Woolley Ideas: Is the Big Idea Now Just a Collection of Smaller Ideas?

The Big Idea. It is what creatives are looking for in every brief. What award judges want to find in their award winners. And even advertisers want their next campaign to be…

But is this obsession with big still a realistic objective? Or has the world of media and marketing moved on and left creative obsessions with size in the past?

Recently, John Mescall, the creative chair at by TheNetwork, shared on LinkedIn, “There’s a word that hurts our industry more than we know. That word is big. Big ideas. Big personalities. Big briefs. Big meetings. Big expectations."

But when John and I were creative directors at J. Walter Thompson last century, everyone was chasing the Big Idea. The Big Idea would dominate award shows and change careers. Dumb Ways to Die certainly did that for John.

Back then, the Big Idea would be launched into the world as a television ad, on a Sunday night, using what was called a “roadblock media strategy” across all the television networks just before the 8:30pm Movie of the Week. It was “destination television” when linear TV still dominated the media and would guarantee to ensure more than half the population was watching. If you got it right, your ad was “watercooler” conversation the next day.

But now we don’t just have broadcast television; there is also streaming, BVOD, YouTube, TikTok, and a thousand other ways that the audience can see, or not see, your ad when and how they choose.

In an industry obsessed with the big advertising idea, you see ads because an announcement of the advertising campaign runs in the trade media with a link to the YouTube video, or on the agency's website that created it under the tab “Our Work”. But for a handful of exceptions, Big Ideas appear to be less visible, and less able to cut through, than ever before.

It has even impacted the way agencies present their work when trying to win new business. There was a time when a great agency could play a reel of work knowing that the potential client sitting there watching it had seen the ads out there in the real world. They knew the campaign and had appreciated the big idea, rather than seeing it for the first time.

There are now a lot less of these Big Idea campaigns out there. So today, agencies are more inclined to present their work in a video which explains the Big Idea and its execution, and more importantly why it worked, as if presenting to a Effies judging panel. Or worse, the Big Idea execution gets thrown in with a bunch of other ideas and cut to pieces in the editing blender to an upbeat, funky music track to make a “hype reel” to kick off the pitch meeting.

This does not mean we no longer need Big Ideas. Advertisers are still calling out for them. But these days, they do not necessarily want or need them delivered in a big television execution. No, at a time of massive media and audience fragmentation, what is needed is a grand unifying idea for the brand universe. (To plagiarise from the world of astrophysics.)

This is no longer simply about executing a big idea on television and then simply running matching “collars and cuff” versions across the various media channels and connection points with consumers. Instead, this is a grand idea based on emotion-driven consumer insight, executed in an infinite number of small ways, each custom-designed to leverage the power of the channel and each building on the grand idea — the Big Idea.

It's like blowing up a balloon — one pump at a time. Can you think of any current campaigns that do that?