From 360 ‘big’ ideas to just ‘good’ ideas

I’ve been working in advertising for nearly five years.

It’s been fun.

But there has been a lot of 360 chat. A lot.

I’ve been across some brilliant ideas (don’t think I’ve ever come up with any mind, just across them).

But some didn’t see the light of day.

Why?

Because they’ve tended not to fit into the ‘big idea’ that has been agreed upon by all the various stakeholders working on the project (the big idea, by the way, is obviously only a big idea when you’ve got AT LEAST seven ideas across various different mediums, which CATEGORICALLY PROVES that the idea is BIG).

Since when was the validity of how good an idea was, how much you could bastardise it into twelve different incarnations?

Plus, when have you ever seen a full ’360′ campaign bought in it’s entirety?

So it seems a little silly to judge how big an idea is by how many different types of media you could fill with it.

I’d argue you can still end up with the desired outcome across lots of different media, platforms, devices etc without having to rely on one big ’360′ idea to prompt the outcome across them all.

Given the growing influence of digital shizzle across our lives and low barriers to entry to applying a more agile process of idea development and roll-out, it seems silly to me to have to wait for a ‘big 360′ idea. It seems that an increasing part of my role as a planner is to encourage this spontaneity – getting behind proactive ideas that had no brief but are simply brilliant right the way through to discouraging another TV spot which drives to Facebook game app of the same design etc etc

As a client, I’d be ecstatic to know I had an agency thinking about me when I wasn’t thinking about them  - proactively bringing me ideas off the fly – that were small, stimulating, new, measurable, creative, interesting, timely, relatively cheap, idiosyncratic and most importantly, answered my business problem.