For a while now we’ve been hearing from bloggers and industry analysts that the age of ‘The Big Idea’ is coming to an end. It has been passionately argued by the likes of Ian Tait, Russell Davies and Joseph Jaffe that the modern communications landscape calls for smaller ideas, and lots of them. This week Nigel Bogle made a stand for ‘Why Big Ideas Still Matter’ on BBH labs blog, something that got us thinking. He makes a solid case for the importance of Big Ideas in bringing order to brands, demonstrating value, and providing economies of scale. But the most salient point is that Big Ideas shouldn’t mean the lowest common denominator: one-dimensional creative work or advertising amplification. What we need is a new set of language to describe the kind of ideas we create. We talk a lot about Rich Ideas, ‘An expression of the communications idea that allows for multiple facets of the brand to be revealed’, as Dylan Williams would say. A Rich Idea gives us the flex to bring alive the brand in ways that best harness each channel, enabling stickiness in web content, immediacy in posters, cliff-hanging in episodic storytelling. So let’s not argue over Big or small ideas and worry about whether our ideas are rich enough.


Thanks to Chris Gallery for this story. Chris is still angry that the Irish football team will not be travelling to South Africa this summer…damn the Hand of Henry!


Image Credit
Epixeirein

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.