How to Eat an Elephant

In my last post, “Putting the May in Maybe”, I talked about the “reflexive no” and how it has the potential to kill innovation. In my upcoming posts, I want to address other innovation blockers that I’ve seen in the advertising/media business.

One major barrier to innovation is time -or more specifically, the lack of time. A new idea or program can often seem as overwhelming and difficult to digest as an unwieldy elephant. Most agencies today are understaffed; even if they have a few people with the word “innovation” in their title, it’s difficult for them to get exposed to all of the new opportunities out there. The heavy lifting then falls to the buyers and planners, who are struggling to keep up with their daily workloads and have precious little time for vetting new ideas, no matter how fresh and interesting they may be.

The situation is similar on the client side. Many brands have created “Innovation Officers” or other roles inside the organization to vet new opportunities, but they simply don’t have the bandwidth to review everything. I recently met with a client who told me that he didn’t have time to meet with any companies he hadn’t already heard of. It’s an innovation-killing viewpoint for sure, but one that I am finding is discouragingly true in a lot of organizations.

Breaking through the time barrier brings me back to the title of this post. OneSpot is a content-distribution company. In a recent meeting with a senior-level client, he was bemoaning the fact that their larger content strategy was a mess and that it could likely take six months before they would be ready to start thinking about distribution. He simply didn’t have the time or resources to fix the situation any sooner, so to him, our opportunity did indeed seem as overwhelming as a ponderous pachyderm. During our discussion, I suggested that perhaps there was a smaller project where we could help, perhaps a product or initiative where the content was better-organized and ready for distribution. We brainstormed and came up with a product that we could build a pilot program around. Not only did we speed up the implementation process by six months, but the learning from this program will give him valuable insights that will help solve his broader content issues. By starting small, we made the process manageable for the organization.

So, how do you eat an elephant? Easy . . . you eat it one bite at a time.