At Quirk, we don't believe in gatekeeping.
At Quirk, we don't believe in gatekeeping. We think great ideas can come from anywhere. Knowledge and craft aren't a hideaway thing for a few people: they're something to study, share, and build on. That's why we make a habit of looking outside our own walls for inspiration, and why we put the whole team through Jason Bagley's Creative Megamachine course.
I joined Quirk as Executive Creative Director after years of creative directing branded content and working in pretty much every role in end-to-end video production. Jason made some of my favorite ads of all time at Wieden+Kennedy, and I thought maybe I’d be able to learn a thing or two from the guy that ran the place.Taking the course as a team was a chance to pressure-test our process against one built inside one of the most respected creative shops in the world. Here were our main takeaways from the course, and spoiler: I'd highly recommend it.
Wrestle harder with the brief. Jason's free lead magnet gives you 80 questions designed to push on the brief from every angle. What does the product think about the user? What should we say, but can’t or won’t? What's the most painfully literal way of saying it? The questions create tension and fodder you can actually translate into strategy. We've built our own internal list to push even harder. The more you poke and prod, the more goo oozes out.I'd seen a version of this before, in a totally different context. Some of the top comedy commercial directors in the world will throw ridiculous prompts at actors mid-take—not because they expect a clean answer, but to see what shakes loose. Same wrestle, different medium. All the ways you can push and pull and tug at the initial creative inspiration to shape what ultimately ends up on screen.
Push it to the edge of madness. Coming from a directing background, I'd already learned that you find the core idea by bleeding it through every element of the work. The strategy and the concept have to live in every choice: sound design, music, pacing, performance, edit etc. Everything sings from the same hymn sheet, or the idea loses its rudder. This is where Quirk has a real structural advantage. I've watched plenty of ads lose their rudder somewhere in the handoff between agency, production company, and post. Operating as a hybrid creative and production studio means we have direct oversight from the first strategy conversation all the way through final delivery. Nothing gets diluted in translation.
There are no bad briefs. It's easy to sit around waiting for Nike, Apple, or the Super Bowl brief to land in your lap, but as Bagley points out, you prepare for the big brief on the bad brief. Making the most of any opportunity means being willing to put the on-brief-but-totally-unhinged version in the deck, and not being afraid of someone saying no to it. I felt that fear myself earlier in my career, but here's the thing: that stuff actually gets through more than you'd think. Look at the absurd, award-winning work coming out of an indie shop like Callen, or the way Eric Kallman writes comedy. For every amazing spot of theirs you've seen, there's a graveyard of rejected scripts on the floor—and that's the cost of the daring stuff making it through. We've seen the same at Quirk, where even direct response work has become genuinely breakthrough because the team isn't afraid to swing.
When I stepped into creative leadership, I had a method I knew worked for me…but methods that live in one person's head are a nightmare to scale. Jason's course was the perfect moment to put language to instincts, and to hand our team a shared vocabulary to riff, build, and sharpen ideas together.
So Jason, thanks from the team. And if you're stepping into creative leadership, or just looking to sharpen your creative thinking, I highly recommend the course. You'll be learning from one of the greats.
- Bennett Johnson