It may seem odd for an ad person to talk about the importance of thinking small.  After all, one of the most transformative ads for any brand (and an ad many argue changed the industry) carried this thought as a headline.

Yet I think as an industry we are defined by another ad.  This one:

We believe, the bigger the better.  We want a big idea .  We want to launch it in a big way to create a spectacular firework display.  We want to shout and show our stuff in front of big audiences (hence the love of the SuperBowl).

The problem is 'big' isn't working.  Andrew Ehrenberg has shown that it most categories a brand's market share is stationary.  Copernicus Consulting have reported that people find brands and ads far more similar than different.  McKinsey reports that CPG marketers are spending three times more on price promotion than they are on brand building.

The issues, I believe, is that we have confused the end with the means.  Of course we want big business results and brands and communication that feel big, pervasive and central to culture.  But, perhaps counter-intutively, we need to think and act small not big. We need to break the tyranny of the big idea and embrace small.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about why.

I think small matters for three fundamental reasons:

 

1.  Big problems don't require big solutions

One of the most important pieces of academic work in the last few decades has been in the field of behavioral economics.  It's hugely important to advertising (Rory Sutherland made it the focus of his two year Presidency of the IPA) but despite this and increasingly popular books on the subject (Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler is as good a place as any to start) we tend to ignore its most basic premises.

One of these is that big behavioral change can occur through small actions.  Perhaps the most famous example is of the huge impact the default setting is on an employee's 401k enrollment.  More often than not the default is set to opt out.  When this is changed to opt in as the default, participation and saving increases dramatically.  

Rory Sutherland talked about the issue of people not finishing their drug prescriptions - a waste of tablets and in some cases (eg antibiotics) patients who aren't fully treated (with the ensuing further days off work, medical costs, erc.)  So why not change the instructions to read, for example, "first take the yellow tablets for 10 days and then take the red tablets for the next 10 days").  Same medication, much greater likelihood for the treatment course to be finished (this is, I believe, called "chunking").

2.  Culture is increasingly small

When I worked on Palm, I was lucky enough to interview Matias Duarte the Head of Human Interface and User Experience (he's now doing amazing work at Google on Android).  When I asked him about the goal of his work he quickly replied, "make it invisible".

The same is true of Jack Dorsey's work on Square. An article in the MIT Tech Review said this about the design philosophy: "Square is elegant. The user's flow through payment or application has been reduced to the fewest possible steps; the app has minimal features. This emphasis comes directly from Dorsey, who says, "I'm really good at simplifying things." He espouses a tremendously attractive belief that good industrial design wins customers' trust by disappearing."

This seems to make intuitive sense:  we know from experience that the best customer service, for example, is the service you don't notice.

So, in the increasingly well designed world we live in, the advertising beliefs of bigness, interruption and 'grabbing attention' seem rather at odds with an ethos of smallness (to the point of invisibility).

3.  Small is good for business

In his book 'Little Bets', Peter Sims talks about how great companies stumble upon  greatness.  It comes from experimentation and learning from placing little bets rather than ponderously trying to birth perfection. Google's a great example of this (originally a project to index Stanford's library). as are Starbucks and the way comedians and musicians try out new material.  It's what gets Pixar from "suck to non-suck" through huge amounts of early iteration and feedback sessions every day around rushes.

But being small isn't just good for start ups, it's great for big brands.  At the PSFK conference in New York last year, the designer Andy Spade made the terrific point that "a bigger a brand gets, the smaller it has to act".  It's kind of the common sense version of Coke's 'think global, act local'.  More importantly, doing lots of small stuff is what makes a brand feel personal and, more importantly, gives it energy and momentum, the best leading indicator of future preference and usage.  So being small creates unfair advantage.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about what a small idea looks like.

I think small ideas tend to have most (if not all) of the following characteristics:

1.  They tend to be in the service of people

Sounds like rule one of marketing, but too often we forget this (probably calling people 'consumers' doesn't help).  Far too often we get narcissistic about the brand (people must be interested in what we make) rather than be humble, empathetic and interested in their lives.

As I've talked about before, the great brands today understand what people are interested in and work back from there. Great communication ideas act as a bridge.  A bridge between what people are interested in and what you make/ sell. A bridge between your world and theirs; real life/culture and commerce.

 

 

2.  They reduce friction

I wrote about this last month - how brands today seem to be learning from design and thinking about how they can remove friction between themselves and people; between what people do now and what they want them to do. Great examples of this are the Museum of London app from Brothers and Sisters that gets art out of the museum and in to people's hands, the Epic Mix app for Vail that uses RFID technology rather than check ins and even an idea like Battle of The Cheetos that created a game where people went online rather than try and get people to visit your own site (which is a fairly futile thing to do given the average Amercian goes to 3-5 sites a day).

3. They're one of many

This is something I've talked about for a while but still believe is critical - the need for brands to do lots of things, not one big thing.  It ties back to the point about placing little bets and is about managing portfolios rather than playing roulette.  Google is a great example of this type of prodigious brand - search to Google 411 to Chrome (the list goes on).  

Creating brands built around a coherent stream of small ideas makes them stickier (the velcro analogy Russell Davies has used that I still think is an incredibly helpful metaphor) and more powerful - being the brand of new news and seen as having momentum and energy is the best leading indicator of future preference and usage.  It also means you are more likely to thrive in a world where 95% of things die.

4.  They do rather than say

It's about making communication products, not communicating a product

5.  They build long ideas

The long idea is a brilliant thought first articulated (I think) by Jon Williams of Grey.  The long idea is a better objective than the big idea.  They're created by a stream of small ideas.  It creates participation and realizes that the launch of the campaign is, in reality, the beginning. It creates real pervasiveness in culture

Tomorrow I'll write about how we can think, and make, small ideas

So the final ramble about the presentation I did last week at Future Flash.  It's the most navel gazing one of the lot as it's about what I think agencies, and particularly planners, need to do if they want to make small ideas happen.  Here goes:

1.  Build brands from the bottom up rather than the top down

Brands aren't how we define them but are things formed in people’s minds.  As Jeremy Bullmore said many years ago, "Consumers build an image [of a brand] as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon." So wouldn't it make more sense to perhaps, for once, build our brands from the bottom up rather than the top down; from actions rather than brand vegetables or mission statements.  It's again about being action, rather than word, driven.  Making real things and see how they do in the world rather than spend 3 months thinking about whether your brand is amusing or funny.

2.  Be useful,interesting, entertaining and playful in the service of people

Preferably all four of the above, at least three.

3.  Think about what communication strategy can learn from UX design

Whether we try to sweeten it or not, communication strategy tends to be built on the assumption that interruption is best.  Maybe we can learn from UX design and think about communicating in a way that removes friction in a near invisible way and get credit for that, rather than shouting more cleverly.  At the very least let's focus on the right 3 degress not 360 degrees.  I still think we have a tendency as an industry to deploy the 'Dr Seuss Communication Strategy' - to put it on mats, on hats and on cats.  (Thanks Mr Robson for the inspiration for Seuss).

4.  Do something and interesting things will happen

Again be action oriented.  Make communication products, not PowerPoint.  Be biased towards actions, not meetings

5.  Build a culture of experimentation not planning

Do stuff and learn from it rather than learning and doing.  It's more realistic and the cost of trying stuff is getting lower and lower.  Place lots of bets and think about your Communication R&D strategy and budget - or join the 5% Club as Contagious likes to put it.

6.  Realize perfection is the enemy

We spend far too long trying to make things perfect - the words on a brief, the layout - rather than getting ideas out there in to the real world.  As Lorne Michaels says of Saturday Night Live, "the show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 1130."  We need to realize that good enough is more often than not good enough.

7.  Be rewarded for good behavior

Finally this controversial one as it's about money and how we get paid.  The way agencies by and large are compensated - time plus - encourages bad behavior: get as many people as you can to work really slowly.  On one thing.  Repeat.

What if we got rewarded in a way that encouraged better behavior.  What if we got paid for outcomes rather than outputs or inputs?  What if we got paid for business results driven by our portfolio management?  What if we got paid for being more efficient in the way we work and prodigious in our output?  What if we learned from builders and contractors, of all people, and got bonused for finishing stuff ahead of time?

This talk was all about need to break the tyranny of big and embrace small.  I genuinely believe it's what we have to do in order to remain relevant.  We have to stop conflating the outcome with the means.

As I've said before I think the agencies of the future will combine the storytelling skills of Madison Avenue with the inventive, purposeful experimentation and speed of Silicon Valley.  Small ideas, and big success, will live here.

There's an infamous story in music.  It's about this:

Van Halen's infamous tour rider from the 1980s contained the immortal line: "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."

Many have quoted this as a sign of arrogance and excess in rock.  But there's perhaps a different reason; a very smart piece of small thinking.  Van Halen were the first major act to really tour secondary and tertiary markets in the US and were unsure about how good and safe the venue organizers were there.  If they got to the venue and found Brown M&Ms they could deduce either the rider hadn't been read carefully or was being ignored.  And this means the more important aspects of staging - lighting, safety, sound, security - could have been screwed up by an amateur (or arguably criminal) promoter.  It was the proverbial canary in the coal mine.  It was a brilliant bit of thinking small.

Interesting piece in the Independent about Adele, the British singer who's new album has shifted 5 million units so far.  As the sun headline says: "Soul superstar reveals how staying small has made her massive".  Here's the article:

 

The secret of Adele's success? No festivals, tweeting – or selling out

 

Soul superstar reveals how staying small has made her massive

By Adam Sherwin

She refuses to headline Glastonbury, bans her hits from advertising campaigns and won't turn her life into a soap opera. Adele has revealed the five-point plan which turned the singer into the world's most successful – yet reticent – pop star.

 

The Tottenham-born singer's latest album 21 has sold 5 million copies and currently sits atop the US Billboard chart for the ninth consecutive week. At 11 weeks, she holds the record for the longest consecutive stretch at number one by a female solo artist.

Yet relatively little is known about Adele, 23, who stopped sending personal tweets two years ago, just when her celebrity contemporaries began using Twitter as a confessional.

In an interview with Q magazine, Adele says that, despite huge commercial offers, she refuses to "sell out" and despises artists who exploit their fans for financial gain.

Rule number one in the singer's plan is no advertising tie-ins. "I think it's shameful when you sell out," she says. "It depends what kind of artist you wanna be but I don't want my name anywhere near another brand. I don't wanna be tainted or haunted." Adele attends every "strategy meeting" and approves every decision personally.

Rule number two is to restrict interviews and avoid Lady Gaga-style ubiquity. "I don't want to be in everyone's face. I'm a big music fan and I get really pissed off when it gets like that ... and I don't want people to get like that with me."

She won't tolerate the traditional marketing scam of record labels re-releasing albums with extra tracks to make fans buy a record twice. "I was furious when they did that on [her debut album] 19. I said 'No' and they did it anyway. Just mugging off your fans."

Rule number four: Adele won't play Glastonbury or another festival. "I will not do festivals. The thought of an audience that big frightens the life out of me. I don't think the music would work either. It's all too slow."

And finally arenas, such as the 18,000-capacity O2 Arena and their ilk, are also out. "We had three nights on hold at The O2 and I was like 'I wont play a festival. You think I'm gonna play a fackin' arena? Are you out of your mind?' I'd rather play 12 years at the Barfly [small venue for indie bands] than one night at The O2! So I've made all those decisions and some people are pretty mortified. They think I'm mad."

Paul Rees, the editor of Q, said: "What's become lost in the Lady Gaga-era is the confidence in the idea that less is more. A large element of Adele's success is that she remains something of an enigma and we don't know everything about her."