Brands need big ideas to earn fame, but even though most media spend goes on digital, digital agencies are not set up for creative excellence.
Bring to mind some of the great campaigns of the past – those soaring, surprising, sharply etched brand ideas that were so apt, so unforgettable, so sweetly wedded to the owner brand that, from the very first exposure, a rival marketer would be consumed with both admiration and envy.
‘Reassuringly expensive’, for Stella Artois. ‘The world’s favourite airline’, for British Airways. ‘We try harder’, for Avis. ‘Vorsprung durch technik’, for Audi. ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’. ‘Have a break, have a KitKat.’ ‘I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.’
Even though, in those days, these big-idea concepts would normally have been launched on TV, or in posters or press, they were not, of course, confined to those high-end advertising media. There would be downstream communications disciplines in any marketer’s repertoire and the ideas would be adapted to suit them and ripple out through them.
This adaptation, and sometimes hotly debated interpretation, would be the remit of specialist agencies, with the experience, knowledge and skills to make things work and add value within the constraints of their discipline. So, there’d be one for point-of-sale material, another for brochures, and others still for sales promotion, direct mail and exhibitions. Digital didn’t exist when those campaigns first broke, but if it had done, it would also have been a specialism, with its own, highly specific, challenges, skillsets and agencies.
Digital is a specialist discipline, peopled with specialist talent, primed to think in a narrow way.
The task of unifying all these strands of creative output would fall to the marketing team, perhaps with a little guidance from the originating agency. In those days it would be less common than it is now to refer to a ‘guidelines’ document; it was more about judgment and experience. And, in any case, if the idea was big and simple and clear enough, it would exert its own guidance, be its own beacon. Your task could be designing the beer mats, but if you were doing it within a brand idea that said, ‘Good things come to those who wait’, you’d know that it would be better not to make a gag about a ‘quick pint’.
Not infrequently, marketers would be aware that they were likely to spend more on these downstream disciplines than on the advertising, but they would never commission any of the specialist agencies to create the big idea. Yes, ‘Ideas can come from anywhere’ was a mantra even then, but one more apt to be trotted out in a meeting than proven in practice. Big ideas have a marked tendency to come from people with the talent, stamina and courage to come up with big ideas. As a general rule, these people were not to be found working in the sales promotion agency.
The need for big ideas
Today, nothing has changed, and everything has…
