The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
–Marcel Proust

(artwork:

John Stezaker, Love IX

, 2006)

Marketing is an ideas-driven business. Ideas are our currency and our crack cocaine. They make us high and they can bring us down. A lot of time is spent protecting ideas, establishing ownership of ideas, and generally staking claims to the originality of ideas. People get downright vicious over ideas in advertising. I know I have.

But I’m in idea rehab now. I’m getting older and wiser and more humble by the day. What I know now is that all of “my” ideas are “our” ideas. There’s truly nothing new under the sun. That zinger of an idea you had last week? It’s been had before and someone will have it again. There’s probably someone in Sweden or Appalachia or Denver having it right now. And now.

Having an idea is a mysterious and exciting thing. Because the insight feels like a wholly personal revelation, the temptation is to believe–as the idea is revealed¬–that we have figured something out; that we put the pieces together in a way no one else has or could. But if you pay attention, there is something vaguely familiar about the moment of revelation. This is because the idea has existed before and does exist outside of you. Think about the moment of revelation. It feels not so much strange or new, but like the return of an old friend. “Ah, yes,” you think, “There you are. I misplaced you for a while. How good of you to come back.”

Here’s the beauty: the less you think of ideas as having an owner, the more likely they are to float down out of the ether and plunk themselves into your consciousness. They recognize the receptive mind of those who don’t seek to exploit them, but to expose them. The more I try this technique, let’s call it idea catching, the more ideas I conjure up…and the more convinced I am that protecting an idea is the quickest way to smother it.

After writing my June 1 entry on advertising’s new flirtation with Wall Street-style data crunching, I came across this passage in George Soros’ latest book:

Ordinary language gives a very inexact and emotional view of the world, but has an uncanny knack for identifying the features that are needed for instant decision-making. Logic and mathematics are more precise and objective, but they are of limited use in coping with life.  

In finance and in research, neither words nor numbers capture the whole truth. But, together they tell a story is stronger than either separately. Mr. Soros is a fan of both–a savvy interpreter of financial instruments with a belief in the ultimate fallibility of humans (and therefore any numbers related to or produced by humans). I love a man who calls finance alchemy

and trusts his own body’s non-verbal signals (back ache) over the accepted wisdom.

Researchers unite! It’s time to bring more numbers into our verbal techniques and more humanity to the process of data mining.

The most emailed business article on The New York Times

website today is this one: “Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.” It’s about the arrival of Wall Street-style analytics to online advertising. I read the article yesterday with a sense of great anticipation. It felt like the dawning of a new era.

The article describes the use of data mining to improve an ad’s reach and effectiveness. Ads can be placed, tested, and evaluated in a matter of days. Without much risk or investment, brands can test incentives, images, even messages before investing in a high stakes campaign…or they can choose not to go with the high stakes campaign at all.

My hope is that taking the guesswork out of the process will help eliminate the scattershot that has passed for media planning for too long. Continue Reading »