Big marketing ideas on modest budgets

Big ideas work

A secret of the digital age is that you can have as powerful an online presence as your biggest competitor with a much more modest budget with the right approach. How? With powerful creativity that cuts through. What keeps the Chief Marketing Officers of large brands awake at night is not the budgets of their competitors; it's creatives who can make their multi-million-dollar marketing strategies look tired. And that's not limited to their largest competitors. They're also concerned about the 'little guy' with the incredible Creative who used budgets in tens of thousands to belittle their big budget plays.

Clever creatives have superpowers.

Global advertising agencies focus solely on the work when recruiting creatives to head up their business. They never look at academic achievements or even seniority. It's always about solving marketing and brand problems in ways that engage and delight audiences. There is no age limit for great creativity. Some people have it, and (no matter how hard they try) others don't. The basics can be learnt, but true creativity comes from a healthy spring that doesn't stop. I have been a creative director since graduation 35 years ago, and the ideas never stop coming, day or night. I always have campaign ideas coming to me, even for brands I've never worked with. My experience is not unique. There are Creative Directors around the globe with similar backgrounds and experience. None of us knows where these ideas spring from; we are hopeful they never stop coming. 

Is the marketing sector stuck in the doldrums?

A zone five degrees north and south of the equator is known as the doldrums. It's a place that sailors once feared. It was a place trade wind just stopped, sometimes for weeks or months. This could spell your end if you were transporting goods by sail across the globe. The marketing sector may be stuck in the doldrums.

After more than three decades in the creative space, I look around today and see little originality in marketing. Creatives today missed the halcyon era of advertising, where all the great campaigns appeared on free-to-air television, major newspapers, and advertising. Creatives today are often driven by metrics, determining after the fact what 'kind of' worked and what didn't. They need more confidence and experience to develop and execute big creative ideas with small budgets. On the other side of the equation, big agencies are so afraid to make a mistake that they over-test campaigns and paper over dull creatives with expensive production techniques. 

Why big ideas don't always need big budgets.

This entire marketing approach is the antithesis of what's producing lucrative outcomes in the new tech space. Bold ideas in business are in the fast lane, while marketing languishes in the commuter lane. The digital environment provides countless opportunities to bring big ideas to marketing. Here's how it's done.

The trick is to have the big idea strategy and then break it down into creative tactical components. Each tactical piece focuses on the needs of the specific channel and target audience while further enhancing the big idea. You use metrics over time to determine which tactical components perform better and which must be approved or abandoned. You keep feeding new creative executions into the pipeline, ensuring that your audience never tires of your approach and that your target audience is exposed to the most memorable of the 10,000 marketing images today is yours. Over time they feel they have a relationship with your brand, breaking down any barriers they may have had to connect or transact. Like those sailors who wanted to avoid the doldrums, you keep looking for favourable winds that keep it fresh while staying focused on the big ideas. That's the science and art of big marketing ideas on modest budgets.