Mindshare launches fast idea-generation service Mindshare 24

Mindshare has launched a fast-turnaround, idea-generation service, Mindshare 24, that will come up with solutions within 24 hours of a brief.

Nick Emery, the global chief executive of Mindshare (pictured above), said Mindshare 24 will "put culture, speed, data and fun at the heart of the process" and then scale up ideas that work.

Clients will not have to pay for an idea if they don’t like it.

About 15 of Mindshare’s leading strategists and thinkers across the global network will form the core of Mindshare 24 and draw in other staff as they see fit for each brief.

There will be hubs in London, Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney, Portland and New York.

Mindshare 24 will not be a standalone unit with its own employees.

Emery said he was inspired to launch the initiative after talking to clients about how the agency could brain-storm ideas. Then he discussed it with staff inside Mindshare.

"We all started emailing each other and sharing ideas," he said. "In a couple of hours, the ideas were better than half the ideas we spent months on."

While Mindshare 24 is chiefly about generating "raw" and "intuitive" ideas that can be scaled up, it will tap into data from The Loop, the agency’s data visualisation service.

Emery believes Mindshare 24 can bring "energy and excitement back into planning", noting "there are few things that you can do now that can be fun without getting you into trouble with auditors".

He has argued for some time that "traditional comms planning is dead" because it has become "boring" and "commoditised".

Too often, agencies offer 30 pages of analysis and only one page of ideas, according to Emery.

"Mindshare 24 turns that on its head – it’s data and rooted in a brief but first and foremost it’s about speed, gut and native genius," he said.

"It’s the creative antidote to a ‘tech is the only solution’ view of our world that is pervasive."

He said an idea could be "anything" because "everything is a medium".

That means there could be a number of potential remuneration models.

"How do we price it? No idea," he said. "In my dreams, it would be a shared product or platform or revenue stream, not a traditional commission-based model."

Emery dismissed the suggestion that Mindshare 24 might encourage short-termist thinking and said it could help on long-term ideas and brand-building too.

"If the brief is, ‘how do I get sales tomorrow?’, you’ll get ideas that are short-term and tactical," he pointed out.

Mindshare has trialled Mindshare 24 with charities Amnesty International and Enactus.

In the case of Amnesty, Mindshare 24 generated 21 ideas across four continents and three of the ideas went on to become executions.

Emery added: "Any brand that is interested in quick and powerful ideas anywhere in the world should call us or even just send an email, go to bed, and then wake up with a world-changing idea."

Mindshare picked up Unilever’s global communications planning account from PHD at the end of last year.

Like other media agencies, Mindshare is in the midst of a wave of reviews, dubbed Mediapalooza 2, including HSBC.