and to get it produced. No, it’s like nonprofit, not pro bono itself. And so what happened that time, we sat together with the planner and because the brief was always a little the same, it was kind of like, how can we tell people that school shootings are preventable when you know the signs?
We’re like, all right, how can we like change the brief a little or add something or like, what do we do different so we’re not briefing the same or maybe it’s going to continue being the same? And in the room with the strategist and me and Peter, we all started talking about kind of like, what the landscape was. And what we noticed that like a huge difference was that school shootings were changing how now like the school curriculum worked because now they were adding classes that you like just times within those kids schedules that you would like learn shooting drills. So people were teaching kids about shootings. And the fact that now there’s like something in culture that like change about this like the subject that we talk about every year, we’re like, we can’t ignore the fact that now back to school is going to be different. Kids are going to be also be prepared to like learning how to survive shootings to like learn the shooting drills and all of that. So strategically, we’re like, instead of doing a PSA at the end of the year in December, let’s do one in back to school. And let’s kind of like get ahead and show that instead of being teaching kids how to survive shootings, we should be preventing them.
And that was all the brief. And that was all like I was in a room talking about like strategy before we put that into the creative machine to actually get to where we got. And I think just sort of like learning the power of a good brief and how the strategically, when you’re asking the right questions, when you’re like, are we solving the right problem type thing? Are we solving the problem of like school shootings by doing a PSA in December? And like kind of communicating what we need to communicate? No, like now we need to shift things and be communicating something different at a different time. And yeah, that just kind of started to get me even closer to strategy and recognize how important it is before we get the brief.
If You Can’t Say The Idea In One Line, Start Over
BIANCA: You know, if you can’t say the idea in like one sentence, it’s like probably not a great idea. And if you are at a point where you feel like you have an idea that’s very convoluted or for some reason it feels like it’s more complicated than it has to be, or if you can’t say it in one sentence, I think you probably like want to start over or just think about how to simplify it. I think a lot of the times that’s on the brief and on the client of like kind of committing to one single thought. Like you can’t communicate multiple things. You know, strategist sacrifice. So you need to pick the one maybe, you know, I usually think is like the one thing we’re communicating here. I’m sure you can tackle like maybe another thing is like all the point that’s important that you could, but like there needs to be one focus. So I try to like go and have a conversation with the client, the strategist, like what’s the one thing? What’s that one clear message that we need to be like talking about? And then just focus on thinking about how to deliver that simple one thought without thinking about anything else that usually helps me keep it simple and contained in a good way.
Make a Question List You Use on Every Brief
I love the idea of asking questions kind of like, you know, like asking better questions. So for example, what’s the most wrong thing you can do here? What if we use the components that the opponents wait against them on this thing?
