Scarcity.

The only scarcity in a world of abundance is attention.

Specialize or die.

As of two years ago, Crispin/Porter+Bogusky's employee manual said "most people think advertising is magazine ads, TV spots, online banners, billboards and the like.  We think it's anything that makes our client famous.  Traditional advertising is important.  What's arguably more important is the stuff that orbits around the traditional stuff.  Like the message on the company voice mail.  The t-shirt we mail to every employee.  The idea for a great new product.  The bumper sticker every customer gets handed to them on a certain day.  The cool, new website flash page.  The letter to every member of Congress petitioning for a new national holiday. That's how brands are built."

Yep.

It's true agencies, more and more, have to specialize to succeed at a higher, more profitable level.  Especially small agencies in small markets with small clients and small budgets.  Salt Lake City, for example.  Richter7, for instance.  But I speak not of specializing in some facet of the overwhelming digital realm.  I believe we have to specialize in the whole idea of coming up with ideas. 

That's our future.  That's our heritage.  That's what clients can't do very well for themselves.  That's why Questar picked Faktory over us.  They liked their ideas more.  (Ouch, it hurts to say that.)  They didn't say it was about our knowledge of their business, or media buying skills, or research or our web savvy.  We had that in spades.  Instead, they were enamored with some ideas, created by idea specialists – creative guns for hire, who partnered with a separate group that had media buying skills.

Bottom line?  We have to be specialists in coming up with new ideas.  Grand ideas.  Frankly, in the long run, we might not do many ads –- we may find that events, or promotional activities, or concerts, or games, or reality competitions might be the best way to make our client famous.  Media agnostic – that’s a term you’ve heard before.  It must describe us.

As we know, one well-crafted idea that engages people, and has talk value, can take the place of a huge media campaign with boring ads.  And a good idea doesn’t have to cost a lot.  But people with talent do have to think a lot in order to come up with it.  Lack of time is the greatest deterrent to breakthrough ideas, I believe.  This baloney about waiting until a deadline forces me to come up with good ideas is just that, baloney.  Great ideas, and great ads, take great effort and time. 

These days, you might have noticed, anything is advertising.  That’s why to make change happen, creative people have to stop being the only people who think creatively.  Yes, the CD is still the curator of the ideas, but the ideas can come from anyplace – especially the media department.  Because unexpected ways to deliver a message are actually part of the message itself.  Hence, the media department has to be thoroughly drenched in every single possibility the digital world has to offer.  A web campaign (anything non-traditional) can’t just be an adaptation of the TV spot.  All that does is put a TV spot most people don’t want to watch on a website or YouTube.

If we start with an intelligent strategy, and any idea is allowed to emerge from that strategy, we may find it’s more effective to have a knitting competition than to run a TV spot.  Or we end up doing a TV spot about the knitting competition.  That’s how we should be thinking.

What we think are the new tools – the internet, viral, RSS, social apps, email and whatever else comes along that I can’t imagine at this moment in time, aren’t the tools at all.  The “new/old” tool is ideation. If we can’t specialize in doing that well, we’ll go the way of Kodak.