True crime, toolkits and the Big Ideal

What do a homicide investigation and an ad campaign have in common? Rory Sutherland explains

Buried almost unnoticed in the cultural treasury brought to these shores by the beneficence of Murdoch père et fils lies a great number of 24-hour factual and educational channels – among them several entirely dedicated to the subject of True Life Crime. Of these I can particularly commend Crime & Investigation, Serial Killers' Biography Network and Discovery Stabbings +1.

While not watching southern sheriffs shouting at the underclass or hearing how on-23rd-November-1987-Wayleen-Dodds-24-year-old- Topeka-housewife-waved-at-her-neighbour-as-she-left-her-home-for-the-very-last-time, I also enjoy something from A&E called The First 48.

In fact I like it so much I am now trying to persuade the entire Ogilvy organisation to reshape its processes and workings to better reflect those of the Dade County PD. Preferably all the way down to diet and dress code.

WHAT IS THE FIRST 48?

Let me first explain the premise behind The First 48. The '48' refers to the vital first 48 hours after a murder is detected. Vital because the actions in this comparatively brief period have a considerable bearing on the entire course of a murder investigation and on its chances of success. Indeed it is said that, for homicide detectives, 'Their chance of solving a case is cut in half if they don't get a lead in The First 48™. Each passing hour gives suspects more time to flee, witnesses more time to forget what they saw, and crucial evidence more time to be lost forever' (www.aetv.com/the_first_48).

For this reason, the first 48 hours of any investigation are a time of frenetic activity. Manpower levels are high, information is regularly shared and all avenues are explored.

And I mean all avenues. These people are cops, so they naturally don't use outlandish terminology such as 'integration', 'user-generated content' or 'solution neutral', yet what they do is a model of what we might call 360-degree thinking. There are no assumptions made as to where a lead may first come from: instead countless possibilities are pursued rapidly and in parallel. No one assumes that, say, forensics need precede house-to-house enquiries, or that you don't need to interview witnesses until you have uncovered any DNA.

You seek a lead or a breakthrough (we might call it an insight) wherever it might present itself. It's as simple as that. But instead of purely attempting to do this through a drawn-out process of laborious sequential logic, the detective process starts with a sense of urgency and foment.

News of the crime in question is circulated to a wide group of people in various police specialisms. But the search for leads is not confined to professionals: clever use is made of the media, informants and indeed the public at large – enormously increasing the effective manpower of the organisation.

In these first 48 hours, the approach is essentially open-source. Whereas judgement and decision-making remains tightly centralised (it is a myth of the open-source movement that it is highly democratic – it isn't) the whole purpose of the exercise is to encourage contributions from anywhere within or outside the force by widely sharing details of the investigation. (The Portuguese system seems to be a notable exception here).

To use a phrase coined by my colleague Robyn Putter, what this process acknowledges is that fermentation must come before distillation.

THE VALUE OF THE FIRST 48

It is interesting that the police proceed this way. Not being known for over-intellectualisation, those featured in the programme will often be unfamiliar with the tenets of The Wisdom of Crowds or Malcolm's Gladwell's Blink. Fewer still will know the scientific value of what Einstein called 'First Insight'. Yet in a way what they do suggests an instinctive understanding of all three: the fact that rapid, subconscious reactions to a problem have a value; that collective knowledge is often worth consulting; that how you define a problem at the outset has more bearing on your outcome than everything else.

Above all it acknowledges that a problem shared is a problem ... well twice as likely to be solved. It accepts that there is a time and a place where collaboration and shared intent are worth more than focus.

Yet the wonder is not that they do this; it is why we don't. In fact the first 48 hours after a brief being received are probably spent doing nothing more useful than trekking to the finance department to open a job number. And all the while time – and possibilities – are ticking away.

With the single dubious exception of brainstorming, the creative process adopted by agencies has never really embraced the many-peopleand- fast approach to generating first insights, preferring the model of few-people-and-slow.

Few-people-and-slow may be the right approach for developing and crafting creative executions. But is it really the best way to develop an exciting new perspective on a brief? Especially as the new perspective could come from almost any direction: from an insight into the product, from the media (bought or invented), the target audience definition, the consumer, the mode of usage, the brand imagery, the category conventions, the packaging, the channel, the point-of-purchase, the customer journey, the online experience. Actually, I really do mean anywhere.

As someone working for a very large agency, this few-people-and-slow approach has always irked me a little, if only for reasons of competitive advantage. What is the point of employing 1,200 people with expertise across multiple disciplines if the average brief gets exposed to only five of them? What advantage do you thereby offer over an agency of 30 people? Or five?

Well, I can think of several reasons why agencies have not attempted to adopt this practice. Some more disinterested than others.

WHY AGENCIES DO NOT WORK LIKE POLICE FORCES System Addiction

Payment by the hour has placed an onus on agencies to justify their every moment's work – requiring us to maintain the wholly inaccurate pretence that all creative activity is the product of a clearly defined, self-contained linear process, infinitely replicable and free of risk and uncertainty. It's bollocks, of course, but it seems to shut the procurement people up.

Outdated Practices

Most agency processes were devised for the old media age, when media were scarce and expensive. Back in 1993, when your options were confined to perhaps four media, and where the division between media money and content money was immovable and unambiguous, there was little opportunity for challenging the status quo. Worryingly, a lot of what is regarded as axiomatic and unarguable in advertising is no better than a vestige (like the human appendix) from a previous media age. The obsession with brevity, the belief in only one idea for a brand, the notion that any communication can only ever convey one thing: these are not eternal verities but simply convenient guidelines for the TV and poster age.

Frankly, once your overall approach has been decided, a large part of the creative process does depend on small numbers of people intensely focused on producing a superb product (just as the later, evidence-gathering stages of police work are the preserve of specialists reporting to a small central team). But it is wrong to conflate the kind of structure that can produce a great press ad with the kind that produces a great early breakthrough.

Failure to Involve the Whole Team

Then there is a traditional failure to understand the complicated relations between the executional and the strategic: not realising that the process of creation is iterative, and consists not so much of a single breakthrough but of a series of them. This misconception gives rise to the assumption that no junior or executional specialists have value at the outset, only grand strategists. Yet, as any detective will tell you (remember Sherlock Holmes' 'I am glad of all details, whether they seem to you to be relevant or not') it is wrong to separate minor from major. Fred West, Peter Sutcliffe, John Christie, Son of Sam and Ted Bundy all were caught by beat police performing routine duties.

Failure to Place Value in the Whole Team

We're also beset by a freemasonic, in camera approach to the brand; the self-regarding idea that only a few initiates of sensationally high intelligence and vast brand experience can possibly contribute worthwhile ideas. Indeed the very DNA of most brands is enshrined in mysterious cabalistic symbols such as Brand Onions, incomprehensible to anyone outside the marketing fraternity and to most within it.

WHAT HAS CHANGED IN THE INDUSTRY AND WHY WE NEED TO ADAPT The Media Sphere

The greatest change of all has come in the media sphere. Within ten years, the available means by which we can reach consumers have gone from scarce and expensive to abundant and even free. How you define audiences, whether you place a higher value on reach or voluntary engagement, whether you target people or moments is now all open to debate. Progressing from brief to 30-second spot as though on tramlines no longer holds. There is not only the opportunity to do things creatively but also to do creative things.

Top-down No Longer Applies

What this change in the media ecosystem has meant is that our business simply needs to become more collaborative and open: the topdown approach no longer applies. Instead what counts is your ability to co-opt different groups in support of your brand objectives. And the people you engage in this endeavour now include not only different disciplines but actually people outside the secret society of marketing: anyone from customer-facing staff to consumers themselves – even (lawdy!) the CEO. In an interactive world, brand building often results from a collaborative joint venture between the brand's owners and its users.

Mass Collaboration is Now Easy

The same new technology that has transformed our media world also provides an economical answer to the problem of mass collaboration: with blogging, wikis, twittering and other collaborative tools there is no longer a requirement for everyone to be in the same room simultaneously; indeed there is no requirement for the people to be on the same time-zone, continent or even payroll. The advantage of this approach is that whereas the problem may be shared with 1,000 people, only those with useful contributions need raise their voices.

Reframing – Why the First 48?

It is only by acting very fast that you have the opportunity to reframe a problem. We have proved this repeatedly in experimenting with this methodology on live briefs. Go back to a client organisation with a radical suggestion after 48 hours and you add value – try the same thing after three weeks and you add confusion.

Diagonal Thinking

This upfront approach re-engages media thinking with creative thinking – on a proper equal footing. And in parallel rather than in series. The two are entirely interdependent. And it also recognises the partnership of rationality and imagination – without that usual moment in a brief where logic grudgingly hands the baton to magic. This is what (to cite Hamish Pringle in this issue's Viewpoint) diagonal thinking is all about.

Discipline neutrality

The same approach also fosters discipline neutrality. Within the first 48 lies that window of opportunity for approaching a brief from a media-neutral standpoint – before it has become defined by the language of one discipline or another – or where lazy assumptions about the target audience have skewed everything towards one medium. This helps create fertile combinations of different disciplines: essential if you want to create the kind of multi-dimensional, textured brands people actually want to engage with.

MAKING IT HAPPEN: THE BIG IDEAL

Easy said. But what is needed to make this happen? Obviously an understanding that client briefs and issues are shared rapidly but widely at the very beginning of any process. A small, dedicated team – typically a planning partner, creative partner and business partner who, along with the client, decide direction (decision-making – as opposed to opinion-seeking – should never be a mass activity). Finally, you need an 'open-source' brief for your brand, something that combines both clarity and purpose. And this is what leads us to 'The Big Ideal'.

Something to supplant 'The Idea' as the orchestrating component that gives a brand its consistency and direction. Hence no more the language of Onions or Brand Essences, but instead a clear appeal to some sense of duty or higher motivation – the kind of thing that encourages people to cooperate with you – to help you with your enquiries. This is, after all, the reason why the police can still call on volunteers and public and media support in a way that traffic wardens can't.

We call this a Big Ideal, and it differs from a big idea in one crucial way – it is generous, open and encouraging of collaboration.

It is analogous to the single clear objective that allows a disparate group of policemen to work together effectively – a brief that shares its source code.

THE BIG IDEAL: JUST ANOTHER TOOL? John Shaw continues ...

I don't have much time for 'tools' in general. Like most planners with a few years under their belts, I've seen enough of them to last me a lifetime. After a while, they begin to blur together. This is partly because so many of them begin with the word 'Brand'. The Brand Onion mentioned by Rory is the root vegetable of them all, but I've now seen Brand Pretty-Much-Every-things from Trees and Boxes to Temples and Stars. Almost every globally recognisable shape, particularly if it has religious overtones, seems destined for tooldom.

THE TROUBLE WITH BRAND TOOLS

This unease stems from two factors derived from that crucial zone where strategy meets creative. First, I've always found it hard to have conversations with top creative directors based around what the tool says. They don't seem to like being dictated to by a tree – brand or otherwise. Of course you could always use the tool in secret, and allow its findings to inform regular conversation, but in the modern collaborative all-round-the-same-table creative environment, this is increasingly hard (and a bit phoney anyway).

Second, I have a suspicion that there is a poor correlation between tool use and quality of creative output, or even (scandalously) a negative correlation. Even if the individual tools have merit, there are some cultural factors at play that make it rare to find heavy tooling at the heart of the greatest creative case studies. It's often easier to invent new tools than it is to make the many tough decisions inherent in doing the best work.

So why introduce yet another tool, the Big Ideal? Well, first, because there are exceptions, of course. It would be wrong, not to say questionable in career terms, to write off all the tools in my own agency's 360-Degree Brand Stewardship, and there are definitely some other good examples of where tools, used appropriately, not only have considerable strategic impact but are actually usable at the creative coal-face.

But the real reason why we have become very excited about the Big Ideal is that it just seemed to make sense, to be fresh, and to be helpful with the type of big brand marketing and communication problems we face now. Plus, it passed the test of 'stickiness' – people seemed to want to hear about it, to interact with it, and to try it for themselves ... which is not the case with all agency tools.

As Rory has indicated, there are some issues where the focus on one pivotal idea is too obsessional. It's not that it's unimportant, it's just that other things are important too, both 'downstream' in execution, and 'upstream'. It was actually in a discussion on the need to have better ideas that I first heard the phrase 'Big Ideal' mentioned in a marketing context, by Robyn Putter the creative guru of WPP and Ogilvy.

He pointed out that great brands, with track records of doing great campaigns, seemed to be founded not just on ideas, but on ideals.

An ideal is 'a conception of something in its perfection', which we interpreted as a sort of desired worldview that was inherent in the brand, either explicitly or implicitly. Most of the brands we really admired seemed to have some kind of worldview like this at their core, underpinning great marketing communications and creative ideas.

These worldviews felt like they were true to the brand's 'best self', and often touched on a cultural trend, truth or tension. They appealed more to aspirations than to anxieties; and they targeted a collective interest, not just an individual benefit.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In practice the Big Ideal has been very helpful. It does seem to answer Rory's desire for a way of working that encourages collaboration. From PR to retail activation, we hope to work with specialists who have good ideas of their own. So imagine how demotivating it is, and indeed wasteful, to give them assignments that ask them to 'execute' an idea in PR or 'take it down' into activation – often accompanied by rigid executional guidelines that may or may not be appropriate for that particular discipline. 'We'd rather work with a Big Ideal' is a common refrain.

The ultimate test, of course, is the work that is based on Big Ideals, and for that you'll have to watch this space, but if the enthusiasm of various types of creative people is any guide, it will have more beneficial impact than most agency tools.

Finally, a health warning. The Big Ideal is not the answer to life, death and the universe. It needs to be accompanied by many other things. It doesn't take away the need for good judgement or great talent throughout the unpredictable path of bringing great work to fruition. It's not a panacea, only a tool. But – to return to the analogy of late-night TV, we do think it just might be a chainsaw among choppers.

THE BIG IDEAL IN PRACTICE

To explore this, we developed a short form of words that could potentially encapsulate a brand's 'Big Ideal' – a simple sentence-completion exercise: 'Brand xxx believes the world would be a better place if ...'.

We liked this form of words because it was fairly simple (I could imagine using it with a creative director without any glazing of the eyes), but at the same time allowed for some texture and richness to be conveyed. Simple, but not simplistic. Here are some examples, for illustration purposes only (no trade secrets).

Coca-Cola has optimism at the core of its brand, and a renewed focus on that in recent years, originally in Latin America and subsequently globally, has helped the brand to find a powerful voice again. Perhaps Coke's Big Ideal might be something like: 'Coca-Cola believes the world would be a better place if we saw the glass as half full, not half empty'.

There also seems to be a Big Ideal implicit in adidas's 'Impossible Is Nothing' campaign and mantra. Something like 'adidas believes the world would be a better place if people ignored the notion of failure'.

Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty has been a huge success. It too seems based on an underpinning Big Ideal along the lines of 'Dove believes the world would be a better place if women were allowed to feel good about themselves.'

Persil/Omo seems to be possessed of something similar at its core – that the world would be a better place if children were allowed to play in it.

Enamoured of this construct as we were, one of the early questions was how noble the ideals needed to be. The answer seemed to be that the concept would quickly become dull and undifferentiated if all Big Ideals were about world peace. Some great brands appeared to have Ideals that, while not exactly noble, were nevertheless Big.

Miller High Life successfully reversed its apparently terminal decline through a strong apparent belief that the world (or at least the US) would be a better place if men could be men again. The brand's communications were not exactly politically correct, but they benefited from a strong worldview that tapped into a cultural tension about the decline of manhood in America.

And Lynx (or Axe) has been fabulously successful on the clear belief that the world would be a better place if men could have sex very, very easily. This is a pretty Big Ideal when you're a zitty 14 year old.

From this we concluded that it could still be useful to think about Big Ideals even when a brand was not inherently 'noble', and that although Big Ideals should be widely interesting, that was not the same as appealing to absolutely everyone.

This article featured in Market Leader, Summer 2007.