Despite what the facilitator in the brainstorming meeting told you, there are bad ideas. Horrible ones. I’ve had tons of them. You usually know it soon after you’ve said it out loud, or written it down. You get that gut feeling that this has been done to death, or it’s not right for the brand, or it’s just plain lame. And if you don’t get that feeling, hopefully there was someone there with the guts to tell you it ain’t gonna happen. Because if you follow that idea, at best you’re wasting a lot of agency hours. At worst, you’re wasting a lot of client dollars.
There’s nothing wrong with having bad ideas. Like I said, I have them all the time. Just this morning I thought “Now, without Hepatitis!” was a good re-branding angle. Would have been funny, but it lacks appetite appeal. So into the trashcan it went. Right next to the “stray dogs as mobile billboards” idea.