Where have all the ideas gone?

LBiQ4 - Death of the big idea?

In our jaunt through LBiQ 4 and it’s exploration of ideas; big and small, traditional and new, it’s clear completely new ideas are increasingly hard to find – if they ever existed in the first place. “There’s nothing new under the sun”, after all, as some crusty old fool once said. (I think we can be fairly sure he didn’t work in advertising.) As the web grows up, and is no longer the brave new world of unchartered possibilities it used to be 10 years back, we need to look back and recognise the patterns that were formed during that period of innovation, to identify the successes, and the failures, and to work with and from these in order to keep advancing.

In the thrust for The New it is important not to lose sight of a few simple facts. Check this year’s hot work: quizzes, games, viral films, soap operas, blogs and scrolling banners. Nothing new there, per se – these formats are now established, in some cases almost traditional - but all are succeeding today in 2008 by combining creative thinking with brand messages in novel and interesting ways that match and resonate with the passage of time and the changes that are happening in the world at large. 

Just as David Gunn says there are only 12 types of advertisement, a creative writing teacher might inform us of only 14 ways to start a novel, or seven types of plot; and a musician teaches us that there are only a set number of chords; we can surmise there are a limited number of interaction models in digital, a set number of viral types, and a comparable set of methods for online advertising.

So let’s stop sticking our noses up at ‘just another’ video site, or in-search-of viral film, or interactive scrolling banner, and look a bit deeper. There are ideas a plenty in the digital world - ideas that creatively stretch the main brand promise, trigger the all-important emotional hook, and ensure they are bloody well executed. Inventing new forms of communication is hard, and it’s not necessarily the job of a commercial creative. Don’t be afraid to use what you know already. It’s easier, simpler, and usually much more effective, to focus on mixing and matching known quantities in order to find creative digital ideas that work. 

Want some inspiration on finding big brand ideas? Take a read of Brand Marketing Manifesto, in which a feisty future-looking John Grant sets out a thesis for ideas and creates a framework based on eight cultural streams: innate emotional hooks that exist deep within our psyche and can be found in centuries of literature, film and music.

Me? I’m off to write a book on the 10 different types of viral. Stay tuned.