Volume 97: The idea of the idea.

1. Like a phoenix from the flames, the idea of the idea returns.

tl;dr: Bottom of funnel myopia is bottoming out.

This week, as he eloquently eviscerated Martin Lindstrom’s pandemic pronouncements that “nothing will ever be the same again,” Mark Ritson observed that marketers “are addicted to the pornography of change,” meaning we have a tendency toward making grand pronouncements (and big business bets) based on shallow data, and he’s almost certainly correct.

Because of this addiction, the endless self-promotion cycle of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook has lent themselves toward the perpetual-motion peddling of change-or-die-ism’s, especially from high profile snake-oil sellers like Lindstrom, Vaynerchuk, Sinek et al. And while these three regularly spout utter bollocks, I don’t really blame them. After all, their own commercial relevance rests on an ability to build and maintain celebrity, which all three have proven to be good at, but which requires them to feed the algorithmic beast. (A game Mr. Ritson isn’t averse to playing himself, btw.)

However, what’s particularly interesting about this world of perpetual disruption, is how quickly bad ideas sink while the things that matter eventually bubble back to the surface.

Does anyone remember “growth hacking?” A supposedly superior replacement for marketing that was sunk by its own stink just as marketing itself bubbled back to importance again.

Anyway, an idea that’s bubbling back right now is the idea of the idea itself. When I started in this business, everything was about “the big idea.” For good or ill, people cared deeply about “cracking the idea” and finding that perfect encapsulation of what a brand stands for and how it presents itself to the world to be different and to stand out. This wasn’t the stuff of a couple of hours at a whiteboard; people spent weeks and months figuring it out as they dived into every nuance of customer research, behavioral data, and the internal sense of self within a corporation. Often from the pub.

But, as “digital marketing” and “performance marketing,” and “programmatic media” entered the lexicon, the idea that ideas matter took a backseat. It was all about execution now.

I can’t tell you how often I sat in client meetings, where they boldly proclaimed the entire marketing strategy to be one of “out-executing” the competition, usually programmatically. And for a while there, they were right. There was a genuine arbitrage opportunity in digital media, which at the time was insanely cheap compared to non-digital and was being super-charged by advancements in tech-driven tracking that meant you could farm at the bottom of the funnel in a way you simply couldn’t before.

But, this ability to win via execution has dried up. Bottom of the funnel digital marketing isn’t novel anymore as the skills and tools have become commodified and available to all. And the arbitrage opportunity disappeared as competition for media, platform monopoly, and Apple changing the rules drove up the cost. Worse, the execution-ninjas have found that solely farming the bottom of the funnel isn’t enough. Not only does it become prohibitively expensive, but we now know that it places a ceiling on growth - with previously fast-growing businesses flatlining into what’s been labeled the “CAC valley of death.”

So, what next? Well, as bottom of funnel myopia bottoms out, brands and branding are back on the agenda in a big way, which means that ideas are back on the agenda too. It was always a fallacy that “ideas are easy, execution is hard,” and today’s commodification of marketing execution puts this fallacy into stark relief. The truth is that brilliant big ideas have always been hard, which is why we aren’t surrounded by them every day, all the time. Or even once a year.

But, as is so often the case in business, just because something is hard doesn’t mean you should avoid it. On the contrary, doing the hard things well is often exactly what you want to do precisely because being hard makes it hard to copy and makes you stand out as a result.

And, arguably, standing out matters more now than ever before. Why? Well, there’s more competition for our attention than ever, and consumers have become more attuned to tuning out bland commercial messages than before. And if execution has essentially become commodified, then what are we left with? That’s right, the idea.

So, is The Big Idea back? Yes, I think it is. Maybe not labeled as such, but it’s clear that as marketers pay more attention to the empirical work coming out of places like the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, then the top of the funnel is very much back in vogue again. And if the top of the funnel is back in vogue, then so must the ideas you require to drive success there.

Of course, maybe I’m just being self-serving and seeing a nail to hit with my own hammer. But I don’t think so.

2. A glimmer of “designing for digital” hope.

tl;dr: Instacart work ain’t exactly mindblowing, but it is interesting.

I check LinkedIn maybe once or twice a week. Its combination of nonsensical pronouncements, varied forms of bragging, things you can learn from whatever is the biggest news story of the day, and outright bullshit gives me anxiety.

Anyway, I checked it yesterday, and as I scrolled past a formulaically braggadocious self-promotional post from my former employer, I saw the newly updated identity for Instacart. I have to say; my first thought was there isn’t anything worth bragging about here. Muddy colors, a generic typeface, and an arrow stabbing down into what looks like a bald Oompa Loompa’s head instead of what was previously a happy-looking carrot. Upon seeing that arrow, all I could think of was the direction of the Instacart share price on the opening day of its rumored IPO.

Looked at as a plain old logo and logotype, the work is competent but far from exceptional and leaves one wondering why change at all. But, for some reason or another, I clicked on the case study article and realized there’s more here than first meets the eye. That downward arrow has a simple and elegant use in product UX, something which inexplicably remains a rarity in the branding world, marking this new identity as noteworthy.

Rewinding many years, I remember having a chat with someone at one of the larger branding consultancies. He asked what I thought the most significant issue they faced was, and my response was that they were in a race—the big question being whether the digital agencies would get brand before the branding consultancies got digital.

Now, years later, neither has done a particularly good job. Yes, plenty of digital design shops claim to do branding, but almost to a T, they do singularly uninspiring work. And there have been plenty of branding shops claiming to do digital, only to find themselves woefully underprepared. I suspect that both thought these respective fields would be easy when actually they are hard. Mostly because marrying them requires coming up with something new.

This is why I find the Instacart work so interesting, not because it’s a killer logo (it’s far from that), but because it demonstrates an integration with product that’s incredibly rare, that will hopefully inspire others to take the baton and run with it, in the same way that I hope folks will take the generative design baton from the likes of the San Francisco Symphony and Anchorage and run with that too.

To quote William Gibson, “the future is already here it’s just widely distributed.” Well, the future of identity design is also already here. It just needs to rise out from under the bland monotony of Helvetica In Pastels before we’ll notice.

3. Reading time.

tl;dr: A return to the power of the written word.

I’d happily refer to myself as a voracious reader. I always have at least one book on the go and have done pretty much for as long as I can remember. When the Kindle came along, and I could read on my phone, I read more.

While others might play games or watch videos while waiting in line or sitting on a train, I’ll almost certainly be reading a book. It’s also why I don’t listen to many podcasts or watch all that many online videos.

So, with great joy, I read yesterday that the pandemic has led to a revival in reading. Lifting the average to a whopping 20 minutes per day, a 20% uplift from 2019. As a knock-on effect, ebook sales are up 30%, and print books saw their best sales years in a decade in both 2020 and 2021.

Now, the only sad thing is that comparing time spent reading to time spent on platforms like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and suchlike 20 minutes doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But I guess we have to start somewhere.

Now, if only I could get my teenage son to read for even 5 minutes a day, I’d be delighted…