what's the big idea

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

the new art of fringe planning

Next to account planning, connection planning, propagation planning and the likes a brand new discipline is added to the already complex world of strategic planning: Fringe planning.

Fringe planning

I really like the concept as in fact its core principles are already embedded in the way we look at marketing over at Boondoggle today. For starters, we believe that the true added value of an agency lays in the improvement of existing products & services or the development of new ones with the sole purpose of helping clients doing better business. Our entire Boondoggle Electric ecosystem is built on that. We even have our own innovation incubator called Boondoggle LifeLabs.

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five suggestions for creative strategists

Learn to dissect

Anyone can identify a great idea from the past. It could be a story, a film, an ad, a performance. The tendency sometimes is to replicate it. After all if it worked once, why not again? But anything done, of course, is old. The trick is to take it apart and break it down. Why did it work? Was it a connection to culture? The way it portrayed a type of person? What it said about the user? It’s use of juxtaposition? Need practice? Just look at the new VW spot, The Force and figure out why it is so well-liked. It’s not about the car. It’s about the kind of family who owns one, how they raise their kids, and the joy of small creative moments. All of those can be replicated without regurgitating the idea.

Master the art of stealing

This may seem a contradiction, but it’s not. The trick is to steal from somewhere else, outside the world in which you’re actually working. That, of course, means that you seek inspiration from lots of different places. Museums, theatre, distant culture, science, literature. Can’t get all your ideas from watching YouTube videos, you know. Here’s one of my all time favorites. A doodle by Picasso that I discovered on the fourth floor in the Musée Picasso in Paris. Gave me an idea for how to use editorial commentary in new ways and apply it to advertising. Turned into an ad campaign that successfully launched a new product and won hundreds of creative awards.

Find unexpected sources and look below the surface

Miles Davis and Atul Gawande - listen, read, learn

Teachers are everywhere. Listen to Miles and you learn much of what you need to know about collaboration: a leader has to keep everything focused on the ultimate goal; learn to get out of the way; surround himself with young talent; let other people shine. From Atul Gawande, the brilliant surgeon, you can re-think how you get people to change behavior, overcome old habits, and cast aside the blind deferral we sometimes bestow on a single “creative director” who may not always have the right answer.

Seek collisions

I’m thrilled to see that Dave has this thought in his syllabus. But nothing is more important to a strategist (or a creative thinker). Ideo shows us how how valuable it is in design thinking and problem solving. It’s already become the driving force behind the best new apps and uses of technology thanks to APIs and what we can to with them. And many of our favorite creative ideas, from Nike’s Chalkbot to Sour’s interactive videos are about crashing things together. Here’s a talk from Steven Johnson on the very topic.

Observe human from different angles

This is the obvious one, so I don’t really need to talk about it. But the one suggestion I will offer is this: it’s no longer only about relationships to brands and categories; it’s also about relationships to content, technology, media and most of all, community. So understand the latter as well as the former. Then start with your customer and what she needs, not your brand and what it wants. Even when it comes to advertising.