Why not just pay a creative or marketing agency to come up with an ad or marketing campaign or gimmick for you?

No question on that, do it if you have the funds.

But creative agencies are external entities. While they provide you with the marketing blitz you required, you still have to contend with your internal issues like your team's focus to the campaign goals and/or communications barriers that may disrupt the ideation process.

Before these agencies, comes the question whether or not your teams are up to the game and knows how to reciprocate and maximize the potential momentum that agencies may create.

More than the viral video that businesses crave for is the ecosystem that will push and turn engagements into profitable relations. For us, the whole ecosystem - that means both your teams and stakeholders (including a segment of your market) - is crucial in your campaign and must therefore be tapped even before your campaign begins.

The company teams have to be aligned in terms of teamwork and messaging. They must in turn be aligned with the target market itself or good representation of that audience. By letting your teams actually engage with that segment in a team-building workshop, you not only get insights of your market, you make the teams work together and get them to understand more about your market.

In a broader sense, this idea generation approach is similar to the ideation process in design thinking. You involve as much stakeholders you can get and level off messaging to put everyone in the same communication page.