Only some ideas are big - big enough to cross boundaries of media, partnerships, screens, and audiences. Big enough to spin off 1,000 smaller ideas that can all work together in a cohesive way.
So let's take an example. What if you had the idea to chop up every Schwarzeneggar movie scream and put it into one video. That would be super. So someone did it.
But then you took that idea to a community manager, an offline agency, a media company, the client, the fans - what do they do with that idea? It's limited. You can take the video and place it in pre-roll. You can share it. You can talk about it in a status update maybe. But there's not all that much to add.
But what if you had expressed that idea one level up? The Supercuts meme takes movies and television shows down to their essential ridiculousness to expose the cliches or shared techniques that exist within them. When you frame it that way, everyone gets to play. You could get this.
That's often the difference between big, integrated ideas and stuff that just does a single job. One gives everyone the freedom to create, the other does not.
You can think of these ideas as gardens. They define both boundaries and fertile territory where other ideas can grow. American Express could have just made the small business tools and Levi's could have just made the tv spot about a fictional steel town getting back to work. And that may have done a job, but it probably wouldn't have spurred as much participation or conversation either.
Even when we do stay solely within the digital space - more often than not, things tend to work better when it's big enough to become a banner ad, a series of social updates, an influencer program, a website, a video and on and on. If all you can do in each of those spaces is tell people that this other thing exists somewhere else, your idea will limit the content teams, social media teams, bloggers and whoever else wants to help it spread.
This isn't always about good ideas or bad ideas. Sometimes our ideas need to be big, programatic, expansive, and sometimes they need to be very specific. But it's important that you understand the difference because even the smaller ones should be additive at the core.
So putting it together - go for ideas that give room for others to play. Infuse them with borrowed elements from music, art, tv, film, fashion, books, memes and magazines to gain attention and make them feel familiar for the audience. Marvel at how awesome you are.
Working Out the Big Idea
Pull out a sheet of paper. On the top - write "The idea." In a few words, write down the basics of the idea.
Below that - you could write this:
Banner ad:
YouTube video:
Facebook status update:
Blogger outreach:
Tumblr:
Then beside each one (and feel free to add other channels) - write down a related idea that would fit with the big idea at the top. If the only thing you can think to do is to tell people about the big idea or you have a slew of hackneyed, unworkable nonsense - might be time to think bigger.
Simple messages are more likely to be remembered and shared. Which is why most briefs have "one key thing." It's also why trying to game the brief by adding a double entendre or a two-pronged one key thing makes it exponentially more difficult to use.
Pay with a tweet is easy to talk about. A mobile application that is a social network within a game that measures the speed of your car and gives you points to move up and down levels and and and - not so much. And things that are hard to talk about don't get shared.
As we build increasingly complex digital things - a website, an application, a community, a campaign - the imperative for the easily explainable idea becomes only greater. If you want to sell big ideas, you have to give clients the tools to sell them to their teams and the audience the tools to sell them to their friends.
But there's a tension - simplicity without nuance is boring. And boring things get ignored, too. So while our ideas need to be simple and shareable - each of them need to be packed full of interest generating elements. Or reasons for me to pay attention. And that's where cultural connections matter most. They help our audience identify who it's for and how it can be used.
Given the nature of the site, the big idea is the brand itself. Let's call it 'Classic style for refined men.'
But the site isn't only a rack of clothes. It's full of little content ideas that help me decide if what they sell is for me. So if I'm a lumberjack or something, the whole site would feel foreign. The interviews, the style advice, the profiles of old-school dapper celebrities, they all work together to help me know whether this is something I should stop down for or not. The content never distracts from your purchase, but helps to subtly explain it.
Converse adds the nudges at the bottom - Music, Basketball, Skateboarding, Style - each a reminder, I am for you. The shoes protect your feet - the music, the art, they infuse it with style. The communications aren't just a way to sell more shoes, they are as much a part of the product as the rubber or the canvas.
Earlier this year, Pop Secret launched Pop Secret Labs to use technology to make in-home movie watching more social. Each idea is designed to reach a specific audience or community - a Chrome application for the tech folks, then they've made partnerships with Someecards and OKCupid, reaching out to those that have already shown an ability to connect large audiences.
In each case, the core idea of the brand or the campaign uses smaller ideas to create the world it should live in. They are the connective tissue from the function of the thing to its meaning. When done properly, they make our ideas no less simple, but provide much richer, contextual experiences that give the audience a reason to pay attention.
This is often where campaign microsites and utility for utlity's sake applications consistently fail. While creating an airbrushed stereotype of our audience, we strip the reality, the nuance, the humanity from them. We create a fake world for our audiences instead of a rich world that reflects the one they actually live in. It's in this area that digital shops have the most catching up to do. Even the most technologically interesting solution will fall flat if it remains barren and disconnected.
In short -
If you want to make and sell big ideas, make them easy to talk about and share.
If you want people to watch or participate, use references to create familiarity, context and invite attention.
We talk a bunch about making stuff, but we spend much less energy connecting that stuff to what our audiences are already doing, reading, watching or making themselves. So let's start getting after that.
Stick with me here. It looks long, but at least there are lots of fun videos and stuff.
Why does celebrity matter?
Sometimes they lend credibility. So if I need to sell a tennis racket, maybe I'd want Monica Seles as a spokesperson. Or if it was 1995 maybe I would. Because she is great at tennis, so she must know something about rackets. Just like 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Crest, and they know more than you about teeth, so better to take their advice.
Or second, they have existing communities. When I attach myself to Jay Z, I'm not just buying him, I'm buying what he represents to the people who listen to him. So he may sell Pepsi or American Express, two products he has little special credibility in. Except maybe that he's rich and has awesome taste buds. Either way, the line is way less clear than she plays tennis so let's give her a tennis a racket.
You could think of Jay Z as a publisher himself, not all that different from Rolling Stone or GQ. So when you bring him in, you're effectively buying space in the mind of his audience. Or at least occupying the same space.
But there is a bigger thing happening here than just credibility or attention. Mostly we're buying familiarity.
Now - think about your own social circle. How did you get to know them? Probably some sort of commonality. Maybe you went to the same school, or you work with them, or you were at the same show, whatever. That commonality provides the basis for a conversation. And that basis gives you leeway to explore other interests you may have in common. Might be music, books, political leanings or even a worldview. You make connections with others because of all the ways you're the same.
The same goes for how you connect with brands. We tend to favor those that seem familiar. People usually choose things that they know over change, even if the new thing is better. I could spew some psychological mumbo jumbo here, but suffice it to say - creating a sense of familiarity matters a lot whether you're meeting someone new, chatting up a potential client or trying to get someone to buy something. So all those associations you pack into the things we make also amp the likelihood someone will use it, trust it, share it or frankly - just give it a chance, which is half the battle.
A weird one to be certain, but think of all the little snippets of connections they're using here, creating a world where Star Wars geeks, fans of Snoop Dog and club DJs can all play. All in a style natural to the thousands of remixes that appear on YouTube. And all brought into the Adidas universe. We can argue of how effective it is, but it certainly provides lots of reasons for people to stop down and give it a watch.
Keeping on the Star Wars theme, here's Toyota's Super Bowl spot from 2 years ago. Pretty brilliant connection between a feature and, well, the enterprise.
But let's focus on the year after, where they continued to expand their cultural tapestry, starting with the teaser for last year's super bowl spot.
They stuck with Star Wars bit by having a dog choir barking the Imperial March, but added a throwback to the most annoying Christmas song ever made. The extra touch of the dogs resembling the characters just gave another nice angle to talk about.
But then it gets more interesting with the spot itself. Starts pretty basic with the cute pup. But then we pull back into the Star Wars universe in the middle of a meta debate on which spot was better - a conversation that would happen across millions of households only seconds later. Maybe a little weird, but packed with cultural currency.
Video-centric examples tend to be the easiest to explain, but sometimes a bit harder to follow into the digital space. So think of the Pain Squad mobile application. Maybe it wins at Cannes without the Rookie Blue and Flashpoint integration, but I doubt it.
Nike+ Fuel Band
The invention of the Nike+ FuelBand sucks up all of the attention, but it is the world Nike, Wieden and R/GA crafted around it that elevated it from just a cool thing for runners and tech geeks to something of more interest to a much wider audience.
This one was super interesting because they used football player Ndamukong Suh, but also partnered with Path, introducing a whole new community. And setting up a relationship with SXSW.
The simplest example is this single post from Oreo. They could have just put up another video of you dipping your Oreo into milk or something, but instead - they chose to play in the real world.
The status of products are often derived not from their function, but from their cultural viability. The voice-over, the music, the style of the shoot, the actors, the language you use, all of it - creates a playground of opportunities and a cultural shorthand for the brand. Every choice is a chance for the brand to say - I like this thing, so do you, so now we can have a chat.
By now, you've probably figured out that this isn't really a post about celebrity. It's a post about common references. That can be a meme, a phrase, a book, a song, a band, a youtube video, a media property, stylistic element or even another brand. Sometimes it's overt and sometimes it's more subtle - but packing these elements into our products builds the connective tissue that gives it a punch that an unknown voice actor or a custom-made song could never supply.
So how often do we play with these elements? How often do we think of these audiences and question - what do they watch, read and play with? What stuff comes across their newsfeed? What do they talk about in line at Starbucks? And how can we take all of this cultural noise and use it to make our stuff more meaningful.
None of this is new. But it isn't structural to how we assemble our work. And it probably should be. Our baseline job might be to create another action, to provide better experiences, to get someone from point a to point b - but all of that works better and harder when you make the cultural stuff that matters to our audience work with you rather than trying to fight it, or worse, ignore it.
Anyway, more to come. Then we'll get into method.
A version of this was cross-posted on Core, the internal engine of Twist Image
"Once you start conceiving of your book as a commodity, you start thinking about readers as potential buyers, as customers to be lured. This makes you try to anticipate their tastes and cater to them. In doing so, you begin to depart from your own inclinations rather than respond to what the Irish novelist, Colm Toibin, has referred to as “the stuff that won’t go away.” “It seems that the essential impulse in working is … to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find a form and structure for it.” Facing up to what haunts you and finding a form and structure for it can never be a commercial enterprise. That stuff’s too chaotic and unpredictable, too messy and gorgeous, to fit a popular template. But it’s the source of your originality and may well prove popular in the end."
Author Jeffrey Eugenides shares somewhat of a fact of creativity. it tends to work best when it's something we want ourselves. Which I think is problematic for the business we're in. Everything we do chases the whims of something or someone else. So our question then is how we "chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul" when it's not only an expression of something that burns within, but rather something meant to move someone else.
Not to get all emo on you, I think the answer is love. We don't have the luxury of chasing every eccentric act of creativity that crosses our mind, we aren't in the business of provoking for the sake of provocation. And frankly, very few can build a career on that sort of indulgence in any industry.
So love though, think of how you bought gifts for others this past Christmas. Did you hurriedly buy the first thing plausible you could find? Or did you have the most success in considering the tastes and fashions of someone you care for? Did you buy it to check a box on a list or did you buy it because you wanted to show that person that they hold some meaning for you? If your purchase is more considered, the act of both giving and receiving becomes more satisfying. Everyone wins.
The best strategists and creatives I've found are not only passionate about the work, but the joy of the work stems from something bigger than building stuff you like or building because you need a pay check. The best find something about those who will ultimately touch the things they make that they genuinely care for, admire and respect. The best work is not simply transactional, but an empathetic exchange of something of more import than selling a few widgets.
So that is the job for the New Year, to get beyond the scowls and politics, the holier than thou attitudes we sometimes take towards an audience who may seem far away and not of us. It is to stay out of the high rises and in the streets. To not imagine only soccer moms, tech geek dads and rich, extreme white teenagers when we find ideas, but to create experiences for how the rest of us, and the most of us, live, too.
Austin Kleon says of musicians, "You can ignore the audience as much as you want — just don’t expect to get on the fucking radio."
Ignore your audience all you want, just don't expect to be rewarded for it.
“If you look at the creative process outside of traditional advertising, you’ll find a gap. And where there are gaps, there can be opportunities. Why does it take agencies months to work out a single campaign, when it seems Silicon Valley can kickstart an entirely new company in the same amount of time? In the same time frame, gaming companies pull together thousands of iterations of Call Of Dutyand Farmville. Sitcoms can turn out dozens of scripts. And so forth.
What agencies must take immediate responsibility for is the change in hierarchies happening outside of the agency brain tunnel. Top-down assembly line processing is a remnant from the rusty industrial age, and no longer works in the fluid, spreadable hoodoo environments of the information era.” - Patrick Hanlon, Google Says It's Time for Agencies to Get Agile, Forbes
This drives me almost as crazy as the ridiculous "utility or bust" snake oil that sold agencies the idea that storytelling is for chumps, tools are the only things that matter. Like don’t teach math, just build better calculators. Sounds good on paper, but leaves you with a bunch of idiots.
First, agencies are not startups. Startups aren't even startups, at least not in the romantic view in which they’re presented here. They imagine the myth of the entrepreneur while dismissing the months or years it takes even the most succesful to find their footing. Even then, they fail at a higher rate than would be sustainable for our industry. If you expect to stay in business long with 1 success to 100 epic failures, good luck.
Second, most startups are building stuff they themselves want. In Paul Graham’s post on growth in startups, he said “Steve Wozniak's problem was that he wanted his own computer. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. But technological change was about to make it a much more common one. Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people in the coming years. But by the time it was obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was already established.”
In other words, it’s a combination of perspective and circumstance. Neither easily gained, especially not at the rate suggested here.
We spend most of our time making things that need to move people other than ourselves. Pretending that you can create things that matter to someone else by wielding only an expert knowledge of a technology is just absurd.
I believe that agility matters. I believe that companies that can grow and adapt to changes happening around them usually win. I believe that relentlessly iterating and staying ruthless with our ideas matters more today than in any other time in our history.
That doesn’t mean that every part of the process of making advertising-like things should be treated the same. It's not always useful to throw a bunch of people in the room and expect anything of value to come back. Agility is not an end unto itself.
A secret sauce for faster ideas is a story the industry wants to believe in, just like the flash of a brilliant insight or the power of creative genius. But if we rely on miracles rather than the tenacity and grit to both find and produce good ideas, I have trouble seeing how the products we make improve rather than continue to decline.
We need to understand when to run. When enough information is enough. When we have the right problem to solve or the right ideas to execute. Maybe then is when speed becomes more of an imperative. Otherwise, dollars are too scarce and too important to risk for the sake of speed alone.
Well, it's come to this. I'm busy as always, but missing all this blogging fun. Good for the soul. So in the spirit of Andrew, I think I'll just repost an email. Maybe you'll find it interesting, too.
One of our strategists at Twist found a pretty great survey of Walmart moms. One question in particular stood out to me. Or as Gillian said, "Walmart Moms were less likely to refer to themselves as middle class, and more likely to describe themselves as working class (let's get real – this probably speaks to them being more realistic and having less status anxiety than the other women surveyed – we all know America doesn't have much of a middle class. I've read other studies that have shown that most people, regardless of whether they are rich or struggling, will self-report that they are middle class)."
So I yammer on in response…
I especially love the bit around working class versus middle class. Working class is used in an almost derogatory fashion throughout most of the States. Like middle class implies you're working your way towards the upper class, whereas manufacturing types in Michigan or Pennsylvania, Miners in West Virginia, whatever – don't relate as well to the quintessential American story. Their parents did the same job. And their parents before them. And that sort of thing is a badge of honor within those communities, not a sign of stagnation.
It's partly what I love so much about the Levi's Ready to Work campaign. It took the ideals of the working class, freedom in open spaces, working with your hands – these things they were feeling like they were losing, and made it a cause for the creative class in San Francisco, LA, Chicago, NY – who were just discovering those very same ideals and making them their own.
Also speaks to the broader point of how we should be looking at our own jobs. It's not enough to look at a situation or an audience and understand them in a vacuum, but we're at our best when we're connecting those audiences to a larger story. Which doing that is all about all of our other inputs we bring in. What is it that our brains bring to the table that help us sift and see how one thing is like another in ways others can't.
The somewhat interesting, frustrating, fascinating fact of creativity in advertising is that it's something most ask for, then get at doing just about everything possible to remove all the newness, risk and unfamiliarity needed to make what we do impactful.
So that was the starting place for my Infopresse chat in Montreal. If creativty inherently means uncertainty, and we live in one of the most uncertain times in history - we might as well make it work for us rather than against us.
Without further adieu...
And of course - the slideshare if you'd like to follow along.
Most advertising is somewhat of a constant push and pull, the story of the brand versus the insight into the audience. Brands with too much of a disconnect between these two things tend to just muddle through, bouncing from promotion to promotion without a clear identity or sense of what they’re here to do. It’s item at a price based on the idea that people want stuff, not necessarily stuff to facilitate belonging, values or any of all that fruity stuff that seems more difficult to quantify. At least those things that “feel” less like selling anyway.
But our goal is pretty simple. We’re helping brands operate more fluidly, expressing a coherent sense of self and an acute understanding of what that means for an audience, their needs and expectations.
“All our cognitive skills are in fact acquired skills. Ordinary life, from birth to death, teaches us to exercise our various cognitive skills in order to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. They are acquired. The message in all that is that if you want to understand your own mind, it is best to start off with yourself…in looking at the history of your own belief system.”
In other words, the way we make decisions has everything to do with how we’ve experienced our past. So you can’t really understand a brand’s lens unless you also understand its history, how it got from point A to today.
The tool we’ve been using is meant as both a rallying cry of sorts and simply a way to focus new decisions based upon the important behaviors of the past. The stuff that shapes who these companies are and why they’re here.
For explanation’s sake, I’ll re-order a bit.
The first couple are super important, but also what you’d probably expect to see in something like this.
Values What are the things that are most important? What is the brand’s moral code? For Apple this could be intuitiveness or accountability, for Google it could be experimentation.
Personality Does the personality reflect that of their founder? CEO? How might you describe the tone of voice? If you called the company Steve or Stu and tried to describe it, what words would you use?
The next three are a package of sorts.
Purpose This is the rallying cry bit. What is the thing the brand could rally their community towards? What is the bigger idea the brand exists within? What does it do in service to the audience, the world? The bigger idea is important. If you’re a foundation company, you don’t just exist to pour concrete, you might rally for more stable homes. Or if your Tom’s shoes, you exist to improve the lives of children. Nike exists to make athletes better.
Motivation This is what gives you credibility and authenticity. What is the thing from which the purpose is derived? Why should we believe that you give a shit? Often this is founder driven, and sometimes crosses over with behaviors, but this is really about things that happen inside the company that shape who they are. You could say the core brand motivation for Virgin comes directly from Richard Branson. But you could also say that GM is what it is because of a scrappy, survivor mentality stemming from the restructure.
Behaviors Often much harder than it seems, behaviors are the outward signs of this motivation. What are the past actions the company or people within it have taken in support of that purpose? If you can’t name anything, you probably haven’t found the right purpose. Red Bull made a secret half-pipe for Shaun White. Levi’s jump-started a town. Apple’s yearly strategy retreats for the top 100 employees or DRI’s begin to define the expectations the company has for itself.
Now we have what essentially amounts to our brand filter. Probably a good place to stop. Next up, we’ll tackle the external stuff and where that fits.
