Use this creative brainstorm technique with your marketing or advertising creative team to generate new ideas.

1) Make 4 decks of index cards:

Target Audience Deck – write down all your different target audiences on multiple cards (at least as many as you have players)
Selling Points Deck – write down all of your company or product’s key selling points
Media Deck – write down various media vehicles that you may use to promote your brand (e.g. TV, Radio, Magazine, Website, Online Advertising, Instagram, etc.)
Wild Card Deck – write down a bunch of “wild cards” that may make it difficult to execute a marketing tactic. Here are a few to get you started, but feel free to add any that are unique to your industry:
- Your budget is only $10
- You only have 1-week to execute
- You can only feature employees
- You can only feature inanimate objects
- You have to use an elephant in some way
- You need to drive them to a landing page

2) Shuffle the cards and pass out one card from each deck to each person who’s playing. Alternatively, you can make each “player” a group of 2, which can help with the ideation.

3) Distribute 10 poker chips to each player. 20 if they’re groups of 2.

4) Give players an hour to come up with a marketing idea based on the cards they were dealt.

5) Have each player present their idea to the group.

6) After each player has presented, have everyone put chips on the ideas they think were best. They can determine the number of chips they give each player. They just can’t keep any chips.

The player with the most chips wins. Based off of their idea, work together on how to actually execute it.