How to develop a concept that actually works

Key takeaways

• Concepts come from inputs, not from a room. The quality of what you gather decides the ceiling of what you can make.
• Talk to customers, not just stakeholders. The strongest ideas come from the people being sold to.
• Generate more than you need, then kill most of them. One concept presented is one concept defended, badly.
• Interrogate before you polish. A treatment makes a weak idea look convincing, which is the opposite of useful.
• Two weeks in development saves six in production. This is the cheapest phase in the project and the one people compress.

How do you develop a video concept?

Gather primary material first — interviews with the people being sold to, not only with the people commissioning. Find the tension in what you hear. Generate several distinct directions from it rather than refining one. Then interrogate each against a fixed set of tests before anything is designed or written up, and kill everything that does not survive.

Where do concepts actually come from?

From material, not from imagination. Every strong idea we have made was already sitting somewhere in the inputs; the work was noticing it.

Four sources, in rough order of value:

1. The audience. Interviews with the people the film has to reach. Not a survey — conversations, long enough that the second and third answers arrive. The useful material is almost never in the first answer.
2. The people who do the work. Engineers, makers, technicians, the ones who never get asked. They describe the business without marketing language, which is exactly what a concept needs.
3. The friction. What is genuinely hard about the category, what customers complain about, what the sales team dreads being asked. Tension is where concepts live.
4. The commissioning brief. Necessary, and the weakest of the four on its own, because it describes the problem in the language of the people who already have it.

This is the phase clients want to shorten and it is the one that decides the ceiling. On our most research-heavy campaigns it has run a full year before a frame was shot, because some audiences read a shallow understanding instantly and never come back.

What are you actually looking for?

A tension. Something true that is also uncomfortable, or surprising, or contradictory.

Films built on a positive statement have nowhere to go — "we care about quality" is agreeable and inert. Films built on a tension have structure already: something is at stake, and the film can resolve it. Practical examples of the shape:

• A contradiction. A rebrand has to feel new and continuous at once. Two instructions that fight each other, and the film has to satisfy both.
• A defended audience. The people you need to reach actively resist being reached. The concept has to earn its way past that rather than push through it.
• An invisible value. The thing that makes the company good is real and cannot be seen from outside. The concept becomes a way of making it visible.
• A category convention worth breaking. Everyone in the sector makes the same film. Doing the opposite is a concept, provided it is doing a job rather than being different for its own sake.

If the material yields no tension, the research was not deep enough. That is a finding, not a failure — go back rather than proceeding to write something agreeable.

Generate several, not one

Three to five genuinely distinct directions, not one idea with three treatments. Distinct means they could not be swapped for each other: different structures, different emotional registers, different things being asked of the audience.

There are two reasons this matters, and only one of them is creative.

The creative reason is that the first idea is usually the category default wearing a disguise. It arrives quickly because it is familiar. Working past it is where the actual thinking happens.

The commercial reason is that a client presented with one concept is being asked to approve or reject, and rejection is expensive for everyone. A client presented with three distinct directions is being asked to choose, which is a better conversation and produces better feedback. You learn more from why someone dismissed two options than from why they liked one.

Then kill most of them. Presenting five is as bad as presenting one — it signals no point of view. Two or three, with a recommendation and the reasoning behind it.

Interrogate before you design

The most common failure in concept development is polishing too early. A well-designed treatment with good reference imagery makes almost any idea look convincing, including a bad one, and once a client has seen it beautifully presented the interrogation gets much harder.

Test in plain language first. Four questions, applied honestly:

The second one is the most useful and the most resisted, and it is covered in more depth in the concept is the film.

Who should be in the room?

Fewer people than usually are, and different ones.

• The person who will direct it. Non-negotiable. A concept written by someone who will not be on set loses its intent at the first compromise, which is the structural problem with the chained agency model — explained in video agency or production company.
• Someone who can say no on the client side. Not a relay. If the decision-maker sees the work for the first time at presentation, you are developing blind.
• Whoever knows the audience best. Frequently a salesperson or a recruiter rather than a marketer.
• Not the full stakeholder group. Development by committee produces the average of everyone's caution. Consultation, yes. Authorship, no.

When to kill a concept

Earlier than feels comfortable, and on evidence rather than mood. Four signals worth acting on:

1. You cannot explain it without apologising for part of it. "It sounds odd, but…" is sometimes a sign of originality and more often a sign the idea does not hold.
2. Every review makes it more generic and nobody can point to what was lost. The concept had no load-bearing element to protect.
3. It only works with a budget you do not have. Reframe it or drop it. Do not shoot a compromised version and hope.
4. The tension turned out not to be true. Sometimes further research dissolves the insight the whole idea rested on. Better to find that in week two.

Killing a concept in development costs a conversation. Killing it after a shoot costs the shoot. The full cost curve is in the concept is the film.

Where this stops

This is the process. Two adjacent questions have their own answers:

• Why the concept decides the film at all: the concept is the film.
• How a concept differs from a script: video concept vs script.

How does DOT run this?

DOT Video Agency writes concepts in-house, and the people who write them direct the film. Founders Tijmen van Grieken and Jesper de Rek take the scoping call, run the interviews and are on set, so the idea is defended on the day by the person who argued for it.

The part clients find unfamiliar is how much of development is listening. Interviews with your team, and with your customers where it counts, come before anything is written. What comes back is a direction with a recommendation attached, rather than a menu of three safe options with the decision handed back.

Related reading

• The concept is the film
• The brief is where most video projects are already won or lost
• What is a director's treatment?
• Brand film production