Every month, for about the cost of a pizza and an hour of time, the Dallas-based integrated marketing communications firm MasonBaronet stages what's become known around the office as a Creative Jam for its creative staff. These outings give the MasonBaronet team a chance to stretch their conceptual skills. There are two key goals to these meetings: build staff unity and gain new perceptions from creative exploration.

Creative Jams offers a relatively easy recipe for any creative team to follow: Choose a task or destination; establish a medium for participants to visualize or document their individual perceptions of the experience; then reunite all participants to share their perceptions with one another. “Usually, the Jams last 60 minutes including lunch,” says creative director Paul Jerde, who plans each outing. Some of MasonBaronet’s sessions require 40 minutes for traveling and eating, leaving just 20 minutes for the creative exercise. Others take 10 minutes for lunch and allow 50 minutes for discovery.

Jerde encourages that the creatives put more emphasis on the conceptual value of the idea than on its production or finished value. “The work has a grassroots feel to it,” he says. “It’s not supposed to be premeditated or finessed. It’s about letting go. We’re trying to capture that creative lightning, so the work isn’t polished, it’s pretty raw.”

Jerde says that he’s constantly studying and reading about creative exercises and techniques. “Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Graphic Problem Solving” by Judith and Richard Wilde has been a recent source of inspiration for Creative Jams, but Jerde finds new themes almost everywhere. 

Here's one of the office's favorite Creative Jams; let it inspire you to try something new at your office:

Branding a philosophy
The unanimous front-runner for favorite Jam of the year didn’t entail any field trips or special equipment. Jerde elaborates: “I asked each person to think of a personal philosophy or core value. Maybe it’s love or friendship or saving the best thing on your lunch tray until last. Then, take this and distill it into a single word. Next, take that one-word attribute and turn it into a consumer good that might change people’s beliefs if it showed up on the grocery shelf.”

Puckett recalls one participant who developed “Loyalty” branded aerosol—so it could be more easily spread around. Another staffer designed a “Freedom” brand F-logo with a “live free” slogan, which could be molded onto the tread of a shoe to leave its mark on impressionable surfaces.

Jerde explains, “In the Jams, we aren’t locked into any budget. We can be as outlandish as we want. But it reminds us to search for that same emotion in our client work when we do have a budget.”

Excerpted from "Making Jam" in the June 2008 issue.