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." 

 

2.  A Big Idea Cannot Depend On A Line

This seals the deal for me.  The real growth media of recent years - music festivals, mobile phones and Facebook applications - don’t have room for them.  The fragmentation of media and the shift to global marketing means that Translation, whether in to different channels or different languages, is the priority.

 

 3.  One Big Idea Doesn’t Mean One Big Execution. 

Historically Big Ideas came in the form of big executions.  I first encountered The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Orange through an epic cinema commercial.  I thought it was dazzling at the time; I suspect I would find it indulgent today.  The best way to manifest a Big Idea today is through a whole bunch of activity.  The same positioning could inspire a series of 'marketing molecules' that make the most of the media and the audience.  No one molecule is the high point of the brand; all contribute to it.   Nike is the brand of Joga Bonito, 10K and Supersonic.  Top Shop is the brand of personal shopping, vintage and the Kate Moss range.  To steal a quote from Ben Malbon of BBH: media fragments, ideas don’t.

 

 4.  Align Your Big Idea To Your Business

Big Idea marketing is most powerful when it brings people along with the business. A truly robust Big Idea should be rooted in how the business generates value, where the business is going, or in the culture of the brand.  Apple's 'Think Different' works on all these levels.  It’s difficult getting an organisation to buy in to a Big Idea if the accountants and engineers suspect that it's just sugar sculpture from the marketing department.  It's easier to get alignment and results out of something that is commercially true.  I'll bet that Orange's new 'I Am' idea has more trouble taking root in the company than See What You Can Do had at 02. 

 

5.  Match Your Brand Behaviour With Audience Behaviour

A traditional Big Idea didn't care who you were or where you were.  But today channels make such a difference to how people deal with ideas: quick, useful interpretations of the brand idea for mobile phones; rich, interactive ones for the Internet, visual spectacles in-store.  Brand strategists used to understand consumers as consumers of the brand.  I wasted my early days in advertising like a Victorian botanist trying to establish whether buyers of Felix cat food were a different species from people who bought Whiskas.  Now brand strategists need to understand their audiences as consumers of media.  The most useful channel-planning tool today is probably a Venn diagram of how the brand behaves and how the audience behaves.  The overlap should always inspire something interesting.

HT @ouilouis

2 German students created a bluetooth enabled bottle opener that automatically invites your Facebook friends for a beer everytime you pop a cap.

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The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

Howard Gossage

The real fact of the matter is that nobody talks about brands. People talk about what interests them. Sometimes it's a brand.

Howard Gossage remixed by Gustav von Sydow

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When evaluating the traffic sources in your web analytics tool you should particularly pay attention to the list of search terms your visitors used to find your website. Not only is it important to look at the top keywords, also the type of keywords (breadth) and the length of the list (depth) indicate how well you score in terms of search visibility.

During recent analyses I found that brands:

1. rely too much on brand-led terms in search.
2. mistakenly attribute these keywords (e.g. “brandname” and “brandname.com”) to their natural and paid search efforts, whereas in fact this should be counted as direct traffic.
3. aren’t fully aware of the context in which customers use, need or search for their products.

Or in the words of Epiphany’s Director of Search, Andy Heaps:

It’s not necessarily that big brands are complacent when it comes to search - it’s more that the potential of search isn’t always understood, so isn’t seen as a priority. Brands are also often blinkered by the comfort that comes from brand traffic they receive, that they often neglect the fact that larger exposure is available through more generic search terms.

That is why the search marketing agency now challenges the list of UK superbrands by exploring their visibility within the search landschap. You will notice that their ranking of B2C brands differs greatly from the standard list.

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