The biggest challenge for Big Ideas today is where they take root. Big Ideas with no means to reach people are nothing more than Intellectual Property.  They are only useful where we can use them. I’d like to propose five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape.  

 1.  It’s More Important To Have A Point Of View Than A Line. 

Activities thrive better than ads in the new media landscape.  So the most useful Big Idea is a point of view than can inspire activities.  John Grant refers to this as a Marketing Enthusiasm: a point of view on the world that is bigger than the brand or the product.  Persil’s ‘Dirt Is Good’ is more than an eye-catching line.   It is a marvelously rich point of view about how children develop through play.  For example, its website currently promotes a list of 33 things to do before you’re ten.  Contrast this with Samsung’s alleged Big Idea: ‘Imagine’.  There’s no point of view there, nothing to engage with. So ‘Imagine’ ends up shoehorned in as the opening to its line of copy.  Russell Davies nicely mocked what happens to meaningless Big Ideas online:   “It was OK when a Big Idea had to support three TV scripts and some posters, but its flatness shows when the poor digital agency has to turn it into an immersive, online experience, not just a silly game of whack-a-mole with the brand mascot.”   Read more…

Britain’s great marketing effectiveness stories of the 1990s were Orange’s ‘The Future’s Bright’ and Tesco’s ‘Every Little Helps’.  They didn’t rely on product USPs or lovable gag-filled campaigns. Instead they made big statements about their brands’ positions in the world. David Brooks caught the mood in Bobos In Paradise, describing an era in which ice cream companies possessed their own foreign policies.   

But while this heroic style of marketing went on to great heights, along came a bunch of branding success stories that challenged the big idea approach.

Innocent Smoothies became a £70million business without having its own election manifesto.  Nike revitalized its brand through a series of 10K runs, instead of bringing ‘Just Do It’ out of retirement.   Virgin Mobile picked up more customers than any other network by acting fun and irreverent, rather than lecturing people about the future of human interaction.  These brands weren’t concerned with communicating their agenda.  They were more concerned with connecting with people.  They connected through stuff they did, not through claims they made.  And they chimed with an increasingly interactive culture where people expected conversations instead of lectures from brands.  No wonder that some of the most interesting writers on brand culture – notably John Grant and Russell Davies – were dismissive of Big Idea marketing. 

All of which could make Big Ideas feel rather dated: a lumbering approach to a nimble world.

Yet we still need Big Ideas.  They remain useful to so many of the constituencies of marketing.  Looking at where and why they are useful gives us clues as to how big ideas can be as relevant in today’s new media as they were in their 90s heyday. Read more…

Lee Clow – Worldwide Director of Media Arts

We are at the beginning of the most exciting time the advertising” business has ever seen. While lots of people are talking about the challenge of the multi-media future, I believe it is the biggest opportunity for creative minds since the ‘60’s.

New technology hasn’t simply made our media options broader, it’s actually changed the model that brands have to operate in. Our talent is still about storytelling but using new delivery systems, formats, screens and experiences that have become opportunities for brands.

First, we have to re-think what we call media. Media used to be simply a way for brands to target consumers, but today, media is the way that people are engaging with the world around them. Really, media is just any space between a brand and the audience. And in fact, I believe the best brands will become media themselves: the places, spaces, experiences people choose to spend time with. Already, the Apple stores are a media experience, and iTunes is serving millions of songs, podcasts and playlists – all media of the brand. And others like Nike, adidas and Virgin are shaping their brands to make themselves a medium through which people experience their lives.

And as brands become media, agencies will have to become passionate across complete brand experiences, not just the media we are currently comfortable in. And we have to stop striving to be media neutral, we have to be media passionate. Read more…