Move past the music, whiskey, candlelight, and showers—sparking creativity through the ABC Darium
From supply chain risk monitoring, to event industry cloud platforms, to smart toasters: agency life is made up of different clients from many sectors that offer a wide range of services and products. And so, to guide all of them in their communications work, as a PR consultant, you have to pick your brain for creative ideas that will give their messages an extra boost to stand out from the crowd.
For some, being creative may conjure the image of beguiling music, a glass of whiskey on a rainy evening, the dancing flames of candlelight, as drivers of inspiration. However, reality is less romantic—especially when creativity makes itself scarce and there is a yawning emptiness in the mind instead. “Take a hot shower!” some might exclaim—the place where thoughts and ideas supposedly run free, emerging from the deepest corners of our brains—having helped many a person achieve fame and glory through creative eureka moments. Well, if even after the fifth shower there's no flash of inspiration, and the skin is slowly starting to prune, then a more pragmatic—less wet—solution is needed.
Thankfully, there are many masterminds who have done the hard work of coming up with tools that can help us be creative. One of these simple, yet very effective tool, is the so-called ABC Darium, which the Laika crew recently discovered during a workshop. Besides being fun to say out loud, the ABC Darium is especially useful to come up with creative and vivid imagery descriptions, and to construct attention-grabbing headlines. And as a PR specialist, you know just how important headlines are—because no matter how good a pitch to a journalist is: if the email is not clicked on—if the headline is a dud—then the beautiful pitch will never be read and all the effort would’ve been in vain. So let’s have a look at this simple ABC Darium technique and how it works.
Before jumping right into the project, choose a generic term that is connected with your topic. For example, Christmas—as it’s just around the corner. Now get inspired by all the letters of the alphabet. Think of one or more words for each letter of the alphabet that is related to Christmas.
For example…
A: advent, angel…
B: bells, bright, busy, baking, buying, Bethlehem…
C: Christmas, Christmas cake, candlelight, cinnamon, choir, caring…
D: December, drinks, deer, decorations, divine, dinner, donations…
…
Z… zest, zealous…
The next step is to make use of this list as you create your content, including using some of these words to build a creative headline that corresponds to the content of your text and/or pitch. For example, imagine having to create a pitch for a nasal spray product. During the cold and flu season–red, sniffling noses are especially abundant. Perhaps for the letter R on your ABC Darium list, you had written “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Therefore, you might come up with some creative headlines such as: “Red Noses Are Only for Rudolph” or “Red Noses Are for Reindeer Named Rudolph” or “Tired of Looking Like Rudolph?”.
The same ideas apply to using the list when you feel stuck trying to construct fun and creative sentence structures. Using them for headlines is just the beginning—and there are no limits to how you can make this technique work for you.
While it can’t substitute music, whiskey, candlelight, and showers, the ABC Darium is definitely a fun, simple, and solid solution to help you get that spark of creativity, and give those messages that extra boost to stand out from the crowd.