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Turning an Idea into the next (Really) Big Thing By JOhn Bell

InsIGhTs FROm DaviD Droga, DROGA5; Mark D’arcy, AnD anDrew Bosworth, FACeBOOk

Make it

participatory. As Droga sees it, some time ago the ad industry forgot that it needed to actually earn people’s attention. As a result, Droga pointed out, a whole industry sprung up around helping people skip advertisements. We need to make our work more participatory. We fancy ourselves great storytellers. Today, part of the story is how people get involved. Once they are engaged, they amplify to their networks and we only need to go a few hops to get scale.

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Find tHe idea, not a Million of theM.Creative people are used to exploring dozens of ideas rather than zero in on one exceptional idea. When Facebook launched photo sharing, it wasn’t great, as Bosworth himself admitted. But the best bit it had was tagging. That one idea caused Facebook’s photo sharing to grow exponentially. Get to the core of some goal people have (e.g. sharing photos).

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“Steady wins the race.”Advertising grew up around the finish-line model, Droga said. everyone worked like maniacs to get the campaign done and launched, with everyone then shouting, “We’re done!” That doesn’t work today. Creativity gets delivered via a steady cadence of everyday engagement. D’Arcy pointed out a campaign for Target, the retail giant. Target ran a sustained program where people could determine which schools would get funding. The activity generated more than 300 million stories in newsfeed. Call it the creative marathon.

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Buildon ideas.Tkpanelist told the audience that the ad business doesn’t like riffing and building on good ideas. While advertisers are inspired by others, they often dismiss ideas that seem derivative. Advertisers crave originality over repetition. That’s flawed according to D’Arcy. Instead, he said, advertisers should act like such technology companies as Instagram and Facebook that build on good ideas. For instance, 12 people built Instagram, which on the surface was not an original concept. loads of others had done photo sharing and filters. Instagram just put its own spin on the idea.

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it isn’t Much

witHout diStriBution.Today’s creative must come with its own clever distribution strategy. That might start with Facebook and will extend out through networks of owned, earned and paid platforms and channels. Gone are the days when you could just plop great creative down an ad channel to drive mass reach.

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Get cloSerto the people you are engagingCreatives must have a much tighter relationship with the people experiencing the product or service. never before has there been so many ways to listen to and talk with the actual people using products and services. Creativity that scales is iterative and responsive. Great creatives are no longer lurking around behind the scenes but out shaking the virtual hands of regular people.

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