Yesterday, in a class at BU, I gave a lecture and led a discussion about “advertising” creative ideas. We explored “big” ideas: Let’s build a smarter planet; Giving wings to people and ideas; Day One. We dissected “campaign” ideas: A long day of childhood calls for America’s favorite pasta sauce. We thought about “advertising” ideas.
While some are clearly the creation of a traditional advertising creative team, the higher up the idea food chain you get, the more you can see the contribution of the strategist, or at the very least the strategic side of the creative team.
Ideas like “Day One” don’t happen without a pretty deep understanding of the user.
With the proliferation of screens, the mainstreaming of social media, the omni-presence of digital technology and the arrival of the Internet of Things, it becomes essential to know a lot more than how a consumer feels about a category, a company or its advertising.
How does she use technology? When does she access content? What role does her community play? How does context affect her willingness to engage? What kind of value and utility does she expect from a brand? What inspires her to share? Can you turn her into an advocate?
Today, the very best creative people have to be able to ask and answer those questions. And the very best strategists have to be able to get to ideas as good as Smarter Planet or Day One.
Years ago, when we worked in a linear fashion – client hands assignment to account guy who passes it to planner who writes brief for the creative team – we didn’t need to be T-shaped or know all that much about each other’s roles. Now, however, we have to be 20 or 30 percent something else. A writer/planner. A designer/coder. A strategist/creative.
Which leads me to the second part of this post — my excitement about Planning-ness having its 2013 conference in Boston next month. There is certainly no shortage of conferences, planning or otherwise. But as we all know, too many of them are designed to have you sit and listen as opposed to think and do. Planningness labels itself an “un-conference” for creative thinkers who want to get their hands dirty, offering a bit more how-to and interactive workshop sessions than the typical conference.
That makes Planningness a good thing for strategists who want to get more creative, or for creatives who want to get a bit more strategic. There may always be a distinction between creative and planning, but look at the very best of new, big, or digital ideas and that distinction gets more and more blurred.
The Planningness Grant
This years Planningness is offering a $10,000 grant for anyone the best research idea or project designed to benefit the planning community and creative thinkers.
How do social ideas spread? Are smaller communities of influence a new trend? Does real time come at the expense of enduring ideas? Do we learn by iterating or by testing?
Come up with a proposal and get it in. You have three days left. But this is a great opportunity to learn something that will make you, your agency and the community of planners better.
Eventually there will be some very impressive data visualizations of SxSW. How many people, how many sessions, how many beers consumed, how many hangovers. Until then you can check out Mashable’s SxSW by the numbers. Or poke around SxSWs’s press room.
But to be honest, I’m less interested in how much there is to pore through and more in the few things that might actually be useful, transferable, and worth remembering. Which is why I go every year. To find insights and perspectives that might serve a purpose the other 360 days.
Out of consideration for the fact that you are either:
A. Home but still waiting for the alcohol-induced haze to subside
B. Too busy doing actual work back at the office while your more fortunate colleagues are partying under the guise of working down in Austin
C. Still there in which case you’re overwhelmed already
….I share only five. Certainly you can remember five.
All In
You are not a true entrepreneur unless you go all in. You don’t even have genuine conviction unless you go all in. This from Olan Musk, who in his interview with Chris Anderson, shared how he took every cent he had from his PayPal fortune, along with whatever else he collected from Tesla or other initiatives and put every last cent into SpaceX. To the degree that he had to borrow money to pay living expenses. If you had a couple of hundred million would you keep some back? Or go all in. Big balls.
Out of the Internet
This from Google’s Aman Govil during his Art, Copy & Code talk with Ben Malbon. It’s time we stopped making things for the Internet and started making things out of the Internet. This was one of the evident trends and ideas at SxSW this year, apparent in lots of new services and platforms. But it’s an important reminder. The ad industry is still thinking that ads on a mobile phone are the way to go. That would be making things for the Internet. Uber and others, on the other hand, are doing the opposite. Out of the Internet. Get on it.
Crisis in Chinese and Japanese
Al Gore says that the word for crisis in both Chinese and Japanese is composed of two characters. One means danger. The other means opportunity. Think about that. The language forces you to consider the positive with as much emphasis as we typically place on the negative. I’m not sure that English focuses us that way. Crisis tends first to elicit thoughts of danger, harm and concern. We may eventually see opportunity, but maybe we should see the opportunity immediately. For example, to use Uber again, urban cabbies can only see danger. That will lead to their inevitable failure.
Capture the Imagination
Clean tech — wind power, solar power, biomass, hydropower, biofuels — never quite reached its potential because it never captured our imagination, says David Merkoski, former ECD at Frog Design, now founder of Greenstart. The clean web on the other hand — AirBNB, ZipCar, other companies whose models are based on collaborative consumption — will and do. They may not have been created to clean the environment, but because they use fewer resources and waste less energy ultimately they will. More importantly they capture our imagination by inviting us to both create and participate. They get used, they spread, they get used even more. Fail to capture the imagination of users and sharers and little happens. Oh by the way, it’s the same reason that big business in America is despised more than Congress, according to Whole Foods CEO and founder John Mackey. That’s pretty obvious once it’s pointed out.
Behavior Should Impact Design
And you thought it was the other way around. Ha! In a rapid fire talk from Adaptive Path’s Chris Risdon, the behavioral designer, reminded us that every design decision we make, in any medium (digital or analog) influences our user. But too often we start with what we want to achieve and what we think will work or be logical. But given that we live in world that lets us collect endless data on an individual user’s behavior and have multiple ways to tell/create/frame a story or experience, we’ll be a lot better off if our design allows itself to be informed by the user we’re trying to motivate.
“You will never win fame and fortune unless you invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.” David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy is credited with coining the term that has defined the objectives of ad agency creative departments for more than 50 years ago. The “Big Idea” was a concept or story or tagline or execution that that could define a brand, capture the attention and imagination of a mass audience,and motivate consumers to buy. If it was truly big it could endure for years (Think Melts In Your Mouth Not In Your Hands, or Please Don’t Squeeze the Charmin, (bad, but big) or even Tastes Great, Less Filling).
Depending on who was applying the term BIs weren’t necessarily creative, just familiar.
George Lois, one of the great creatives from the 1960′s and beyond, the man behind DDB’s original VW campaign, has been a one-man spokesperson for the virtue of the big ideas for three decades.
Lois believed that the Big Idea was all that mattered in advertising.
A big idea can change popular culture. (VW and the small car)
It can transform our language. (I want my MTV)
It can start a business. (Tommy Hilfiger)
It can turn the world upside down. (Not sure about that one)
As a result, George spent his entire career “creating vivid human images that catch people’s eyes, penetrate their minds, warm their hearts and cause them to act.”
All good stuff no doubt. But today we have to ask just how much easier it was, not necessarily to come up with a Big Idea, but for that idea itself to accomplish all of the above when there was such limited media and content competing for attention.
Historically, most big advertising ideas have been made-up stories, taglines, and campaigns that tell you something memorable about a brand or product.
It’s as if the role of advertising were to invent a story about a product rather than invent a product that had a story.
The former is traditional advertising, the latter is Silicon Valley and perhaps a few of the newer, more innovative agencies that build things not just say things.
In “traditional” advertising, there were different kinds of Big Ideas. They shared certain characteristics. They explained, illuminated and differentiated with memorable images or lines. They offered a fresh and surprising (at the time) solution to a communication challenge. The possessed a strong, singular concept. And if they weren’t outrageous, at least they were unexpected for the category.
Some of advertising’s Big Ideas included:
Marlboro: A Big Idea That Was Totally Contrived
There’s the Marlboro Man. If ever a story about a product were totally invented, Marlboro was it.
BMW: A Big Idea That Captures The Essence Of The Product
In the 1980′s BMW’s The Ultimate Driving Machine was a “Big Idea” from the ad agency Amirati and Puris. Unlike Marlboro, however, it released the truth about the product rather than invent something entirely make believe.
Perhaps one of the really great “Big Idea” ad campaigns of the last 20 years was Apple’s Think Different. Created by Jobs and his agency partner Lee Clow at then Chiat Day (now TBWA Chiat Day), Think Different expressed Apple’s beliefs, its soul, and the vision of Steve Jobs who has just returned to the company after having been forced out years earlier.
The reason for the campaign was to solidify the base — the core loyalists — who believed in Apple and Job. At the time, however, Apple had lousy products and nothing great in the pipeline. And so this was an important placeholder that gave a glimpse of greatness to come. It articulated a
vision for the company, its employees and those tenacious loyalists.
The Mac PC campaign was another Big Idea ad campaign. The premise, the message, the execution, the characters, the copywriting and the extendability of the campaign made it so.
Another big idea campaign — focused, enduring, ownable — was Mastercard’s Priceless in the 90′s. So familiar it became the subject of numerous parodies. Some quite funny. See the third spot below.
The first Priceless ad script:
“Two tickets: $28. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $18. One autographed baseball: $45. Real conversation with 11-year-old son: Priceless.”
Man, that was a long time ago if two tickets to an MLB game cost $28.00.
From 1987 to 1997, MasterCard (Research) maxed out five advertising campaigns – and failed to narrow the gap with Visa. So when the company decided to get a new ad agency, it looked like desperation. To McCann Erickson, it looked like opportunity.
McCann assigned a core creative team of three – Joyce King Thomas, Jeroen Bours, and Jonathan Cranin – to prepare a pitch. The trio, who had been working together for two years, conferred with the strategy team and brainstormed intensively for a month. “We were very comfortable working together, so we debated everything freely,” says Thomas, now McCann’s chief creative officer in New York City.
The breakthrough came to Cranin in the shower: the tag line “some things money can’t buy” to anchor the ad. Back at the office, Thomas caught the spark and began crafting a spot around it. Inspiration struck two weeks later, as Thomas and Bours batted around ideas over coffee and bagels on a Sunday morning.
The first ad would be set at a baseball game, feature a list of ordinary transactions, and lead to the setup: “Priceless.” Recalls Thomas: “We knew we had it.”
MasterCard agreed, even after a different spot tested better in research. “Intuitively, we knew the insights made it more than just another ad,” says chief marketing officer Larry Flanagan, then head of U.S. advertising. Gut feeling proved right. Since 1997, MasterCard has added new U.S. credit cards at more than twice Visa’s rate.
And the award-winning campaign’s versatile format and simple appeal have also made it a global winner: Spots have been tweaked for audiences in 105 countries and 48 languages.” – By Eugenia Levenson in article called Six Teams that Changed the World.
California Milk Board: A Big Idea That Reframed The Familiar
Got Milk is another “big idea” ad campaign that worked a bit differently. It framed a familiar and taken-for-granted product in a new way: deprivation. Getting you to think about the product not as a healthy beverage but as a necessary accompaniment to foods you love.
Original "got milk?" commercial – Who shot Alexander Hamilton?
More recently, we continue to see traditional advertising campaigns that can be considered “big ideas,” though this one — unlike Marlboro (which tries to imbue the product and user with certain qualities), or The Ultimate Driving Machine (which is a label for the product), or Think Different (which is about a brand belief), or Priceless (which is about an emotional benefit the brand wants to associate with) — is a big idea that is really nothing more than a creative executional device. Granted it is brilliantly done, well written, and clearly has endurance (it’s one of David Ogilvy’s early criteria), but it as pure an advertising idea as could be. Makes you think that big ideas can still work.
Today, however, we have a lot of debate about the value of a big idea. With fragmented media, the challenge of buying attention, the need to connect with people in different places and different times, on their terms, perhaps the big idea is over-rated.
“The big idea is dead. There are no more big ideas. Creative leaders should go for getting lots and lots of small ideas out there. Stop beating yourself up searching for the one big idea. Get lots of ideas out there and then let the people you interact with feed those ideas and they will make it big.”
So says Kevin Roberts Saatchi & Saatchi CEO
He also suggested a lot of other aspects of advertising are dead, too.
This, of course, is a cliche. Many of us have been writing about the virtue of small ideas for a long time. (You know that by the time a holding company CEO starts touting a message it’s been in the marketplace for years.)
Many of these posts go back to 2009. But perhaps it’s not so much that the Big Idea is no longer needed, it’s that we need many more different kinds of ideas because we can’t reach the masses with one, in one place, not even in a SuperBowl commercial.
So if Coke’s big idea is Happiness, it has Polar Bear TV spots, but also Internet connected machines that create experiences and yield content.
If Zappos’s big idea is (coincidence) Happiness, it has service that delivers on, boxes that declare it, advertising that captures it and fun viral events that demonstrate it.
And if Nike’s Big Idea is Achieve Your Potential (Just Do It), they not only have advertising, they create products and utility like Nike + and Fuel Band.
Others, too argue that The Big Idea, if not dead, can no longer be an advertising idea. A tagline or a campaign won’t do it. It’s more likely that new Big Ideas are rooted in technology and the building of something.
We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.’
And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.
Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems. Freud taught us to explore our minds as a way of understanding our emotions and behaviors. Einstein rewrote physics. More recently, McLuhan theorized about the nature of modern communication and its effect on modern life. These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.
But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.
The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.
We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.
But, if the Big Idea is so dead, culturally and advertising wise, how do you explain this? Old Spice (or we could put Dove here, or the Guardian, or any number of other brands that are still creating huge, game-changing impact with advertising.
Maybe we should re-write the definition of the Big Idea
Let’s for a moment argue that what made the Big Idea big was that it became omnipresent. That it reached the masses. That it was embodied in a single tagline (Just Do It) or image (Marlboro man) that lived for many years across many media. That it was primarily a message. Designed or conceived only to get you to notice a brand or product, pay attention to it, perhaps like it and hopefully buy it. If everyone saw the ad at the same time you did, and approved of its message or embraced the concept, you, as a consumer had permission to buy that product. It was OK.
Those days may be gone. The Internet, technology and the proliferation of media may have changed it. The fact that our attention can rarely be bought, even if we watch a lot of TV and video, that it has to be earned, that it turns to multiple screens and platforms to focus and that it quickly moves on certainly suggests we need new kinds of ideas.
No, we don’t need digital ideas. (Watch out for that label.) What we need are ideas for a digital world.
We need ideas that are interesting, shareable, useable, customizable. Consumers, if not also producers, are at the least a powerful distribution channel.
The real challenge is that we need amazing ideas no matter what size they are. Which means we need our small ideas to be big — if big means something that catches your attention (even a utility has to be noticed before it gets used), fills a genuine need; makes you feel great about using (or reading or engaging); and whose brilliance inspires you to pass it on.
Encouraging small, individual ideas is great. But we can’t let small ideas free us from striving for great ideas.
Big can be small, cheap and underproduced. Think Shocking Barack from a few years ago,
Big can be an event seen by no one until the video of it goes viral. TNT Square.
Duke Ellington said there were only two kinds of music. Good and bad. We could possibly end this debate entirely with an agreement that there are only two kinds of ideas. Good and bad.
Once good ideas were big, clever, fresh, original, memorable, motivating and enduring.
Today perhaps all that’s changes is that they are useful, shareable and participatory. They may be one shots. They may be home made. They may be campaigns. They may be supported by millions. Or thousands.
But one thing is sure. Whether they’re big is no longer up to the creator. It’s up to the user.
From Rabbits of Roadkill, a Hyper Island, Tim Leake exercise.
“The more we have no idea how to do it the better the outcome.” Tim Leake, the Global Creative Innovation and Partnership Director at Hyper Island (now there’s a title) shared the thought with me yesterday.
We were talking about how to teach and inspire creativity. Tim runs workshops for Hyper Island while I teach grads and undergrads at Boston University. Usually when I get asked, “How do you teach creativity?” I simply answer that I unteach whatever my students learned previously. I encourage them to take risks instead of play it safe. Urge them to run from the comfortable and familiar with as much speed as they can muster. Implore them to avoid the conventions that yield both written and unwritten rules.
Of course you can’t teach any of that. Students have to learn it. By doing. Creating. Even hacking.
My call to Tim was inspired by the cleverness of his idea to group-author a book on speed in three hours. It’s not a long book, of course, but Rabbit or Roadkill, Agency CEOs Write the Book on Speed is a brilliant exercise in how much you can do, even with a scarcity of time and resources. A thought that aligns perfectly with the idea of doing, creating and hacking.
Tim was kind enough to share the process he uses (I shared some of mine in return) and gave me some wonderful tips on how to do a something similar with my strategic creative classes.
When I asked Tim what he thought the chances were that the exercise might fail or yield little of worth, he shared the best answer of all, “The harder the problem — the more we have no idea how to do it — the better the outcome.”
As I thought about that, something else became apparent. Hard problems — challenges we may never have encountered before — actually liberate us from falling back on the tried and true tactics and techniques we too often rely on. Hard problems force us to think of entirely new ways of solving them. It might be the process we use, the team we assemble, the space in which we work, the idea that we pursue.
Maybe in the world of advertising we should start welcoming tougher problems, or even attempt to invent them ourselves.
We’ll be writing our book sometime this semester. Will share the outcome and the experience when we do.
This spring 25 students will re-invent the Nissan brand* with the creation of a new sustainable product line. A few weeks later they’ll help the city of Boston improve its efforts to attract consumer-focused startup companies to its budding Innovation District. And right after that they’ll create something entirely original – a program, a community, a product, or a company – and plan a way to introduce it. Oh, right, they’ll also launch their personal blog and get their online presence firmly established.
Thought I’d share the syllabus. Got any thoughts on how to educate the next generation of advertising creators, makers, strategists and hackers? Let me know.
The rules of marketing may have changed. But you still need to get attention, be remembered and generate results. Hi, I'm Edward Boches. Creativity Unbound is where I explore new ways to engage, inspire and motivate consumers when they’re the ones who are really in control.
Eventually there will be some very impressive data visualizations of SxSW. How many people, how many sessions, how many beers consumed, how many hangovers. Until then you can check out Mashable’s SxSW by the numbers. Or poke around SxSWs’s press room.
Al Gore says that the word for crisis in both Chinese and Japanese is composed of two characters. One means danger. The other means opportunity. Think about that. The language forces you to consider the positive with as much emphasis as we typically place on the negative. I’m not sure that English focuses us that way. Crisis tends first to elicit thoughts of danger, harm and concern. We may eventually see opportunity, but maybe we should see the opportunity immediately. For example, to use Uber again, urban cabbies can only see danger. That will lead to their inevitable failure.
