Biased claims about the death of the 'big idea' do marketing no favours...

There's a great old quote from American novelist Upton Sinclair. It distills a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately:

"It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

When your business model depends on a certain idea, technology or status quo, you're innately biased towards maintaining, supporting and preserving it. It's a mix of sunk cost fallacy and status quo bias.

It's also human nature.

Sinclair's quote is a close cousin to Clay Shirky's more recent idea that...

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution".

I think these concepts are true in all walks of life. But in advertising, they're particularly rampant.

The agency views a client's needs through the lens of its own core competencies and inevitably their solution is couched in what they're best at doing, rather than what might be most needed.

What do I mean?

It's the ad agency who reckons that any business problem can be solved with more advertising.

Or the media company that won't change their buying approach to fit the reality because their business is built around doing it this way.

Or the social media agency whose answer to every brief is social media.

To take another famous quote...

"to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Tentpole ideas

In the last few weeks, I've seen one particular example of this crop up a few times.

I thought we were entering a stage of marketing maturity, returning to a world where people understand the need to balance big, brand building ideas done in broad media with more tactical, targeted, direct activity.

Surely by now people have read Binet & Field eh?

I thought brands were slowly realising that, while it can be effective, perhaps they've invested too much in using micro-targeted programmatic media to chop up creative into smaller and smaller pieces.

I thought maybe there would be a return to valuing BOTH big creative ideas and tightly targeted direct tactical messaging.

But in some cases, that doesn't seem to be true.

Old fashioned?

Speaking at an event last week, ex-WPP boss Martin Sorrell labelled labelled big tent-pole campaigns as old fashioned. According to Sorrell, a hugely influential voice, the future of marketing is about using first-party data to drive digital content delivery through programmatic, a 'loop' that effectively shuns ‘traditional' media.

He called out the 'slow cumbersome process' of creative development spoke of how 'big tentpole ideas' were no longer needed.

Meanwhile in Mumbrella this week, an analyst from new agency group Mutiny spoke of how...

"Even an ad without a big idea can now be just as effective and on brand if it’s in the right place at the right time."

Good old Gary V has had his say too. According to him, the secret to success is...

"to create 'hundreds of thousands of pieces of content contextual to specific audience segments".

Needless to say, I'd strongly disagree with the certainty of these statements.

(At this point, it's important to note that one of the big problems with talking about this topic is that, like most things in marketing we don't have an exact definition for 'big tentpole ideas'. It's hard to pin down exactly what people are talking about when they claim they're no longer as relevant or valuable.

Are they creative platforms? Big creative ideas? Or expensive TV led campaigns?

For the purpose of this piece, I'm going to assume it's a mix of all three.)

Going back to the earlier points from Sinclair and Shirky, all three of these respondents work for companies that are focused on propagating this 'cheaper, better, faster' model. Their businesses depend on creating micro targeted content quickly and then pushing it out to niche targeted groups through programmatic advertising.

They're all very good growing businesses and this approach has its merit. The capability to target more efficiently is a huge benefit of the growth of addressable advertising.

But the problem is, it's being presented as a zero sum game - big 'tentpole' idea *or* lots of small targeted messages?

And there's a strong intimation that that the latter is more efficient and the 'modern' way of doing things.

That's a false dichotomy. And it's also wrong.

Balance

Like with all things in life, the answer lies in balance.

If you’re just only engaging in heavily targeted activity without 'big ideas' you’re not building your brand effectively. You’re not filling the funnel and eventually your audience will dry up. You need big creative ideas along with tightly targeted tactical advertising, not instead of.

The danger is brands start seeing this other route as a holy grail, forgetting the importance of doing the 'upper funnel' job.

For example, Baileys seems to be going down this route, talking about 'smaller ads' with less media spend without the need to create big 'expensive' tentpole ideas.

Essentially the argument seems to be ‘do more, smaller iterations with less media in less visible channels and change things up constantly’.

Whereas in fact we know the opposite is generally a better approach - ‘simplify, do campaigns in broad visible media that get noticed, combine that with some targeted activity and stay consistent’.

Symptom

This is a symptom of a wider narrative that tightly targeted data driven marketing using digital mediums and delivering high ROI is the modern efficient way of doing things.

And anyone who still believes in the power of the big creative idea, slowness, long termism and media like posters, TV or radio is hopelessly outdated.

It's part of a wider trend that involves the declining influence of creativity, a focus on efficiency not effectiveness and a general impatience to develop and deliver on big creative idea.

Yet all the best data tells us that (generally):

• Broad visual media that reaches lots of people is most effective for driving attention and impact.
• Brands shouldn't invest too much in over-targeting, reach is a primary driver of effectiveness.
• Big creative emotive ideas played out consistently over time deliver more than small schizophrenic and bitty ones.
• Companies need both brand building and sales activation to win, but marketing has prioritised the latter to the detriment of the former for the last decade.

In summary

I worry that influential marketers trying to diminish the importance of a big creative thought done in broad media is a slippery slope.

It would be wrong for adland to fall back into the trap of believing cheaper, more targeted digital media is a panacea that means we don't need to spend as much on messy, expensive things like creativity, ideas and production value.

It would be wrong to focus too much on delivery mechanisms and targeting and not enough on big, fame building ideas.

I'm not saying that 'small' ideas can't be creative, but by definition, they often have less impact.

To paraphrase someone else...

"lots of shit delivered in bitesize programmatic chunks to the right person at the right time is still shit".

Don't listen to biased voices who want to bury the big idea in all its forms.

It's probably still the best tool in your arsenal to build a profitable business.

Shane O'Leary

@shaneoleary1

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