Insight vs Ideas vs Speed

Speed blurs.

The lag between discerning an insight then having and producing ideas is getting shorter. That does not necessarily mean either output is getting better.

In the mid 90s, Jon Steele and his team at Goodby Silverstein conducted research over many months and realized an insight for the California Milk Processors Board: Milk matters most when it was missing. This inspired the idea: Got milk? (Which, because the idea was primarily expressed through time-consuming print, outdoor and television, meant that many more months accumulated between the realization and its expression.)

Only time will tell if insights derived in the age of social (e.g. Oreo: "Power outages at major sporting events are inconvenient") will have a lasting impact similar to the Milk Processor's 'deprivation strategy.'

I think that's what Gary Goldhammer has in mind with H+K's e-book: The End of Content. It's a compelling read, if only for the comparison and contrast between brand storytelling and journalism. Both aspire to output content that lasts (e.g. Got milk? or the Pentagon Papers). And yet, both brand marketing and journalism suffer under the current yoke of churn.The inbox waterfall (and by "inbox" I mean email, social news feeds, subscriptions - including DVR, etc.) appears to mandate we listen constantly to culture for any inkling of differentiating prescience. And then we must act immediately.

The space between insight and idea ceases to exist. And the result is too often just shallow link bait -- neither real insight or illuminating idea. Just speed for the sake of appearing to move quickly. It's an approach where content, “...collapses into invisibility,” as Linda Zimmer puts it in the H+K book.

Just because we operate in an interactive age doesn't mean we must act instantaneously. Interaction can and should be ongoing; not mere binary transaction. This requires patience from marketers, analysts and shareholders; as well as a nuanced understanding of when to invest slower speed into consumer understanding (i.e. investigative journalism) and when to expect less immediate (but no less powerful) returns from creative development.