- With the tenure of the typical CMO measured in months rather than years, the chief goal of the Chief Marketing Officer seems to be to attach his or herself to a “big idea”, garner short term sales and attention and ride that into their next job.
- A fragmented and hyper-segmented media environment creates a labyrinth of inconsistency that “big ideas” can find hard to survive.
- With more marketing partners sitting around the client table these days, jargon, advertisingese, and agency-proprietary process vocabulary make it hard to reach agreement on just what a team is being asked to deliver.
- Nobody has figured out whether a big idea is grown organically or synthetically engineered from the cloned DNA of a past success.
Each team was asked to develop a specific POV on how to define “the big idea”, how best to develop one and how to know it when you see it. It was a fun assignment and yielded some great blue-sky thinking by the students. I don’t think I’ll give that assignment again.
One Size Does Not Fit All
And that one size is not “big”. I’m more and more convinced that what we should really be in search of are lots of little ideas and their cumulative effect rather than one “clouds part and the angelic choir sings” big idea. Everybody’s onboard with the changing media landscape. We’re no longer held hostage by an inventory-based media model. Agencies and clients have the opportunity to create their own media vehicles and tailor those vehicles to specific audiences. Now more than ever the basic tenets of direct response marketing apply. Test and learn. Test and learn. It’s easier to do that with little ideas. Literally throw something against the wall, see if it sticks, learn and move on.
Todd Lamb, a Brandcenter grad and award-winning copywriter, exhorted our students to “keep making stuff and putting it out there”. It could be quite possible that companies need to adopt this philosophy to generate a sense of momentum and salience around their brands. Rapid prototyping may be the new hallmark of the next few years in our industry.
The complexity of culture Gareth Kay, Planning Director at Modernista and a member of the Brandcenter BOD, shared his belief that developing a perspective on culture was critical for planning moving forward. This would enable brands to have a point of view on the world, to take on and challenge a social problem or situation. If we wait for the development of a big idea, culture may have already moved on. Simple, single-minded small ideas offer nimbleness and in many cases, I’m guessing, cost-efficiency.
Let’s all get Lost
I confess to being a big fan of Lost. Not so big that I blog about it or maintain a catalog of hidden clues. In fact, some of the episodes hurt my head and make me wonder whether it’s time to give up on the show. I hang in there because I greatly admire the pre-planning and choreography of the storylines. How one season so specifically tees up another. And how the writers and producers went into the show controlling its demise in 2010.
This reminds me a bit of what I’ve heard Crispin thinks about during the strategic planning process – what will the cultural reaction to this work be? What will the press release look like? The replacement for the big idea may be the careful orchestration – the care and feeding – of a web of smaller ideas. Another layer of strategic planning – the “what happens next?” Jakob Trollback, founder of Trollback + Company, came to speak to our students last September. He asked the question ‘When does creativity happen?’ and answered it with ‘when something moves from one state to another’. Sure, that change might require something big. But it could just as well happen through something small and sublime. Today, small ideas may result in much needed short-term revenue.
Note: This post was drafted to be published in the VCU Brandcenter's annual magazine called SIXTY.
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