The Big Idea: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
14th July 09
Posted in creativity, interactive
'Idea' by brunkfordbraun, via Flickr
For a good while now we’ve been hearing about the death of the big idea (put that phrase into Google and see what you get back), but before the coffin gets nailed down once and for all, I’d like to check for life signs. Not so that we can limp on, clinging to an old familiar industry cliché, but to make sure we’re not systematically talking ourselves into killing off something that still has the power to bring tangible and intangible value to the brands we serve.
There are a dozen reasons this declaration is being made, many of which make a ton of sense. Gareth Kay, in a piece about the Future of Marketing, got me thinking a little while ago. He argues that we need to ‘break the tyranny of the big idea’ for two reasons:
“First, we must remember that while marketing (and brands) exist for a commercial purpose, they live in a cultural space. And culture is far richer, deeper, complex and nuanced than 99.9% of marketing. Marketing will be more culturally interesting if it is made up of lots of coherent ideas than repeating consistently one idea.
Second, given our inability to predict the future (despite the fortunes spent on research) it makes much more sense to start lots of fires to see what takes hold and place lots of small bets…learning from them and then scaling up behind the ideas that seem to be working.”
This topic also seems something of a personal manifesto for some very smart people, including Iain Tait (Poke) who ran a workshop at Cannes called ‘The Art of Simple, Smaller & Smarter”, the introduction for which exhorted us to “Forget thinking big. It’s time to think small” and Mark Cridge (Glue) who argues that an obsession with big ideas is an anathema in a digital world, most recently writing in NMA about “the lie of the big idea as the be all and end all to each and every creative problem.” Mike Arauz (Undercurrent) also wrote not so long ago about a new business model for a digital creative agency which “sold a 100 little digital experiences instead of 1 big website.”
There’s a lot to agree with here: we’re well past the days of transmitting an identical, singular message ad nauseam and expecting it to have an effect; we’re finding a more agile, open, iterative approach is not just faster, but better and cheaper too; and the expectation that great brand communication might be defined solely by a TV monologue or a site that takes hours to load, carefully polished over months and months (to be launched upon a world we imagine waits breathlessly for it) also look increasingly anachronistic. Indeed, that behaviour is near impossible to make sense of this in the digital world we live in now, where speed, interactivity, reactivity and context all challenge content for impact in brand communications.
Yet all of the above suggests our problem here is not with big ideas per se, but with how they are executed.
I suspect what is being railed against most is the memory of grandiose, image-based advertising that historically dominated everything from ad spend to water cooler chat, at the expense of just about everything else. Certainly the language of ‘tyranny’ and ‘lies’ is powerful, emotional rhetoric, the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a turn-of-the-century political manifesto, maybe, not necessarily in 21st century adland.
Why should we even care?
Maybe it’s just a stage we’ve all got to get through, but when we interpret ‘big ideas’ as a shorthand to describe expensive TV ads with catchy endlines rammed home to their audiences nightly, we risk forgetting and devaluing the true meaning of the term.
At its simplest a big idea is a creative, compelling thought that gives a brand a strong sense of self in the eyes of its audience. Call that a unifying or conceptual thought, call it a big idea, call it a defining belief. Something that connects at a pretty profound human level. That guides the sort of conversations and stories we might want to create, listen to, fuel and curate on behalf of a brand. That endures over time and works across channel. Something to provide economies of scale and cohesion in an increasingly personalised world, with its attendant increases in variation and sheer volume of content.
This is not to deny for a second that re-engineering how ideas get executed isn’t both necessary and important. If we accept there isn’t enough great work in an interactive space, then it’s healthy that we take a good look at ‘how’ we do what we do (see here for a great example of this from Tim Malbon), not just ‘what’ we do. That we appreciate breakthroughs can come through deliberately trialling new approaches to idea generation in the first place. That it’s okay to realise a ’small’ idea has the kernel of something great in it and build from there, rather than re-write history and pretend it was all part of a grand plan. That we realise this is a constant, evolving conversation or story, not a burst of activity then silence for six months.
In fact, ‘big’ need not mean lumbering, unsurprising or expensive. In fact, quite the opposite. A big idea should make it easier, not harder, to act with speed and agility. Take Axe, for example, a BBH client. ‘The Axe Effect’ is a big idea that has been around for years and spans the globe - nowadays usually beginning & ending in an interactive space - but that thought has directly enabled many neat, inexpensive, ’smaller’ expressions like mobile tools and seasonal tactics with - I would argue - greater ease and consistently high standards of creativity than if the brief been approached from scratch each and every time. Equally, a personal favourite of mine is a film for Nike released earlier this year (from AKQA, directed by James Jarvis & Richard Kenworthy) that proves the point again that a (famously) big idea can be re-expressed surprisingly, beautifully and simply:
http://www.vimeo.com/4238176Maybe it’s just new language we need. Although I am reminded of something Kevin Kelly said ruefully in his excellent article ‘The New Socialism” in the July edition of Wired (UK): “I recognise the term socialism is bound to make many readers twitch……But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.”
Putting language redemption to one side for the moment, the main reason we shouldn’t be wishing big ideas into an early grave is simple: the very best ideas create longstanding meaning around a brand. By definition they tend to transcend the prosaic: they move, entertain and galvanise people. They unite and make sense of what can often be a loose connection of attributes and values, or a portfolio of products. What this needn’t mean any longer is the mindless repetition in communication we’re all afraid of - identical expressions of the same message, all wrapped up with a neat bow of an endline.
Whilst I’m sure there are more reasons - and no doubt a ton of counter-arguments too (please let us know what you think here), I’m ending with 5 reasons we should stop referring to the ‘death of the big idea’ right now, before we talk ourselves out of a job:
- We cease to create economies of scale over time, channel & geography for our clients
- We reduce our own efficiency, reinventing the wheel every 5 minutes
- We commoditise what we do
- We lose some of our best thinkers & creators
- We create confused brands
40 comments on “The Big Idea: Chronicle of a Death Foretold”
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Mel Exon
Should the mobile tools link point to http://www.lynxeffect.com/tools/mobile_lynx_fx_tools.aspx instead?
Thanks Matt. Link shd be fixed now.
Maybe we are suffering from the tyranny of death of rhetoric. I agree the nature of the big idea is changing, as it always has given business is a competitive endeavor. However, is the difference now that the very nature of a big idea is hugely disparate? There is no one “type” of idea. It could be just one execution, it could be a huge 87 touchpaper trans-media campaign, maybe an event or just a UPC code. It all depends on the business problem, target, nature of the product being sold and the cultures of the client and agency. There is no “one way.”
In fact, we have the potential for a big idea to be bigger than ever.
Good, thoughtful post. Thanks.
Seems like there needs to be more of a redefinition than railing against a brand and consumer reality like the power of a Big Idea. To suggest that a Big Idea is defined by medium or number of tactics/executions is backwards. It should inspire and inform these, but by definition should lead as well.
Your example with Axe is right-on. BBH & Unilever created a Big Idea driven by a compelling consumer insight that has unlocked amazing, sustainable business growth. That’s great Strategy.
And the Idea has been executed faithfully by all agency and media partners along the way for great consistency. That’s the benefit of the Big Idea; it serves as a rallying cry and recruits others to its mission, including partners and consumers.
Here’s a simple proof point on the success of a Big Idea: search Google and click through each “tab” or link at the top of your results from “web” to “images” to “video” and more. Try this test with “Axe” (http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=axe&aq=f&oq=&aqi=). You discover the power of the Big Idea isn’t just an organizing principle for advertising and marketing. In this case, it transforms the meaning from man’s earliest tool to “success with women.” For many consumers and especially those in the Axe target, search is the new definitive reality. Evident in the search results are the myriad of media and armada of tactics that have been generated in service of the Big Idea.
So there’s no confusion, I’m on the side of the Big Idea. Just because there aren’t so many great expressions of them in action doesn’t mean they’re extinct. To quote Bukowski, “but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.”
Anyone proclaiming the death of the big idea, has a clear agenda usually to try to wrest budget away from traditional media to more digital media.
My angst has never been about the big idea itself - I love big ideas, the bigger the better!
Rather it’s the way that agencies will hail the arrival of a ‘big idea’ purely on the basis of this is the idea that we want to sell you. So the lie I refer to, is the use of ‘don’t worry, of course it will work, it’s a big idea’ as effectively being a shorthand for don’t ask difficult question, for each and every campaign produced.
I think I said it better in this post about the idea of the idea becoming devalued, http://ow.ly/heoV
Big ideas, and you list some great ones above, are rare beasts indeed and should be celebrated when we conjure one up, normally over a great deal of time, after expending a great deal of energy, with lots of false starts. I’d argue its even rarer to deliver a big idea fully formed as the first piece of work for a client.
That’s what I have a problem, we’ve devalued the idea of the big idea through overuse and under delivery.
What we need to be doing, is stop spending months searching (sitting in a room doodling) for a big idea, while we could be out there DOING. Less talk more action.
Thanks - great article.
Seems like we need to bring more of a strapped startup mentality to creating digital assets..
But agree that you still need the idea behind it, and the execution to pull it off.
Thought-provoking article, thanks. The necessity of having ‘many small ideas vs one big idea’ is one of those points that is repeated increasingly frequently in the marketing world, often without precise definition of terms/meaning.
I really like your definition of a big idea as a “creative, compelling thought that gives a brand a strong sense of self in the eyes of its audience”. This is the definition of a BRAND idea (the modern equivalent of a brand positioning perhaps), as opposed to an EXECUTIONAL idea - a program or platform or campaign that is executed by a brand.
Any person, organization or brand that wants to be credible and trusted and likeable needs this sense of self-clarity and consistency: integrity and appeal depend on it. No-one likes the jerk who changes his views and personality depending on who he’s with.
Great post.
I would add this: In order for a big idea to work, everyone who works on the brand - internally and externally - has to submit to that idea. And submitting isn’t easy.
Most brands have a 1000 tiny big idea dictators, each trying to replace the big idea with a new one of their own invention, in order to feed their egos and confirm their “creativity.”
Mark, your point on overuse is key. The term has been bastardized to gussy up every idea, no matter how mundane, as a BIG IDEA. Some agencies even use only caps to make it that much bigger. It’s kind of like how every agency has a “creative department.” Even the not very creative ones.
Relevance, channel context, interestingness and insight are key elements of an authentically big idea. And sometimes, just a bit of dumb luck.
[...] Very interesting and relevant article over at BBH Labs. [...]
I’m not a big idea hater. I like big ideas. I like little ideas too. I just like ideas that are actually ideas.
I love things that make a difference. Things that real people can understand. Things they might actually use once and a while.
And I’m not convinced that real people get impressed by the size of your idea.
And I’m not convinced that any of us can, with total confidence, point at things and assess the size of the idea. I bet if we did a survey of ‘is this a big idea?’ across a bunch of work whether there’d be consensus? I think at the extreme ends we’d all agree - but my guess is there’d be a lot of confusion inbetween.
There’s room for all shapes and sizes of ideas. The big problem is that few of us in agency-land get paid for the size (or importance or value or whatever) of our idea - we get paid based on the time it looks like it took to come up with it. Or the complexity of the delivery and execution of it.
If the quest for big ideas makes you happy, then hooray. If you’d rather search for simple solutions to things, then hooray to that too. Often they’re not so different.
Hooray for ideas, great and small.
I think Big Ideas are morphing into Big Narratives for those that embrace transmedia practices. You still need to sell in a creative idea, and once that idea is sold in go back and think about World Building for that narrative. BBH did this with the Oasis: Cactus Kid campaign.
It takes an idea to sell an ad,
It takes a character to sell a campaign,
It takes a world to leverage all the transmedia contact points available today
We’re mildly obsessed with storytelling here at BBH Labs. We’d agree a big idea relies in the end upon how it’s executed and for the right brand a rich, fictional (or non-fictional…) world built across different touchpoints around a single, compelling organising idea is powerful stuff. Henry Jenkins calls this ‘world building’, as you say.
One point of correction - as much as I’d love BBH to take credit for Cactus Kid, it was in fact Mother London who developed that idea.
Thanks for the correction Mel. It’s nice to be confused with Mother
Some great comments here already - as always helping hugely to clarify things.
Mark’s point that ‘we’ve devalued the idea of the big idea through overuse and under delivery’ seems to sum up the problem perfectly.
I particularly like Emma’s distinction between a brand idea and an executional idea, plus the parallel she draws with how real people behave..
And Iain’s point that that ‘big’ and ’simple’ needn’t be opposing thoughts. Hooray to that.
Mel,
Great post and some good comments. I guess we all exaggerate sometimes to try and move the world on. I’m all for big strategic ideas, the ones that build business eg Axe, method, etc. But in the agency world, far too often we conflate a big business idea with a thin advertising idea. Which we then repeat everywhere. Leaving a very thin, boring brand in a rich, interesting world.
And I guess the other thing we tend to do at agencies is often go here’s your big idea and read out a TV script. The truth is the great big ideas can be expressed in numerous ways in different places and over time.
This is a fantastic discussion. My thoughts are:
A big idea is not about having “one big website”, it’s about having a powerful channel neutral communication property that can be executed across a whole range of different channels.
If the idea is solid and the brief is thorough, the result can be hundreds of different executions from a handful of different agencies across numerous media platforms.
The problem is that all too often claimed “big ideas” are big let-downs - either wrongly named advertising ideas or ill-thought out strategies masquerading as something more exciting in a well-delivered pitch.
Agree with the sentiment of your post wholeheartedly. There seems to be a lot of confusion between strategic concept and executional idea. They are different. One big, the other as big or small as you like.
Big ideas aren’t necessarily great ideas.
Wow, the amount of debate around a ridiculous hot air statement about ‘the death of the big idea…’
I agree wholeheartedly with Drew up there…less talk, more do. Who cares what all these theorists say? I’ve realized, the more the talk has gone up in our industry, the less great the work has become.
Let’s get back to knowing what we do, doing it well, and letting it speak for itself.
It’s not just “talk”. It’s critically important to understand what creative businesses offer, why, and in what form. It’s particularly important during a time of flux and re-shaping within marketing-focused businesses to be clear (even if only internally) about what you think you produce, and why, and also what you think you don’t produce, and why not.
Unless one is lucky enough to work in a business where creative magnificence emerges, magically, out of chaos, then it’s kind of important to have structure.
Far from preventing “great work”, I think the overwhelming weight of feedback and commentary above is that this kind of debate is helpful in creating honing the types of conditions and approaches within which great work can flourish. I’m learning a lot from reading what some fab people have to say on the topic. Thank you.
I respect your POV, Ben. But then again, that’s why you allow us to debate here.
I fully support BBH labs role of helping facilitate great things to be made. But I just think the discussions that go on and on in the blogosphere about the theories around ‘how’ gets a bit pointless.
For example, it’s pointless to even give time to a notion of ‘the death of the big idea.’ because anyone who believes big ideas are ‘dead’ just doesn’t get it. And it won’t affect what we do. Nothing is ever dead, it just changes and evolves. Little ideas, big ideas, blue ideas, whatever. It’s all just rhetoric until we have something to show. Only what’s made matters…if it works and inspires.
What we should be honing in on is more room for experimentation, playfulness, risk. On the surface, it seems the antithesis to these business conditions, but that is exactly what is needed.
I think, the best ‘making’ and ‘doing’ arises out of an organized chaos. And we are organized and structured enough already as an industry. Change will happen organically and naturally if we let it and nurture it - by simply staying true the importance of great ideas, and nothing else. Out of mistakes and trial and error, and the chance to fail. The more we try to define and create a structure around how to be ‘creative’ and how to have creativity flourish, the further backwards and constrained it all becomes. And then the better creative solutions will come slap us from behind, outside of the rules and structures we’ve built for ourselves.
The music video you just posted was done with minimal constraints, no overthink, and zero budget. Was it a chaotic mess? No, it was brilliant.
So compare the man hours of discussions that have gone into the countless blogs talking about ‘big ideas’ - to the actual making of an idea. And then look at the final result. It speaks for itself. What’s more inspiring?
An idea can grow to becoming a big idea. Lot of time what we call a ‘big idea’ comes with the benefit of hindsight after campaigns around the idea have shown extendability and sustainability. ‘Axe Effect’ or the ‘Absolut’ campaign became big because they had something going for it. Which marketer or agency wouldn’t want their idea to be big. One can start small though….
the “big idea” is simply a human truth.
that’s what we hunt for in this industry; that’s what makes brand communications approachable, understandable, and - when we’ve succeeded - beloved.
so to me, this conversation is null. the death of the big idea means the death of humanism in our work. and that would mean the death of one’s endearment to a brand, a movement, or a product. no matter what we call it, this can’t and won’t happen. not while great agencies and intellects are around.
i believe in conversations that push us to a better place, but the one thing i know about creativity is that it does not change. the business may change, the way we talk about ideas and work may change, but in the end, we are doing the same thing: looking for a human truth that makes a brand a welcome part of our lives.
maybe we should just let the term “big idea” die. or better yet, let’s kill it ourselves. all it does is trip us up. instead, let’s look for “the right idea.”
don’t be afraid.
[...] = ‘eyecube’; Over at BBH Labs there having a brilliant discussion on the subject of “The Big Idea” and wheter or not it is dead, or perhaps just deserves to die. The level of thought and [...]
Entirely agree a big idea just ain’t a big idea nowadays if it can’t accommodate the audience playing an active role (as you put it) in its deployment.. which reminds me, perhaps one of the reasons there’s been some shying away from ‘the idea of a big idea’ is the fact the judging criteria seem to have multiplied! thank you for this.
Great post Mel, and the commentary on both sides is terrific. I believe there is value in this sort of conversation. Before we can move to something new, as several people here suggest, we have to hash it out in places like this.
My take is this: In today’s landscape, the Big Idea is the one the that facilitates - even plans for - the creation of a Deeply Immersive Narrative Universe (DINU). A DINU allows for consumers and other professinals to participate in the expansion of the idea. Consumer interaction with the idea is going to happen, by planning for it and giving consumers the tools, or at least permission, to participate you have the opportunity to make a good idea a Big Idea.
Agencies are often tasked with the creation / application of a big idea to what is frankly a poor brand proposition in either traditional functional or emotional terms.
Consumers these days are more brand literate than we give them credit for. No matter how good or big a creative idea is, if it is not supported by the brand delivery, it fails.
The old saying that “creative is not just a dept.” needs to be embraced by clients who must strive for more innovative, better differentiated products, services and brands in a more competitive market.
What is really needed is more innovative big idea brands. The wind-up radio designed by Trevor Baylis, and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation from Nicholas Negroponte (using the same wind up technology) are truly inspired big ideas that genuinely change lives. Whilst most products don’t aim to change the world, many products don’t even stand out from the crowd.
Brand owners seem to have lost the art of developing truly differentiated products and strong USP’s that agencies can leverage.
A strong brand promise is easier to leverage through big idea advertising. A weak brand can’t be polished by a great creative idea in these days of consumer scrutiny and acceptance or rejection.
The big idea needs to live again in the creation of great brands by creative clients.
And then just to throw my theory out of the window, this comes along from a local Melbourne agency!
You can polish a poor product (but only so far…). Fun stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd6-n7MhVg8&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fadage%2Ecom%2Fadages%2F&feature=player_embedded
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Now I like big ideas! The bigger the better. But I think we all need to classify what different types of ideas we use. First there are brand ideas, these will never die as every client will always need a neat summation of what their brand stands for. Next, there are advertising ideas, these are rather old fashion, quaint things that really are on their way out, as they are so limiting. And last, there are ideas which are so big they necessitate advertising to promote them. These latter ideas are the ones that are truly interesting, and the ones that will propel clients forward. I think anyone operating in the digital space understands this. I’m not sure that those working in more traditional media do.
I think what John Hunt says here makes a lot of sense on this topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oeZOYKsotA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eseenitbefore%2Enet%2Fblog%2F&feature=player_embedded
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I think this debate continues (http://bit.ly/IM6Pp) because our own industry has perpetuated the big idea in its old incarnation: the TV spot. However, what we’ve always done in that space — conceive ideas that inspire everything from laughter to joy to participation — simply needs to be transferred to the new spaces: social, crowdsourcing, iPhones, digital, conversation marketing, new forms of online publishing. All of those media need great ideas and creativity. When we get to a saturation point of community and conversation, guess what will make those communities and conversations stand out (besides honesty, authenticity, transparency, engagement, of course)? CREATIVITY. BIG IDEAS. BIG LITTLE IDEAS. STUFF WORTH GETTING TALKED ABOUT. If we limit our thinking to the old — epitomized by TV — we die. If we expand our definition of ideas, creativity and inventiveness to all the new places and use them all as in ingredients for the recipe that yields or brings to life the truly big idea, we (our clients, our agencies, our employees) all flourish.
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