Idea, schm-idea. Posted on December 08, 2010 Post a comment

About a month ago I hit up the IDEA Conference in NYC with a couple of my fellow rabble creatives. It promised to be a day full of, and I quote, “Reinvention. And the velocity of ideas.” The morning of the conference, we each got dolled up in our New York City best and headed to midtown to get a potent dose of inspiration, likely with a side of new-friend-making.

To say there was a wide range of speakers would be an understatement. From bar-tending mixologists to brand executives and disc jockeys, everyone was there to represent their latest and greatest “big” ideas. Not just in marketing, but a whole slew of diverse fields.

After listening to the first couple of speakers, I got to thinking about the meaning of ideas and what defines one as “bigger” than the next. Okay, so I know I’m getting a little philosophical here, so just take a seat, grab a cup of coffee, and bear with me. Hopefully it’ll end up being worth it. We’ll see how it goes…

Anyway, so, ideas. It always seems like the biggest ones are the ones that are so simple, it’s stupid. Like this guy at the conference who invented the EyeWriter, for instance. It’s a contraption that helps people with ALS, or some other paralyzing disease, write or draw on a projection screen with the help of lasers that are directed by the motion of the user’s pupils. Whoa. OF COURSE people who can’t write with their hands should use some form of eye-driven laser technology. It seems so obvious to me now…why didn’t I think of that? Ideas like this seem so desperately impossible at first, but then once they’re realized, they’re more sensible than a balanced breakfast. This is the kind of thinking that sets apart the heavy hitter ideas from the empty shells.

I started to wonder how this sort of ah-ha thinking could be integrated into advertising. And therein lies my first conclusion: When it comes to creating the next big idea, marketing isn’t this “different animal” that everyone claims it to be. It’s life, just like everything else around us. Our clients look to us to create solutions. Period. And it’s our job to work tirelessly to bring them an idea that makes them slap themselves on the forehead and scream, “By golly, it’s brilliant! How have we never done this before?”

Now, I know there are lots of ad folks out there who think the most important things in the business are working on big-budget clients, winning awards, and acting like we just “fell upon” whatever idea brought us some ungodly amount of success. It’s just that easy, right? I know we all like to say, “That’s not me,” but I believe most of us are guilty of thinking that way from time to time. But the truth is, ideas are hard. Especially the big ones. We slave day in and day out to come up with one that will sell more glass cleaner, get more people to go to Hospital XYZ, or push more organic so-and-so. But just because we can produce great creative concepts doesn’t mean they’re always big ideas.

The biggest ideas come when strategy, creativity, and collaboration combine. When we stop thinking that client changes are in some way inferior to our own. When we are able to give birth to something so unique, beautiful, intelligent, and meaningful, that it actually freaking works.

So we’ve got a big, gigantic, herculean, gargantuan idea of our own. We’re taking a stand against ideas that don’t solve squat. It’s not about making it into the books with our wacky innuendo and hotshot visual eye candy. It’s about making ads that work. That’s what we do here, darn it. And we’re going to keep doing it for every single project that makes its way to our door.

Posted by Erin