Here is this week’s creative advertising exercise to help you work your mind and thrive within the Charlotte advertising industry:

Charlotte Advertising Exercise #1: Give Your Marketing Spin on a Present Product

Examine a few products currently on the market. Are there ones that you think the packaging on falls flat? Is there one which has a logo that you think doesn’t translate well for the customer? As a Charlotte advertising professional you may often think of NEW branding for a product, but re-branding a product with help exercise your creative senses. Take a product and make it something new with your Charlotte advertising expertise. Figure out a new brand slogan, logo, and packaging for the existing product, and most importantly have fun with it!

Charlotte Advertising Exercise #2: Write A 1,000 Word Essay

In Charlotte advertising, you may often find yourself writing creative copy. However, it is likely you always have a topic or purpose in your writing. For this exercise, simply write freely and for as long as you can, with a goal of 1,000 words in mind. Just put you pencil to the paper and start writing whatever comes to your mind. After you have reached your goal, sit back and read what has you have come up with. To be connected with your inner voice will only aid you as a Charlotte advertising pro.

Because of this way your mind worked, you were inspired early on to engage in activities such as drawing, writing, directing, singing or playing music, all of which lead you to become involved in creative advertising.

If you are faced with a creative advertising road block, stop for a moment and reassess. The most effective strategy to get those creative juices flowing again is to utilize simple creative exercises. These will sharpen your skills and get you back in the artistic mind flow that you need to be in in order to be successful in creative advertising. Plus they are fun!

Below are 3 creative exercises you can do to give your brain the inspired boost it needs:

1. Package and Brand Yourself

If you were available to buy in your favorite store, how would your brand packaging look? As a creative advertising professional, you know how much the final packaging matters. You need to think of the display, an appealing product name, attractive colors, and size. This task is important to think about not only for creative thinking purposes, but also to get to know your brand. How do you brand yourself in an interesting, and imaginative manner that also sells?

2. Brainstorm a New Invention

Often in the creative advertising world, we think, “why has this product not been created yet?” or “why isn’t there a way to do this more efficiently?”. Why don’t you take a whack at filling that gap? Spend some time brainstorming gadgets that you believe will be beneficial to others. Make lists, sketch, and research. No matter how silly it may be, it will really expand your creative thinking when trying to earnestly come up with the next big thing. And who knows, maybe you will think up a great novelty that’s good enough to patent!

3. Play Like a Kid Again

Think of all the creative things you play with as a child. Legos, board games, PlayDoh and endless crafting apparatuses. As we get older, these little projects or breaks just to PLAY with something get pushed to the side. In truth, taking any object and creating something out of it is an excellent, simple, and fun way to get your creative juices flowing. In creative advertising we do this all the time, just without the colorful and fun tools to get us there. Grab some building blocks and take the time to make something, you’d be surprised how much your mind gets a work-out!

It’s maybe time to change and not to be such a cliché, London seems to have a lot of reason to charm you as well.

If you except the weather and the food.

But you can at least play with the typical ingredients and do what this great advertising just did.

The advertising agency is here doing with creativity what we were not allowed to do when we were a kid… -“Don’t play with the food!”.

Well, now you can play with your partner!

How do you feel when you are compelled to face your own behaviour?

It’s easier to flee away from it, right? Or pretend that “you didn’t know…”. Well, if you expected this confrontation it’s easy to find an excuse, effectively.But what about being dragged into a short movie without you even realize it and start to feel pain, anger of compassion for the main character? Imagine that you see an innocent being mugged and being treated like a virus… and then realize that you are acting just like his bullies without paying attention.

This as how guilty this creative advertising makes you feel.

We see that men behave in a cruel way with an innocent and helpless kid. We don’t have any explanation about this segregation, and this leads us to uncomfortable wonders. The music increases the feelings and the loneliness. The sadness becomes contagious. The rhetorical question is the last straw to increase the guiltiness we felt growing since the beginning.

In this case, acting just as if everything is all right and doing our daily chores is like accomplishing one of the labors of Hercules.This advertising agency suggests a miracle solution to help you avoid… well, what is below:

This advertising campaign from Ukraine makes me smile with its unexpected twist.

It’s all in there: the power of the swimwear combined to your determination makes you the danger. The darkness of the colours contributes to create a scary mood where the danger seems omnipresent. The heavy sky overwhelmed by dark cloud does not anything be increase this feeling. Usually, optimistic advertising and funny ones are more present on blogs about advertising agencies. But this rarity makes is here even more efficient.

This advertising has the same purpose than the guerrilla marketing: entertain in an urban context.

Here are some examples that you may have the chance to see:

Denver water: This creative advertising agency did a really good job on this one. This one is particularly creative as far as it’s an even more eye-catching advertising.

FedEx: Bored on the highway? Gets entertained! We’ve seen this one on a blog about advertising agencies, but it deserved to be talked about again!

Oldtimer: Well… hard to keep driving without being stunned isn’t it?

Australia post : Another nice advertising campaign from an advertising agency to entertain you while you are waiting for the bus.

Mondopasta: As you may have guessed, this one is for a pasta product. Perfect to deliver the message, right? Creative advertising, right?

Step by step, we follow the guide and discover the apartment that a couple of girls are visiting. We are first intrigued, and expect something to happen. Their curiosity grows with ours, and we get as surprised as the girls when the guide opens the door of heaven.Their reaction makes us smile, and their scream starts: both endless and hysterical. Would it confirm the old cliché of girls in love with fashion, so badly that they get crazy just by hearing the word “discounted Louboutin shoes”?

Other screams, this time with men’s voices, quickly stops their own scream… All their manhood disappears and get replaced by a kind of “hysterical female reaction”. The beer closet just seems to satisfy their deepest desires. This parallel situation is unexpected, these ad agencies always manage to catch us by surprise.

Now that’s what i call creative advertising!

This creative advertising agency definitely played with the nostalgia feeling.

Just at the beginning, you are immediately in. No matter if you suck at blind test, this music is a too big reference to be ignored. At the same time, the mini Darth Vader appears, with the same determination than the real one. He keeps trying using the power of the force, but in vain. We almost feel relieved when his mother helps him to “control” the plate in the kitchen scene. It is only with his father’s complicity that the miracle will happen…

Nb: The ad agencies also divulged the “behind the scenes”, also available on Youtube.

When an advertising agency mixes up complicity, a product loved by almost everyone and a touching feeling, here is the result.

The scene happens in an everyday life place: the bus. Do you enjoy waiting for hours, then hop on it on a heatwave weather and discover that the bus is already crowed… All that you can do is remain standing up, almost falling each time the driver slows down and be so close to you neighbour that it’s hard to pretend that you are not disturbed by his staring look or his smell?

After a few glances, a certain chemistry between the boy and the girl seems to need a push to lead to something concrete… This is when the product makes his entrance like a “deus ex machina”. Once the complicity is here and the mute game between those two characters is on, it’s hard to prevent a smile.