Before the Internet most advertising worked. It was impossible to skip. If you wanted eyeballs, all you needed was money.

And if you had an idea, advertising worked all the better. Look, cool ad!

Now there's too much fragmentation. Too much junk. Too many outlets and options. Even with targeting. Sure, you’re removing some inefficiency on the buy side but the targeted audience is still too overwhelmed to notice even relevant ideas.

It’s not enough to have a good idea today, or even a great advertising idea.

Because great ideas are everywhere, every day on the Internet.

To paraphrase Rick Webb from his book Agency:

THE INTERNET IS OUR AUDIENCE

We are competing, every day, against every other website or video on the web.

OUR WORK MUST BE WORTHY OF THE INTERNET

In this context, you need a different strategy, a different way of thinking about who you’ll impact and how you’ll make that happen. The creative strategy must be different.

Take, for example, Steve Bannon and his Government Accountability Institute (GAI), and the rigor with which they organize an idea and its distribution so it will be more likely to catch on in major media (via Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story on Bannon):

"GAI is set up more like a Hollywood movie studio than a think tank. [Wynton] Hall’s job is to transform dry think-tank research into vivid, viral-ready political dramas that can be unleashed on a set schedule, like summer blockbusters. 'We work very long and hard to build a narrative, storyboarding it out months in advance,' he says.”

Hall continues: “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place...” 

In an era rife with great ideas, great ideas are table stakes.

Media is table stakes. PR is table stakes. You need GAI's kind of rigor to ensure anyone notices your idea.

In other words, you need an idea for how you’ll get your idea noticed.