The history of ideas in the age of digital transformation
They just pop into your head.
At least, that's how ideas are supposed to happen. This simplicity â anyone can do it, just think! â is a potent misdirect, one Idea Makers have borne forever. The reality is, there is structure, habit and process behind every idea, even those that came to fruition in the blink of an eye.
2018 marks the beginning of my second decade writing about ideas, idea people and the business of ideas as holistically as possible. Seems like a good a point as any to look backward for relevant context.
Lets return to the Holy Matthew Weiner-Glorified Era of advertising ideas.
One of the achievements ad legend Bill Bernbach is perhaps less lauded forâbut for which he deserves great acclaimâis the idea of the Art Director and Copywriter team.
Before the Mad Men era, ideas were typically developed by Copywriters alone then "slipped under the door" of Art Directors to illustrate. In other words, ideas were the responsibility of a lone individualâserved by others to refine and polish. (See Rothenberg's Where the Suckers Moon if you want to go down the history rabbit hole.)
Imagine the allure, the power and the pressure. Your brain almost alone in defining ideas that influence culture. Heady stuff. This Loner Ad Genius system fits well in our reverie of post-war America, where individualism titillates. You'd light a cigarette, inhale andâpoof! Idea!
Bernbach shook that up, in more ways than one.
First, the idea of an idea-creation duo pulled Art Directors out from behind their drawing tables and elevating their role beyond production. We'll see this seismic shift repeat itself decades later. But for the moment, imagine the politics.
Since the beginning, advertising ideas had been developed by individuals. Suddenly, it's a sport for two. Now there's a sense of competition, but also teamwork. The ratio of account managers and process roles versus idea people goes from Everyone Else:One to EveryoneElse:Two. I'm convinced this doubling of creative roles had a profound effect on the defense and selling of ideas, and hence, the Creative Revolution. (Hard to win a battle all by your creative lonesome.)
Helmut Krone, Art Director + Julian Koenig, Copywriter (1959)
Second, it began the narrative of idea-creation as a collaborative adventure, one which could be visually oriented just as easily as headline oriented.
What constituted an âideaâ within advertising expanded from a vocabulary rich in words to one equally fluent in images, shape, color and design. (Side note: Many credit Bernbach with defining the âconceptâ of conceptual advertising ideas, too â a welcoming of ideas that didnât fit the status quo of ideas. Such irony.)
Given the many decades since, the shear volume of ideas since, it probably seems timeless and inevitable for agencies to staff and create advertising in pairs â one part visual, the other verbal. Just as the preceding decades of Loner Ad Genius had some inherent logic.
From the mid 1950s into the early 90s, generations of advertising idea people knew nothing but a system predicated upon The Creative Duo.
But then computers and the Internet had to go and ruin everything.
It is difficult to imagine making ideas now without the glorious machine under my fingers. Oh sure, ideas still flow. But the corralling, organizing, refining, consensus-building, selling and producing of ideas is a 10x better system post-software. (Granted, some might not agree.)
It started with enabling technology.
Individuals could always create ideas all by their lonesomes, but software put booster rockets on that capability, especially the visual components. And cheap content distribution (cheap media?) freed the ability to express from the few who had access, to everyone who wanted to express themselves. To paraphrase the Barbarian Group in the late 90s â âour workâs competition isnât the work of other brands, our competition is everything on the Internet.â
Which meant the most potent or viral advertising ideas didnât necessarily have to come from a Writer + Art Director any more. In fact, maybe that old perspective was a bit blind to What Could Be and what the Internet wanted to laud.
So by the early aughts, agencies started expanding the pair to a trio: Writer + Art Director (or Designer) + Technologist (or Strategist or Designer), because ideas had to consider more than two dimensions or time-based narratives. Now ideas had to thrive within digital architectures. We had to consider the conceptual nature of the space the idea lived within. (No one ever had to consider the architecture of a print ad, it was pre-defined. But a website? How wide, deep, structured should it be?) And the very idea of what an ad agency is changed, too.
Then came interaction.
Ideas before code, before the Internet, had no real purpose for inter-action, for response. Sure, coupons existed. But as periods at the end of transactional sentences. Perhaps Gossage was alone in viewing coupons as a conversational component.
But the purpose of 1.0 websites and banners was to enable a very binary back and forth between audience and idea owner. It was engagement at its simplest â the click, weak as it was, gave power to viewers and immediate reaction to idea creators. If youâd made advertising ideas for decades without any real sense of how audiences reacted to your ideas, how strange the Internet must have seemed. Why would audiences want a role in advertising they were just meant to consume?
And suddenly audiences werenât just consumers anymore. They could make the ads and distribute them, too. Maybe with less craft, less expense, but also maybe with much more authenticity.
Hello, DIY.
Hello, social.
Hello, community.
Hello, influencers.
Hello, influencers who have bigger audiences than global brands.
Hello, word of mouth.
Hello, PR is the new Advertising.
Hello, mobile and mobility.
Hello, applications.
Hello, publishers who are now ad agencies.
Hello, technology platforms that say they arenât media companies but sure act like media companies and also act like ad agencies.
Hello, historic business consultancies who are also now ad agencies.
Hello, all-encompassing, vertically integrated manufacturing/marketing/media/content/commerce/distribution entity that is also an ad agency.
Hello, marketing as a service.
Hello, âthe product is the marketing.â
Hello, software that is the marketing that is the advertising.
Hello, walled gardens of content.
Hello, content that isnât advertising itâs content.
Hello, drones. Because.
Hello, augmented and virtual canvases and processes for advertising ideas.
Hello, location-enabled idea targeting.
Hello, fake news and fake analytics and fake audiences.
Hello, ideas that are statues.
Hello, new age of voice-focused ideas.
Hello, marketing and ideas automation.
Hello, cognitive idea generation and optimization.
Hello to a very different landscape for people who are paid to make ideas for advertising.
Consider that almost nothing changed in terms of making advertising ideas between the era of Mad Men and the arrival of the Internet. No software. No connectivity. No enabled audiences. You could enter the industry, rise the ranks, achieve accolades and retire after decades without any substantial change to the process behind your ideas.
And yet, in less than the span of one career we now have a radically different world in which advertising ideas come to life. Sure, the romantic Writer + Art Director duo still exists today, of course. As does the hybrid loner. But check the credits for any modern campaign and youâre just as likely to see dozens of names and roles attached to the making of one modern idea.
This isnât criticism, but reflection.
Ideas are still the result of our brains connecting, inferring, extrapolating, dramatizing. But the process behind insights and briefing, the process behind seeking and refining, the process behind selling, the process behind making and distributing advertising ideas today has almost no parallel with a past just three decades gone.
Is it a wonder the ad industry is in such vibrant, efficacious upheaval?
And yet ideas still just pop into your head.