If you want people to talk about your business and brand, you need to explore making social ideas.

A guest post by Ben Phillips, a skateboarder trapped in the hairdo of a post-ironic digital strategist wandering the Continent, making ideas so social they like each other’s statuses on Facebook.

If you’re reading this, then it’s likely you work in advertising, media or marketing. If so, then your working life consists of coming up with, selling and executing commercial ideas. Mark has posted in some detail about ideas (How to explain an idea) before. This article intends to extend his thinking on the topic, focusing on a specific type of idea that’s particularly in vogue: the social idea.

We’ll cover:

1. The definition of a social idea
2. Why social ideas are important
3. Five ways to create a social idea
4. Your view on how to create social ideas

Part 1: Definition

Social idea: a novel concept that enables a unique, participative form of interaction between 2 or more people.

As an illustrative (and brilliant) example WWF’s Earth Hour is a social idea for many reasons, but most notably because it encouraged people to get together, and host lights-out events.

It’s important to differentiate between social objects and social ideas. A social object is what people talk to each other about. If you and I see a sporting event and talk about it, the sporting event is the social object. However, the sporting event isn’t necessarily an idea.

All social ideas are social objects but not all social objects are social ideas. Clear?

Part 2: Why social ideas are important

Before we get practical, social ideas are important for 3 reasons.

1.We are super social apes

Humans are designed to be social. We are shaped through interaction with others from the moment we are born. Most of our lives are made up of other people (not brands, business or political concerns) and most of what we do is determined by this context. (For more, read Mark Earls’s ‘Herd’).

Social ideas align with intrinsic human qualities.

2. People are saturated with one-way advertising messages

The prevailing consensus is that 3000 one-way messages hit us each day. If you aren’t creating an idea that fosters interaction between people, it’s likely you’ll be lost in the wash.

3. We’re more connected to a greater peer set than ever

It’s important to state here that social ideas live between people, not on social networks. However social networks are a fertile ground for them to come to life because of the ease and scale of our connectedness.

So – for these 3 reasons (these are just a start), social ideas demand consideration.

Now let’s consider practical ways in which we can create them, with a few examples along the way.

Part 3: Five ways to create a social idea

Way 1: Create something that enables people to tell a story about themselves in a unique way

One of the most observable human insights from dinner party environments and digital social channels is that people absolutely love to tell stories about themselves. When this is gratuitous it becomes hugely polarizing, but it’s also pivotal to creating and growing social connections with others. We tell a story about ourselves, they listen, they tell a story about themselves, we listen – a relationship is formed. There are about 1.8 million status updates posted to Facebook every minute. Irrespective of how cynics will label this torrent, the behavioral trend is glaringly obvious.

From a brand perspective, if we can give people a way to tell a story about themselves we can channel this fundamental desire, and they’re going to want to share this with friends and family. However, since we are in advertising and evil [Only Ben is evil - Mark], we have to sell something, so we must consider a product attribute or the advertising idea in the composition of the narrative.

One of the best examples of this recently is the campaign for the Intel core i5 processor. The product positioning is “Visibly Smart” – the chip delivers a stunning visual performance. So we combine the positioning, with our consumer insight “people love to tell stories about themselves”, sprinkle some creative magic and we get Intel’s Museum of Me. The Museum of Me is a “visibly smart” and incredibly cool way for me to tell the story of my Facebook social life that I naturally want to share with others and tell people about.

Way 2: Give people a platform to create something, to remix something, to personalize or customize something

When we create something, not only do we have a sense of ownership over it but we’re often proud of it. Do you remember when you were young, and you’d create finger painting masterpieces in kindergarten? You’d run home to your parents and excitedly show them what you’d done in the hope that it would adorn the kitchen fridge. Whilst the manifestations of this behavior have changed, I think the psychological drivers remain largely consistent. When we create stuff, we want to share it with others and the fruits of our creativity will be the reason we talk to other people.

The spectrum of creation is essentially unlimited, but again the creation should relate to the advertising idea or a product truth. Two wildly different illustrative examples here. (Disclaimer: I work for the agency that developed the first campaign.)

1. 13ème RUE ‘Je Tue un Ami’

13ème RUE is a crime entertainment cable television station in France. To increase the number of viewers, they developed a campaign with the advertising idea “Uncover the detective in you”. The digital creative execution Je Tue un Ami (I kill a friend) enabled participants to create short murder mysteries involving their own friends (their friends were killed in a particularly graphic fashion which added to the appeal). This unique platform for enabling creativity nurtured a personal involvement with the advertising idea and helped turn the site into a hit (no pun intended) with over 20 million unique visits.

2. Walkers ‘Do Us a Flavour’

In the UK, Walkers Do Us a Flavour is a more family-friendly approach to creativity. I’m not sure of the exact articulation of the advertising idea but the simplicity of the creative platform (suggest a new flavour of crisps) as well as the incentive (£50K + 1% of the flavour’s profits for life + fame) delivered one of the biggest social ideas in British advertising history as participants and on-lookers discussed and sampled the various suggestions. The numbers were pretty astounding: during the height of the campaign period, Walkers was selling 12 million bags of crisps a day.

Way 3: Start a movement or a debate

When you start a debate, when you start a movement, when you go against the grain, you’re creating a talking point. You’re challenging people to consider their point of view, and implicitly encouraging them to share that point of view with their peer set. Outside of a campaign perspective, this is also a particularly effective community management technique (for example, “Coca Cola is better with ice. True or False?”).

A couple of points. First, I think this is one of the more difficult methods to do correctly. Second, as with the first two principles we’ve discussed, the debate should relate to an advertising idea or a brand belief. Again, two examples here.

1. Kenneth Cole’s ‘Where Do You Stand?’

Kenneth Cole’s ‘Where Do You Stand?’ campaign asked a series of controversial questions of users about gun ownership, gay rights and protests. The participation rates were strong, and the campaign generated significant amounts of PR. That said, and I’m not intimately familiar with the Kenneth Cole brand, the debate seems to focus more on controversy for controversy’s sake, than on a consistent brand belief.

2. Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty created a participative debate that challenged society’s views on women and questioned conventional notions of beauty. This was a debate that corresponded directly to the brand belief “Real beauty for real women” and through the course of the debate, participants were acutely aware of what the brand stood for and what it believed in. From a brand belief perspective, I think Dove’s focused debate is more effective than Kenneth Cole’s. (Disclaimer: Unilever is a client of the agency I work for.)

Way 4: An idea or challenge that requires co-operation or rewards working together

The vast majority of human accomplishments have relied on our ability to work together. When we work as teams, we not only achieve brilliant things that would have been inconceivable had we been working alone, but teamwork also delivers a shared sense of purpose and camaraderie between team members. In addition to the fundamental benefits of social ideas that we spoke about at the start of this post, ideas that require teamwork nurture camaraderie, and when that camaraderie is an exploration or a demonstration of an advertising or brand idea – the results can be pretty impressive.

There are plenty of brand games and Alternative Reality Games that operate on this principle but my favorite case is Coca Cola’s Friendship machine, a social idea that requires real-world physical co-operation. The brand idea here is ‘friendship’, with the product acting as an enabler and a facilitator of this. The execution rewards teamwork between friends (with two-for-one Cokes) and gives both participant and viewer a warm, strong association between Coke and friendship.

Two side-points:

1. As we spoke about at the start of this post, social ideas live between people, not on social networks. This is a fantastic example of a real-world social idea.

2. The numbers for this campaign from direct participants are relatively small, but the strength of the idea has ensured that it’s touched hundreds of thousands online.

Way 5: A mechanic that has an incentive to share

“Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life…And understanding them—or, often, ferreting them out… is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.” Steven Levitt, Freakonomics.

Our discussion of incentives here is less about an idea per se, and more about the system in which the idea operates. The system refers to how people interact with the idea: what they do, where they go, how they interact, the user journeys etc. There can be any number of systems that give people a reason to talk to each other and spread the word about a campaign.

As an illustrative (and the most common) example.
The idea: Your dog could be the next official mascot for brand X
The system: The dog with the most votes/views/Likes is the winner (or makes the shortlist). Every submitted dog has its own unique URL and vote counter.

Without exception, campaigns that have strong, simple incentive tiers (like the above example) are enormously successful from a volume point of view. Irrespective of the category, the prospect of fame, or victory, or prize, coupled with the system of most votes/views wins ensures rapid and wide-reaching ‘talk-ability’ of the campaign and its content.

A couple of caveats here:

1. Numbers aren’t everything and the system is not the idea. You can have a system that’s fantastic at touching millions of people, with an idea that does little for the brand.

2. When you’re creating these systems, it’s best to put a time limit on the voting or “advocacy” period. Week after week of “vote for my poochie in this campaign” is likely to frustrate and annoy rather than touch and inspire. Without tight time frames, it’s like a retargeted banner campaign without frequency capping – you’re acutely aware of a banner following you around the internet and your opinion of the advertiser adjusts accordingly.

Part 4: Your view

These five approaches, as well as the definition, are very much a work in progress. They are intended as a starting point in an exploration of a certain type of idea. With that in mind, I’d love to hear your thoughts on social ideas and the principles you use to create them.

Ben Phillips is a senior digital planner. He works between BETC EuroRSCG in Paris and EHS 4D in London.

On the way to work today, I listened to a couple from The Bronx compare weekends. The guy played Monday Morning Hero about how much dope he had smoked. The girl, frustrated in her search for a cheap two-bedroom apartment, found a backdoor into the topic. “I remember this last place we lived in, we had no furniture except a television,” she said. “One day, my sister and I were playing video games on the floor, and these guys we knew was in there with the window shut, smoking and smoking and smoking.” The guy nodded his forehead through his grin. “Did you catch contact?” he encouraged. “Oh yeah, they was smoking so much that we caught contact. We started giggling crazy and shit, and telling stories about our uncle. It was so funny.”

Three things struck me. First, let’s get it out of the way: I’m getting old. My weekend included ‘Guess Who?’ and a Dora memory card game, writing a story with my son about moon monsters after his soccer practice, and a family dinner with the kids rolling around the restaurant because 8pm is usually bedtime. I would have understood the Bronx conversation when I was younger. Second, life in New York is tough. Between healthcare, crazy rent prices, food and other basics, people need money for drugs. No wonder many lack furniture (although I bet wall-antlers are everywhere). And, finally, I didn’t realize a television was a piece of furniture. I can’t wait for IKEA to release a make-it-yourself plasma screen. It will sit alongside their Williamsburg-inspired taxidermy and antlers collection.

All morning I wondered about the telepathic powers of her uncle, a man she needed only to mention to get a laugh. I wondered harder about the phrase “we caught contact”. You see, after I looked it up online, I realized that I have spent the past 5 months in the States trying to catch contact. I have sat in meetings feeling stupid. I have run brainstorms and left feeling stupid. Daily, words I have avoided for years marinate meeting minutes and follow-up emails. They overshadow interesting ideas. They jam the system.

You know the words I’m talking about: words made for diagrams, textbooks and teenage English essays – words made for undoing, not making. Unfortunately, many are born from MBA degrees and the corporate cultures they intend to help, as if an education is only worth the long words a person graduates with, and a word with more syllables is worth more than a word that most people understand. It isn’t – it’s the opposite.

So, I have given up trying to catch contact. I can’t learn this way of speaking by sitting in a room with others hoping to breathe it in. If a planner’s currency is ideas and our denomination is words then planners owe it to themselves to spend their words better – marketers, too. Just imagine how much time and money everyone would save: shorter emails, faster meetings, no revisiting what everyone is trying to say… we just say it. In easy words.

Here are the most common word traps that I have come across and stepped in. These days, they cause herpes on my brain.

Eight common word traps

1. You speak like God

God-complexes run rampant in advertising and marketing. It makes sense: while we’re not rolling out the Six Days of Creation every week, what we do affects the world for the better and the worse. Further, survival in the game requires Alpha behavior: sometimes you need to send in plagues to scare pharaohs. But this doesn’t excuse the use of words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘permission’.

Most used in discussions that patronize women, ‘empowerment’ doesn’t really mean anything. Say it to someone who doesn’t share your cocoon. Then tell her that your apples empower women to eat healthy. All she will hear is that apples are healthy. She’ll think you’re intelligent for using a big word so she’ll nod that she understands. But, seriously, it’s hollow – like ‘permission’, a word that smart people love to use when they are discussing behavior change. The alcohol industry loves it. “We need to give men permission to drink vodka at the start of the night instead of when the party’s kicking on if we’re to sell more.” At best, your communications will model behavior but you’re hardly giving permission. Only God can do that when it comes to men drinking vodka early.

2. You speak like Freud or, worse, you Jung like Maslow

If you’re a strategist, your job is to understand people. Academic frameworks are useful. But knowing these frameworks does not make you Maslow. Knowing these frameworks should make you less dependent on hiding slippery thinking in them. If you catch yourself saying, “This strategy is about self-actualization,” close your eyes, visually backtrack then say, “Sorry. Let me start again. This strategy is about empowering women to self-actualize their healthy selves in the act of eating an apple.” As the room draws its breath, add: “Just like Eve.” Boom! You just God-Maslow’d them.

Unfortunately, this stuff works because it makes everyone feel smarter. It also appeals to the logic-wins-every-time attitude that higher education endows on the over-educated. It works brilliantly for brand design agencies trying to justify big budgets for packaging redesign. If this is your denomination, good luck to you. Frameworks are useful but please don’t exaggerate your role in them.

3. You speak Wallflower

Perhaps you learned Wallflower growing up. Key to this language is finding the safest thing to say, and then saying something safer. If Getty Images had Getty Strategies, this is where you’d license your strategy from. You’d take a safety harness and build a strategy around it being safe – not safer, not the safest, and certainly nothing unorthodox. You go straight down the line – the line where the wall meets the floor – and you succeed: nobody notices you.

4. You speak modern Latin (or old French)

I’ve never let etymological fact get in the way of a good whinge: putting -ize and -ate at the end of a noun does not make what you say strategic. It’s a great way to distract people – add syllables to the back of a simple word and people will spend a few seconds trying to work out what you said as you slide past them having said nothing. Say it short, say it simple.

5. You speak like Fox News

The Fox News language is a triad of Folksy, Faux-Intellect and Political Rhetoric. They’re all incredibly difficult languages. To speak Fox News in strategy, you are truly brilliant. You’ll drop in a large bit of jargon – and repeat it through the meeting. You’ll try to re-frame all discussion back into your jargon. But you’ll end with a cute, inoffensive Down-South cliche to make it feel all better. It sucks when this works; deep down I’m just jealous.

6. You speak cliché – it’s a French dialect

Clichés are useful. They summarize conventional wisdom, often throwing in a word twist. But they are useful as stimulus. They are not output.

7. You speak ecstasy

A few things have amazed me about TV ads in America. First, drug ads are rampant. No wonder everyone thinks they’re sick (it’s not the quality of the ads alone making them sick). Second, everyone is selling happiness and joy. Clients like this because it makes them feel good about their products: feel-good food, good-mood food, joyful jelly, happy driving. It’s a great ploy to get through pretesting too. Few people will say they don’t want to feel happy. Thing is, it’s becoming cliché and is too convenient. Dig harder. Make people happy (if you must) but promising it is tricky.

8. You speak Globlish

My long-time favorite player of the Globlish card is the Korean tourism industry. Their taglines must start as bets: “Let’s see who can take the few English words we [Korean tourism marketers] understand and mix them together in a way that makes sense to nobody else.” The Koreans are good at brinkmanship, so it’s a bet I would not place against them. A lot of Asian technology companies do this too. CNN is rife with it. Save the Globlish for the meetings, not the communications.

What’s a planner to do?

1. Re-write the badness out of the strategy

If you want to improve at strategy, please make ‘On Writing Well‘ by William Zinsser your next read. I’m halfway through it and it is the first book I will now recommend to new and aspiring strategists. Words are critical to ideas so being able to write well is mandatory. His main point is that the “essence of writing is rewriting”. I believe it.

So, start bad. Then rewrite. Aim for ten different versions of what you started with – twenty if you’re bold. Do this when your energy is highest. Set a time limit to hack your way to brilliance. Then leave your alternatives and come back a day later. If you’re not happy, do it again. Fast flurries followed by time for your brain to let things tick over works. Share them early with other people. Park your ego next to the taco truck and receive all feedback like a sponge. You’ll squeeze something better out. See if you can get your strategy down to a handful of words with one or two syllables each.

2. Call bullshit

I try my hardest not to fall into the traps above. It happens. But it helps if your team shares an outlook about words and keeps each other in check – with a smile. Push each other to say things more vividly and more concisely. Invest time in word games.

3. Make your words pictures

It can be hard in a room of clients to call bullshit politely. Instead of saying a strategy sounds hollow, I’ll catch myself saying it doesn’t sound concrete: “I can’t see it.” You can see great strategies if you say them right. So, challenge yourself to say things more simply and more instantly visible.

Did you catch contact?

Getting high off someone else’s dope is one way to be kind to your budget. But if your currency is ideas, make sure you know your denomination. Words matter. Catch contact off better writers. They’re in books all over the place. Start with ‘On Writing Well‘ by William Zinsser then explore Stephen Kings’ ‘On Writing‘ and William Strunk’s ‘The Elements of Style‘.

What traps have you floundered in and how did you work your way out of them?

For more on self-expression in strategy, try How to explain an idea and How to do account planning – a simple approach.

Photo courtesy Koisny.

The debate about big ideas versus small ideas is dumb. It’s Fox News narrative re-framing applied to advertising. It’s a dubious act of political rhetoric that I’ve seen mostly deployed by digital agencies to make older agencies look their age; often the older agencies oblige. I’m tired of hearing it, and I’m tired of it nearly getting in the way of coming up with good stuff.

Do you know why it sometimes works?

Because the comparison is not about big ideas versus small ideas. It’s actually about a whole bunch of digital executional stuff versus a TV script.

In reality, there are only ideas and ‘some thoughts I’ve had’. There is only original thought and unoriginal thought. There are only ideas that work and ideas that don’t.

What’s an idea anyway?

Next time you hear someone use the big vs small idea rhetoric, nod politely then ask them what they think an idea is – preferably in front of the audience for whom the rhetoric was intended.

For an industry selling knowledge and thinking, I’m often amazed at how undeveloped our own understanding of what we do is – what a strategy is, what an insight is, what an idea is. Sure, plenty of people have trademarked frameworks and sound-bites that sound smart but when you ask them to not just define one of the basic words our industry operates by but to also give you an example of something they’ve done that brings it to life, often the definition that sounded smart doesn’t have a smart example to live through.

As a fan boy of Edward de Bono, the man who coined the phrase ‘lateral thinking’, I do appreciate his ideas on ideas. The easiest way to understand lateral thinking is to start with linear thinking. Linear thinking takes a topic and breaks it into its natural attributes – it follows one line of thinking (hence, linear).

Let’s take tennis. Tennis – tennis ball – tennis racquet – tennis court – Wimbledon – grass – Nadal – ball boys. And so on.

And let’s now throw in ballet. Ballet – ballerina – men in tights – Nutcracker – classical music.

Lateral thinking simply moves across the lines – from one side to the other – with the output being an idea, a novel concept.

Perhaps we should create a tennis ballet? What about a new tennis serve called the Nutcracker? What about men playing tennis in tights – perhaps it would help them jump higher? What about a classical music tennis tournament?

You could throw in another random topic like gorillas and crisscross all day, pushing out new ideas left, right and center.

Now, they wouldn’t all be good – as I’ve demonstrated – but they’d actually be ideas.

So, this is the definition of creativity that I’ve latched onto because I find it to be the most practical and least steeped in mystique: it’s the bringing together of things that don’t normally exist together in a way that makes better, more useful sense. An idea is the output of this act.

Feel free to disagree with me (or de Bono) on this but I keep coming back to this definition and find it useful.

For more on what ideas exist in the advertising world, read How to explain an idea.

How do you size up an idea?

So, if an idea is a novel concept that has brought things together in a way that hasn’t existed before and that is useful, how can one idea be bigger or smaller than the other?

Is it because the idea crisscrossed more attributes from more disconnected topics? Is a tennis ballet a smaller idea than a tennis tournament where we dress gorillas up like ballerinas and the tennis players have to ride the gorillas throughout the entire match while classical music plays?

Is it because a big idea is more useful than a small idea? To more people or to a few people? Was Facebook a big idea when it started or did it become one? Is it actually an idea based on the definition above?

This brings us to impact. Is an idea big or small based on the impact it has? Measured by what?

Is it sized based on the scale of the problem it solves? Is a small solution a big idea if the problem it was trying to address was massive?

Does a big idea costs more than a small idea? Is an idea big if it’s on TV and small if it isn’t?

Is it all of the above, some of the above or something else altogether?

In years past, I have absolutely used the phrase ‘big idea’ (“We need a big idea”) but am trying to put the phrase to bed. I believe it gets used mostly to prevent the speaker from having to say what she actually means: “I want some new, unexpected thinking – not just another TV script… although, yes, we’ll have to do TV – I just don’t want you to only think about that.”

If you want to know what makes an idea big or small, you’d be best asking the people who use this divisive bit of inception for their own definition. I don’t find it useful so I won’t even hazard a guess.

What the idea size debate is really about

OK. So, to the people employing this anti-phallic word war feeling high on their sense of iconoclasm, I agree with you. I need you to know that. Well, I agree with what you’re really saying.

And what you’re really saying is: “It’s time we got beyond thinking about making one TV spot that runs for months, possibly years, and create stuff frequently that keeps people aware, interested and buying from our clients.”

Simple. Who couldn’t agree with that? Do what works more often in a world where things change all the time.

So, where do we start?

I believe that planning in the creative industries is an act of creativity. I believe ideas (as defined above) should be in the strategy from the get-go.

Too often, planners appear part-client, part-account person – putting in obvious words, insights that are post-rationalized to make the committee they report back to feel good about their business. I don’t believe this is planning; it’s head-hours burning.

If you were working on the brand Baby Bjorn (baby carriers) and noticed, as I have first hand, how the world treats men who wears babies better (grandmas give you compliments, air stewards slip you free things they’re not supposed to, cafes give you bonus banana bread, people let you cut in line), how baby-carrying is the man’s job in many (not all) relationships and how many do it with pride reserved for very few things in their lives, how women physically respond to a baby-carrying man, if you’d read research about a certain type of male ape that carries its young around to show the other male apes they’re not worth messing with, and then tried to mesh these sorts of insights into brand or product truths, out will pop ideas. In the strategy.

So, if the man is either the buyer or researcher of Baby Bjorn, perhaps the brand decides to create a content-driven community and utility to help men extract extra benefits from the world – the inside track on new-dad perks: which companies ‘put out’, what you can get and how to make the plays.

Do you think someone could write an interesting TV ad off this? Do you think you could come up with witty video content at least once a month with this? What about a daily tweet? What about a weekly blog post? An event? A book? An app?

In the 5 minutes I’ve been thinking about this example, my answer to all of those questions is, ‘yes’. Again, I’m not saying the example is any good (I’m trying to have fun with it), but for the exercise, let’s now throw it into the big-idea-versus-small-idea debate.

Is the big idea in the strategy – to position Baby Bjorn as a new dad’s perk magnet (12 months of trick or treat every day)? What if the TV ad followed a man doing this around the world for 12 months to see what would happen? What if it was interesting enough to turn into a documentary? What if that documentary was then broken down into 10 really interesting 2-minute highlights? What if a community of men sharing their own perk-getting tips was built around the documentary? What if the community came together to literally trick-or-treat the world with their babies on – but for a charity in Africa (perhaps to collect school supplies)? Which one of these ideas is big and which one of these ideas is small?

Exactly. Wrong question. We should simply be asking, is any of this any good?

Why you shouldn’t limit your ideas

Firstly, if you’re a planner and you’re not putting ideas into strategies, I really don’t understand what your role as a planner in an agency is. If you’re just doing research, then call it so. If you’re really helping the marketing team with marketing plans, call it. If you’d have taken the above example and asked your teams to focus on how safe Baby Bjorn is or how well designed it is and left it at that then I don’t believe you’re doing planning. Thing is, that sort of planning seems to be the majority of our industry. I believe the role is supposed to be about the un-obvious made poetic and compelling.

Secondly, ideas (big and small) should be riddled into everything. A new twist, a new turn can be added to all executional elements – every TV spot, every blog headline, every re-Tweet.

Finally, you’d rarely ask for one idea from the creative process so why just put one idea into it? The more I do this job, the less I believe in the purity of one strategy: execution makes strategy live or die. Yes, there are planning books all over the place that are written with incredible hindsight, making the planner look sage-like, all-knowing. But I believe it’s simplistic to think there’s only one useful insight for a brand, that only one strategy can work. More rapid and earlier exploration of multiple strategies and creative ideas together is something worth exploring.

So…

The big idea versus small idea debate is not worth having. It’s hung around for a few years now but I truly hope it disappears so we can focus on the power of great thinking – and making it happen as often as possible.

For more on ideas, wander over to How to explain an idea and How to explain an idea.

Image courtesy Katherine Kirkland.

Hello there. It’s been a few months since new content breathed its way onto the site. Not only is this the first bit of writing I’ve done in New York, but it gets to appear on a new-looking site. Reactive launched the new site yesterday. I’ll get a post up soon about how it came together. I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Also, as I’m trying to do what scares me these days, I’ve put myself up for presenting at SXSW next year. I’d dig your vote: http://bit.ly/pQrfco. OK. Onto the thing you came here for.

Nearly every account planner and strategist that I’ve loved working with has had a few things in common.

More business poet than marketing mirror. Off-beat, idiosyncratic, with a tilted-worldview. They fell into planning rather than set out to be in it as a career move built from teenage grandiosity. Words and angles fall from their mouths like pieces of Lego waiting for fearless assembly. They know they’ll stay in it as long as it titillates their creative ego needs but are always thinking Plan B; and, because of this, they always have other options – but they don’t parade them in front of you all the time.

They can sound-bite their way through a strategy in 30 seconds and confidently use plain English – not marketing words – to do so. They constantly seek to get to their strategy more creatively every time. They don’t hog or kill, they share and fuel. I’d let my kids hang out with them because they’re good people.

And they’re nearly always impatient.

Why advertising isn’t currently built for the impatient

A few things have really struck me about account planning and strategy in the States (I just moved here – for more: Moving to a New York advertising agency) so far that don’t currently sit so well with the character trait of impatience.

Firstly, there are a lot of people involved in decisions. The stakes are obviously high: a single brand in a multi-brand company may have revenue bigger than a large single-brand company back in Australia. This leads to large client-side and agency-side teams through whom thinking has to funnel. Add to this the structural changes provoked by the Interwebs and you get additional teams and agencies involved in shepherding ideas through the system. There are agencies here dedicated to one brand that are bigger than most agencies in Australia.

Secondly, planning cycles are built long. FMCG and alcohol brands are a bit like this in Australia but, in the States, I’m hearing about 12-24 month planning/creative cycles as being the norm – with much discussion about how to change this. A friend who worked a decade in New York joked with me that an account planner here could spend all year watching research groups that other people ran. One of the challenges with these cycles, however, is that a marketer may only see one cycle through before being rotated onto another brand. This doesn’t incent hunger for brilliant work – it incents doing good-enough work that keeps the career ladder steady and bosses on side. The account planners I love want to do good work now – it’s why they’re in the industry; clients may be thinking more about their careers in ten years’ time.

Thirdly, and I think this comes from the incredibly educated nature of much of the marketing workforce here (MBAs everywhere), there seems to be a big belief in trademarked frameworks being the way to solve problems, and that the solving of these problems best happens in large groups. The account planners I love run rogue. They grab onto quirky interesting points and could write their strategy in a haiku if they had to – and you’d get it. Frameworks suck the life out of them – especially when edited by a committee.

Fourthly, due to the large groups – and I’ve talked about this with a few expats to see if I’m the odd one out – there can be less directness in group talk; a focus on keeping the group happy rather than getting to an incredibly interesting point of view. The account planners I love want it to be interesting from the get-go and throw inner tantrums (well, OK, sometimes outer tantrums) when things get vanilla and they don’t know what their bosses want them to do. There can also be excessive over-thinking and marketing speak in the group talk.

Finally, advertising is more of a long-term profession in the States. It’s not uncommon for account planners to stay in the one agency for well upwards of 5 years. In Australia, the average churn rate in advertising agencies according to a survey that the Communications Council did a few years ago was 18 months (slightly longer for planners from memory). It makes sense that if the planning cycles have traditionally been so long that people would stick through a few of them. However, due to this and due to the hierarchical focus of American culture (the VP, SVP, EP conventions), it seems that if an account planner hasn’t had the stomach for a long-term commitment in the past, they’d burn out and change industries, agencies or sides.

So, how much patience is enough patience?

Great question. Thanks for asking.

When I get frustrated and feel I’ve stayed frustrated for an extended period of time, I ask myself: “Have I put alternatives on the table in a constructive way? Have I done so in a way that hasn’t made other people feel unnecessarily vulnerable? Has some sort of progress happened?”

If I feel at a dead-end, I ask myself whether there are deeply structural things at play that I’ve tried to constructively address that simply won’t shift – usually due to politics, other people’s vested interests, unspoken stuff.

I then try again – deeply thinking about to what degree I’m part of the problem.

If I can’t make it happen then, in all honesty, I’ve surpassed my patience tolerance level.

This doesn’t happen linearly and rationally like the above may seduce you into thinking. But I do try to catch myself out using those questions above.

This is all in the context of an account planner who likes to make stuff (for more, read Why strategists should make stuff). Not all account planners are – or need to be – like that. Some planners are happy to do their thing, hope the work is OK and move into the next cycle. Some can do that for years. Not all of us are built like that – but each type of planner has his or her own strengths and weaknesses.

What to do about it

Great expectations made small

I think the best coping mechanism is simplicity. It’s having a simple answer to the question: “What are 3 things I want to achieve this year?”

It’s one of those stupid-obvious thoughts that I rally against day in and day out. Like you.

“I need to do this project better. I need a better way of working. I need a more powerful insight. I want to help the creative work move over here, or there. I should be writing more. Maybe I should talk at more conferences. Maybe we should change the brief. We need a better brainstorm process. But what if brainstorms dis-incent creative teams? Should we even have creative teams in the traditional sense? Should I go client-side? Maybe a digital agency? What if I started my own business? Back to the brief at hand – why do we even have briefs? Yeah, maybe we need a new brief template.”

I’ve spoken with and watched enough of us over the years to know that many of us probably had that internal discourse today.

But, like Kung Fu Panda in the sequel, inner peace won’t come from without. Focusing on a handful of clear, compelling goals may help.

Stop partying yourself into the ground

How many of us drink ourselves into escape every week – because of how we feel about ourselves and our work? From what I can tell, if you’ve done this in the past month, you’re unlikely to be the odd one out. You know it’s not useful. Tone it down. Just a little. Then book time in your diary every few days to do something you actually enjoy and don’t let anyone move it.

Keep score

I did this for a period a few years ago. Having spent much of my 20’s running my own business where if I had an idea – for a project, an event, a story – I’d simply… go and do it (for more, read 10 things about trying), I had to get used to being in agencies where it took time for doing to happen and the almost instant gratification I was used to took much, much longer (if it happened at all). So, I started to keep a little note of small wins. Just like writing about what you’re thankful for every day helps keep you in perspective, keeping score may also help.

Join forces

One of the key challenges for an agency’s leadership is to work out how to create the environment and culture to get the most out of account planners who want to do and make now, rather than wait it out for another planning cycle. But, I also believe that this is how non-TV-centric creative brains feel and that the solution should be shared between the agencies and their clients, who now more than ever need this odd, high-impact thinking in their businesses. Make the systems work around the people; not the other way around.

Got a coping mechanism?

Please share with your friends below.

Image courtesy GPY&R Australia.

Making money from blogging… no, making enough money from blogging so that you don’t have to work is increasingly something that many people are contemplating. Unfortunately, if you’re staring into the information well, picking up tips that used to work for people when the web was less competitive, when it was easier to get Google’s attention, when all those search-happy URLs were available, then you’re going to risk putting a lot of effort in for very little gain.

However, if you’re thinking differently enough to everybody else, chances are you can stand out. That’s what this article is about. How to get you standing out in front of brands and agencies, and find new ways to make money from your blogging pedigree along the way.

Old models are struggling

It’s not just “heritage media” that’s trying to work it all out right now. Bloggers everywhere need to rethink their approaches:

• Display advertising needs reinvention: who’s it actually working for?
• Google just downgraded content farms
• Guest-posting is the new content marketing
• Selling ebooks is a hit-and-miss affair for most
• Affiliate marketing: how do you pick a product and make it worthwhile?

Establishing an audience and then releasing a book as your monetization tactic is challenging when such a small percentage of books are actually profitable. So, do you make an app? Do you go Kindle? Do you put on a conference? Should your revenue come from the very content that you pour your soul into or from something else, like a better salary, fees for speaking at events or a new business venture?

Just where will the money come from?

As a blogger, you need to make some serious strategic calls on where to put your focus because content-making is heavy going.

What people want from you

A few months ago, I got to take the stage at the Aussie Bloggers Conference. One of the questions that Sarah Pietrzak asked was, “What should brands expect of bloggers and where do you see this relationship going?”

I started listing all the benefits that I see available from working with bloggers, and they fell politely into these four buckets.

1. Perception

What a marketer wants from you is to look better and more relevant to the people they’d like to sell to—as many as possible, too. Once they’ve finished a campaign, they will screengrab the blog posts and other media for a case study. They may use a sentiment analysis tool to establish the reach and positivity (hopefully) of what you made.

To be honest, this is where a lot of agency and marketing types finish. But it’s not enough in most cases. If I were their boss, I’d be asking about the results. This brings us to:

2. Action

What a marketer should really be measuring and focusing in on (at least in the medium term) is working with you to get people to do stuff. My perception of Bugaboo strollers is that they look and work great but they’re too expensive, so I wouldn’t buy one. Great perception, no action. Having said that, not all actions have to be “sales.”

When I work with a brand over an extended period of time, the first step is about establishing credibility, respecting the existing communities, engaging with them. These are softer metrics—they will harden over time.

Examples of four common actions that you can sell:

• Sales: work out how you can sell their stuff directly within a matter of clicks
• High-quality website visitors (defined by a conversion or engagement)
• Increasing their email/RSS subscribers, followers, fans
• Consumer reviews: no, not fake, astro-turfing stuff—legitimacy or nothing.

Now, if you want to be professional, you need to work out up-front exactly what you want to be held accountable for, and how to measure it. If you bring this rigor to your approach, you will get taken seriously, you’ll start having conversations with more senior people, and possibly get access to more serious budgets.

3. Contacts

This isn’t often something a marketer will ask for, as they may have a PR agency that gets paid to do this, but if you can act as a connector, then you have value to sell or exchange. You may connect them to other bloggers like you, bloggers not like you but with a potentially relevant audience, readers, media, event organizers, and so on.

4. Knowledge

Every brand is working out how to do this right. Business is typically a very alpha-male environment—things are rigid, political, and bureaucratic. And, yes, “male” more often than not. Marketers are always under the pump to prove they have something to offer—typically, the CEO is a sales or logistics guy, and the sales teams always tease the marketers about doing the fluffy stuff compared to their frontline activity. They have to compete for budget.

New leaders understand the values of transparency and vulnerability. These are values one needs to have to succeed in social (I believe). However, these values are not widespread—they involve admitting that you don’t know stuff, that you made an error, that you’re learning.

Some of the things you know that you can package:

• What topics are hot-button topics in your community
• How to talk, write and deal with your social media world
• What ideas you believe are likely to succeed or flop

How to get out of the monetization rat-race

If you’ve explored any of the ideas below, I’d love to know how you went. They all aim to set you apart from the rest by making you more of a strategic partner with a brand—not just a place for ads. It can take time to earn the trust of a brand to be able to implement it all. If you’re contemplating giving it a shot, have a go at doing one of these for free so that you can approach your key targets (and their competitors) with something in hand and a 30-minute offer to see it.

1. Research and research groups

Marketers spend thousands of dollars every year on research groups. The most common way to do this is to get eight people together in a research room with mirrored windows and for a facilitator to ask questions. Now, it’s important to realize that the people you recruit to these groups—if based on your audience and connections—will not be representative of the population at large, so don’t pretend they are.

How much money is there in this? A typical range would be $2500-$10,000 per group. The higher fees are charged when it’s harder to recruit people and they expect bigger incentives (e.g. doctors, CEOs).

Your costs? A venue, food, drinks, stationery (butcher’s paper, cards, pens), a projector, recording the session (video, audio), phone calls, incentives (for 60-90 minutes, you may pay $50-$70), printing of disclaimer forms, and your travel.

How can you make money?

• Bring your audience together for your own research groups.
• Bring bloggers together for a research group (incentives will cost more).
• Create your own side-business focusing on a handful of key audiences that you can credibly claim to know better than anyone else and have ready access to.
• Undertake depth interviews, where you spend a day with a person and document everything relevant.
• Complete desk research, preparing white papers that pull together audience-specific trends (what they like, where they are, how they communicate, with text, photos and/or videos).

2. Online surveys

Marketers often conduct surveys about their brand, competitors, trends in the market, ideas, and advertising. They use online research companies who may have built up a database through cheap banner ads.

How much money is there in this? It depends on the speed of turnaround required, the number of people they need, and the dashboard/tools and analytics you’re offering. My gut feeling is that a typical bit of online research and interpretation would be worth $5,000-$20,0000.

Your costs? If you have ready access to an audience, your costs would simply be in the technology plus your time to make it all happen, perhaps an email blast if you don’t use free tools.

How can you make money? By producing:

• Fast-turnaround surveys based on hot topics—especially brand-specific topics (e.g. if a brand gets bagged out by a celebrity, perhaps you can run a survey about sentiment and seek ideas about what to do)
• Rolling surveys: a survey that repeats itself, capturing data about the same questions every few months
• Bespoke surveys: when needed, when asked for (but don’t be scared to suggest)
• Facebook insights, polls, surveys (although Facebook may not appreciate it)

3. Conversions

Instead of selling blanket advertising space, what about selling more relevant and useful space on pages that tend to convert well or get a lot of quality search traffic? Obviously, you don’t want to cut off your nose to spite your face and stop selling your own products to do this, but, again, it positions you as someone who takes how you work with brands seriously. Offering deep links with correct title tags is another little bonus you can throw in.

How much money is there in this? You’d either charge per acquisition (trial, sale, registration, fan, follow), by the impression or by time period.

Your costs? It depends how you do it—they’d range from simply time to upload images/text through to costs associated with creating high quality content.

How can you make money? By providing:

• Video content that helps them sell better and fits with your values ($500-$20,000 depending on quality, if they are allowed to re-purpose and syndicate the video, etc)
• A whitepaper or ebook on behalf of the brand ($1000 to $10,000 depending on design, contributors)
• Designing good performing advertising ($200-$20,000 depending on what’s required and how much is required, whether they can use it elsewhere)
• Additional pages on your website: there’s no reason for advertising to have to lead away from your site when people are at your site to stay on your site
• Advice about how a brand should optimize their landing pages for your audiences (if you know; also a research opportunity).

4. Shortcuts via statistics, data and numbers

This is a combination of a few points above, but if you do your own research, you can re-package it all and re-sell it. Your sources may include: website analytics, search behavior (keyword search volumes, trends, seasonality, geography), bit.ly analytics, PostRank, Twitter, social bookmarking websites, and so on. With this data, you’ll help brands understand what content, which headlines, what time of day, and which days work. You may build a report on who comments the most, who Stumbles, how people use the key, relevant Facebook pages.

How much money is there in this? This sort of data is very precious. You could shortcut a brand to beat you at your own game if you’re not careful. If you did an annual report, you could try to charge a few thousand dollars for it, but you may need to collaborate with an existing research company. Perhaps the value in this is really to only share it with senior marketers and CEOs (to be honest, I’d use this directly only, not with agencies).

Your costs? Your time, perhaps you can buy others’ research to use in your own (transparently), perhaps a venue to present your findings to key targets.

How can you make money?

• You’d possibly use this tactic as a way to set up selling everything else.
• You could sell a teaser (a top-ten list, for example) and then sell other services to unlock the rest.

5. Affiliate marketing

This is something I’m exploring: how to help brands that are typically sold in supermarkets sell online on your blogs. Brands have guns at their heads right now. The chain stores and big supermarkets have so much power: they bully price changes, and reduce shelf positioning, all while introducing their own competing home brands. If you can solve this problem, you win.

How much money is there in this? What did Groupon sell for?

Your costs? How much did Groupon cost to make?

How can you make money? How does Groupon make money?

In all seriousness, there are free tools out there to help you do this—you just need to work out the logistics with the brand (that is, delivery), as well as how to make them feel that the big stores won’t come for payback.

6. Talent and representation

Like everyone else, you have blogging friends. Like everyone else, you’re getting approached by PR companies, agencies and marketers. Like everyone else, you think it could all be done much better. Well, do something about it! Set up your own company and systems to help your friends get paid more doing stuff they want to do and help the people with the money achieve their goals.

How much money is there in this? If you’re serious about this, then it’s a completely new business for you so the possibilities (and risks) are as big you want them to be.

Your costs? Time, legal fees, business setup costs, and so on—unless you can trial the idea using firm handshakes as contract-makers.

How can you make money?

• Coordinate book proposals with publishers you’ve built up relationships with.
• Talent agency for advertising agencies.
• Event-speaking representation.

7. Band your ads together

You could also set up your own ad network via Adify. You’d need to work hard to establish credibility and scale. You’d also need to decide whether you will do the sales or whether you’ll hire or outsource that responsibility. Either way, it’s worth exploring.

What do you think?

If you enjoyed the read, please leave a comment. Feel free to follow me on Twitter

Photo courtesy Wallyg.