Find Your Big Idea: The Susan Credle Creative Framework
You've absorbed Susan's philosophy. Now it's time to use it — and more importantly, to ask what it means for you.
This exercise puts her core principles to work on a real brief. But before you dive in, sit with two questions that this whole course is really asking:
First: What do you personally take away from someone else's story? Susan's journey is instructive, but the point isn't to admire it from a distance. The point is self-reflection — to look at her principles and ask, where do I see myself in this? Where am I still defaulting to the safe, the predictable, the thing that feels like an ad?
Second: Why does any of this matter right now, in the age of AI? AI can generate executions at scale. It can produce headlines, copy variations, image concepts, and campaign structures faster than any team. What it cannot do — at least not yet — is exercise the kind of human creative judgment Susan has spent a career developing: the instinct to reject the obvious, to push culture forward, to find the charming and simple truth that makes people feel something. In a world where AI is a power tool available to everyone, your creative thinking is the differentiator. These lessons aren't nostalgic. They're your competitive edge.
You're going to develop a campaign concept using the same filters Susan applies — the "does it feel like an ad?" test, the culture-push question, and the simplicity-as-vehicle principle. By the end, you'll have a rough campaign platform that's bigger than any single execution — and a clearer sense of what only you can bring to it.
Choose your brief. Pick ONE of the following product/brand scenarios — or substitute a real brief you're currently working on:
- A national gym chain launching a membership drive in January
- A mid-tier airline trying to rebuild trust after a rough year of delays
- A legacy chocolate brand trying to connect with Gen Z
- A financial services app targeting first-generation wealth builders
Got your brief? Good. Now resist the urge to immediately think of an ad. That's the whole point.
Work through each of the following five steps. Write your answers down — even rough notes count.
Step 1: Name the Obvious Execution
Write down the first idea that comes to mind for your brief. The cliché. The thing you've seen a hundred times. (For the gym brief, it's probably a montage of people sweating and smiling. Write it down anyway.)
Naming the obvious is how you escape it. Susan's whole approach starts with rejecting the predictable — you can't reject what you haven't identified.
Self-reflection prompt: Is this the kind of idea you personally tend to default to? What does that tell you about where your own creative instincts need stretching?
Step 2: Apply the "Does It Feel Like an Ad?" Test
Look at your obvious execution and ask honestly: Would someone choose to watch this if it weren't forced on them? If the answer is no, ask: What would make this genuinely interesting to a person who doesn't care about this brand at all?
Write down at least two answers. Push past your first instinct — that's usually still an ad.
AI lens: An AI system prompted with your brief will almost certainly generate the obvious execution first — and generate it quickly. The question isn't whether you can produce an idea faster than AI. The question is whether you can produce an idea that's genuinely more interesting. That gap is where your value lives.
Step 3: Find the Culture Push
Susan talks about advertising on its best day looking at where the world needs to go — challenging stereotypes, pushing progressive images, making people comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Ask yourself: What assumption, stereotype, or cultural norm does my category lean on by default? Then ask: What would it look like to challenge that?
For example — the January gym brief defaults to the "new year, new you" shame spiral. What if the idea challenged the assumption that your body is a problem to be solved?
Write down the assumption your category relies on, and one way your campaign could push against it.
Self-reflection prompt: Have you ever pushed back on a brief or a category convention in your own work? What stopped you — or what made it possible?
Step 4: Build the Platform, Not the Spot
Think about how Susan described the M&M's characters — the goal wasn't a single funny commercial, it was making people believe these characters actually existed. That's a platform. It has room to grow across years, executions, and media.
Write a one or two sentence campaign platform statement for your idea. It should be big enough to live in multiple executions but focused enough that you could explain it to someone in thirty seconds.
Test it: Could this idea work as a TV spot, a social series, a live event, and a product experience? If yes, you might have a platform.
AI lens: AI is excellent at generating executions from a platform once one exists. Building the platform — the animating idea that gives all those executions meaning — is the human creative act. That's what you're practicing here.
Step 5: Find the Charm
Susan has a deep affection for simplicity and charm — the M&M's Santa spot works because it's sweet, clean, and human. Ambition doesn't require complexity.
Look at your platform and ask: What's the most charming, simple, human version of this idea? Describe one single execution — a scene, a moment, an image — that captures the whole platform in its most delightful form.
Self-reflection prompt: Does this execution feel like something only you could have made — or does it feel like something anyone (or anything) could have generated? If it's the latter, push further.
By the end of this exercise, you should have:
- One named obvious execution (that you've consciously set aside)
- Two "interesting" alternatives that pass the "not an ad" test
- One cultural assumption your category relies on, and a direction to challenge it
- A one or two sentence campaign platform that's bigger than any single execution
- One simple, charming execution that brings the platform to life
But the real outcome is two things Susan's story is ultimately asking of you:
Self-knowledge. Where are your own defaults? Where do you play it safe? Where is your creative courage still developing? You can't answer those questions by reading someone else's story — you answer them by doing the work and being honest about what comes up.
Relevance. In an industry being reshaped by AI, the creatives who will matter are not the ones who can produce the most executions. They're the ones who can think at the level of ideas — who can push culture, find the human truth, and build platforms that mean something. That's what Susan has done across decades. That's what this exercise is training you to do.
This isn't a finished campaign — it's a creative framework in action. The goal is to feel the difference between generating executions and generating ideas. Once you feel that difference, you can't unfeel it.
That's exactly where Susan wants you.
