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…

If you want the idea to serve as the backbone of successive campaigns over time, then you have to take it a step further. You need more than an advertising idea – you need a brand idea. Two examples of this are “Impossible is Nothing”, for Adidas, and “Dogs Rule”, for Pedigree.

Campaign launch: Muhammad Ali

We launched “Impossible is Nothing” on the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Avenue in New York. I remember it well, because I was there at the time. I was surprised to see that kids still perceived Mohammad Ali as a star. Of course, he has a big personality – which enabled him to become a legend.  

Rather than just being a slogan, “Impossible in Nothing” is actually an affirmation that you’re ready for anything. Big ideas have another advantage: a strong brand idea can inspire a lot of executions. 

For example, we constructed a giant “Oliver Kahn Bridge” – an enormous image of the German goalkeeper – over the road near Munich airport. And the Cologne train station ceiling was painted with a celestial soccer match in the style of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Athletes impress us by succeeding against the odds. This is the “Impossible is Nothing” spirit. The manifesto is very simple. It says that “impossible” is not a fact, but an opinion. 

We also launched a manifesto for Pedigree (as well as a book called Dogma). People love their pets so much that they’re often featured in family photographs. Who better than Pedigree, the biggest pet food brand in the world, to celebrate the affection that people have for their dogs? 

So Pedigree adopted an ambitious stance: “Everything Pedigree does is done for the love of dogs.” That changed a lot – not only in the brand’s positioning, but also in its behavior. For instance, Pedigree employees were now invited to bring their pets to work. Salespeople could visit their clients with their dogs. The company even changed its Tokyo offices because dogs were not allowed in the building. It would be hard to find a stronger example of commitment to a brand idea. As Paul Michaels said, Pedigree went from being a “dog food company” to a “dog company”. 

To “Impossible is Nothing” for Adidas and “Dogs Rule” for Pedigree I could add “Shift” for Nissan and “Think Different” for Apple. All these ideas are “big”. They’re big because they have an internal as well as an external effect, and because they work across media, from a billboard to a TV screen to a CEO’s speech. 

So what about a brand like Apple? For me, Apple is an example of a company that has grown big, while staying in touch with its small side. It combines the innovation of small with the energy of big. 

In the 1960s Bill Bernbach taught us that, in the words of his legendary ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, “Small is beautiful”. But Cadillac ran a much older ad, in 1915, called “The penalty of leadership”. It suggested that when you are at the top, everyone wants to knock you off. So you have to try harder. The result: big becomes beautiful. 

I talked about P&G at the beginning. Not only because it was named Advertiser of the Year – but also because it stands as genuine proof that big can be creative.

Click here to read Part One.

When Procter & Gamble was named Advertiser of the Year at Cannes in 2008, TBWA chairman Jean-Marie Dru celebrated with a speech about why it’s great to be big. Here’s the first of two abridged extracts.

Cannes is a place where creativity is celebrated unlike anywhere else. But the source of that creativity does not remain the same. In 2007, something happened in Cannes – something extraordinary. Both Procter & Gamble and Unilever – two giant FMCG companies – were awarded the print and TV Grand Prix.

For decades, neither of these companies had much of a reputation for winning creative awards. In fact, it’s fair to say that some of us had gotten used to making fun of these big, unwieldy clients with their big, traditional agencies. But here’s the reality: A lot of great work comes out of big clients and large agencies. At TBWA, global clients generate 85% of our awards.

The fact that both P&G and Unilever were awarded a Grand Prix the same year was no coincidence. It was a historic turning point for our industry. Bigger is better.

For one thing, big companies have large budgets. And they are using them more effectively. Some of them used to think that, with all their advertising dollars, they could simply repeat the same film over and over until the message got through. That era has passed. As you all know, audiences can now watch whatever they want, whenever they want. Mediocre advertising gets zapped. It’s the beginning of the end for repetitive advertising.   

Mars is one of the companies that have realized this. Five years ago, nobody would have imagined that Mars would make films as edgy as the Skittles “Touch” and Combos “Fever” ads we made for them in New York.

So the question is: why has Mars adopted this edgier style of advertising? Obviously, they saw the writing on the wall. There’s no getting away from the fact that, today, creativity is vital to every sector, without exception. More than ever, big ideas matter. Big has become beautiful.

Read the second abridged abstract tomorrow on www.mad-blog.com.