How ideas become concepts across formats

The Spark: where ideas begin

Every concept starts with an idea. Sometimes it’s a fleeting thought. Other times, it’s a response to culture, technology, or a specific brand need.

But great ideas share three essential traits:

• Relevance: they emerge from cultural insight or audience behavior.
• Emotion: they trigger curiosity, connection, or desire.
• Flexibility: they can evolve and grow without losing their essence.

As Creative Directors and Art Directors, our role isn’t simply to generate ideas. It’s to filter, challenge, and refine them, ensuring they align with both the brand’s identity and the context in which they will live.

Take the case of Etam. What began as a bold aesthetic direction evolved into a multi-format concept that could stretch from high-impact store screens to emotionally driven social content. The spark was visual, but its relevance and adaptability made it enduring.

From Idea to Concept: the evolution

An idea becomes a concept when it acquires:

• Purpose: why does this matter now?
• Narrative: what story does it tell?
• Structure: how can it be expressed across formats while staying true to itself?

A strong concept acts like a blueprint. It’s adaptable yet stable. It can live on a screen, a billboard, a social post, or even as an immersive experience—always recognizable, always meaningful.

For Rabanne, we worked from a spark rooted in identity and mythology to develop a concept that moved across time and touchpoints: from futuristic CGI to in-store activations, keeping the same conceptual DNA throughout. At VOKODE, we call this process: “From Spark to System.

Liquid Ideas: creativity for a multichannel environment

The term liquid ideas reflects a core truth of today’s creative landscape:

“Ideas must flow across formats, audiences, and technologies, but their narrative must remain solid.”

According to 2025 insights from WARC and Forrester, cross-platform storytelling and narrative coherence are now essential markers of brand growth. Brands that maintain consistent meaning across social, retail, AR, and AI-powered platforms see up to 48% higher audience retention.

Liquid ideas are:

• Adaptive: ready to respond to trends and technologies.
• Narrative-led: always carrying the same core story.
• Audience-centered: designed to engage wherever the audience is.

Our Maybelline collaboration illustrates this principle. The concept was rooted in energy and transformation — allowing the idea to manifest as different content formats while remaining anchored to its emotional core.

Why liquid concepts matter today?

“The future belongs to liquid ideas. Static campaigns are already obsolete.”

Audiences expect both consistency and novelty. They want a coherent story, told in surprising, innovative ways. Brands relying solely on single-format campaigns are rapidly losing relevance.

Liquid concepts deliver:

• Increased engagement through storytelling that adapts to different platforms and moods.
• Creative efficiency, reducing the need to reinvent content for every format.
• Stronger brand recall, by repeating the narrative across touchpoints, building emotional recognition.

An idea is the spark. A concept is the fire that endures.

In a world where audiences jump from one format to another, only liquid concepts, flexible yet grounded, can truly thrive. We believe creativity isn’t just aesthetic. It’s systemic. We create narratives that flow across formats while remaining rooted in meaning.

That’s why, when a brief arrives, don’t ask: What should this look like? We ask: What should this feel like in every format?

Our Process:

• Start with the Spark: the initial idea or insight.
• Find the Narrative: crafting a purpose-driven story.
• Design for Liquidity: Imagining how this story can live across platforms.
• Prototype Formats: testing how the idea performs in digital, print, AR, CGI, and experiential design.

Because in 2025 and beyond, creativity isn’t about how things look, it’s about how ideas live.