The big idea is dead

Blogger Seth Godin says the big idea is dead. As author of a book called The Big Idea, I have to say...Actually, I agree.

Godin writes: ‘The secret of big-time advertising during the 1960s and ’70s was the “big idea” [but] today, the advertiser’s big idea doesn’t travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself.’

The television drama Mad Men romanticises this great age of advertising, when Madison Avenue first realised that you could talk about anything. Not deodorant but closeness. Not lipstick but possession. Mad Men shows marketing people becoming philosophers: everything is superficially deep, and deeply superficial.

David Ogilvy called for big ideas in his 1983 book, On Advertising: ‘You can do homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product...Research can’t help you much, because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for thirty years.’ And this thinking influenced branding as well as advertising, through to the end of the last century.

But now, sceptical consumers buy reality, not image: products, not advertising. Yes, you need an idea to drive your reality – to determine what kind of products and services you’ll make. But pure idea is dead.

www.sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/big-ideas-meatb.html

www.fastcompany.com/blog-post/ogilvy-vs-godin-big-idea-advertising-dead

30 April 2008, posted by Robert Jones