Finding Your Big Idea
“Unless your advertising is based on a BIG IDEA it will pass like a ship in the night.” (David Ogilvy)
Yesterday I was reading David Ogilvy’s biography by Kenneth Roman, a former chairman and CEO of Ogilvy & Mather. A sentence struck a chord (p. 85):
Unless your advertising is based on a BIG IDEA it will pass like a ship in the night.
And again (p. 107):
Unless your campaign is built around a BIG IDEA, it will be second rate. Once you decide on the direction of your campaign, play it loud and clear. Don’t compromise. Be strong. Don’t beat about the bush. GO THE WHOLE HOG.
These capital words reminded me of a seminal book written by journalist Matt Bai. In the very last pages of “The Argument”, Matt Bai quotes former New York governor Mario Cuomo. I consider the Cuomo quote in “The Argument” the most enlightening lesson I have ever been taught about politics and elections (p. 300):
“So what happens?” Cuomo asked. His answer was not that you build the best voter turnout machine you can afford, or that you bring in a linguist to calibrate your message. “You seize the biggest idea you can,” he said, “the biggest idea you can understand. And this is what moves elections.”
He then went through, election by election, the larger arguments that had dominated every American presidential campaign since Watergate. Carter won because he made a case for “holiness and cleanliness” in government, Cuomo said. Reagan ran, in succession, on supply-side economics and on forcing a showdown in the cold war. Clinton talked about the fundamental upheaval in the American economy. “It was a big idea,” Cuomo said. “It was a very, very big idea.”
“In 2000, what was the issue?” he went on. “There was no big idea. Nothing. And what did you get? A dead heat. It was a tie”… The last (2004) election, he said, had been all about Bush’s war on terror. “There was nothing else. What about health care? What about the economy? Forget it,” Cuomo said, shaking his head. “No one cared”…
“Now it’s 2006,” he said, “and… if Iraq is not an issue, then what issues do we have to talk about?… So far the Democrats have talked about what I think it’s fair to say are very timid proposals. The minimum wage? No one in this room would say that it’s not a good idea. It’s a good idea. Lower prices for prescription drugs? Another good idea.” And yet, he went on sadly, none of these were grand enough to restore the soul of a party.
So where’s the big idea sustaining your campaign? Watch carefully. Maybe you have too many small ideas confusing your audience. Maybe you have two big ideas conflicting with each other. Maybe you worked out a single idea which is not that big after all. Or maybe — it happens — there is no idea at all to be found in your campaign. Remember the late Ted Kennedy running for president in 1980, answering Roger Mudd’s famous question:
— Why do you want to be president? — Well, I’m, erm, right to make the announcement to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country, that it has more natural resources than any nation in the world.
If you lack a big idea, you may want to rectify that, because that single big idea is the key to your campaign’s success. It polarizes your campaign and fires up your fans. It forces you to stay on message. It helps you reach tactical decisions in the face of urgency. And to put it in one word, it draws attention, the rarest resource on the market.
You cannot miss big ideas, they’ve been put forward so methodically and determined victory so unequivocally that everybody remembers them for years after. It think it is clear for everyone that “Change” was Barack Obama’s big idea during the 2008 presidential campaign. But what was Hillary Clinton’s big idea, “Experience”? And what was John McCain’s? “Maverick”? (And what was Mitt Romney’s in 2012?).
So don’t follow this path and do your homework. Find your big idea, stick to it, dump all the others. If you do that, especially on a digital market where the attention rate is close to zero, 90% of your work is done and you’re probably en route to success. David Ogilvy didn’t need to get to know the Internet to learn that simple lesson.
(This post was initially published on the CauseBuilder blog, June 10, 2010. Slightly edited.)
