Don’t Kill The Baby Ideas
Don’t kill the baby ideas! That’s one of the mantras our firm uses when we are facilitating brainstorming sessions with our clients. Normally, this is part of a larger project aimed at developing new products or marketing approaches. The rest of the speech goes something like this:
All ideas are BORN, not created in their initial stage. That means they are like babies. Babies are very fragile, very easy to kill – or, at least, to dislike. They are very messy; they exude liquid from multiple orifices. They are smelly when they do that. Life is much simpler without them. Yet, for life to continue AT ALL, they are necessary. In fact, it is necessary to protect and nurture them at least beyond adolescence. Just as new (baby) ideas are messy and disruptive for our organization – they require us to do entirely different things and think in very different ways. They threaten our habits, our comfort. But they are necessary if our company is to thrive. In fact, we have to nurture them at least until adolescence.
Consequently, I was quite happy to see that one of my favorite recent advertising campaigns, the e-trade baby, has been nurtured, refreshed, and continued into 2009.
All too often, the advertiser becomes fatigued with a campaign long before the public does. Especially when the advertiser reorganizes every year. Some stupid brand manager, out to make his/her career in advertising (not management!) decides that “The answer is…we need a new ad campaign!! Very soon!! Now, what was the question?”
I learned this lesson early in my career at the Quaker Oats company, owners of one of the truly classic commercials of the 1960’s & ’70’s – “He likes it, Hey Mikey:”
This was a spectacularly funny and successful ad, propelling Life Cereal into contention with the humongous brands from Kellogg’s and General Mills. Rather than ride it very hard for a decade, or upgrade and refresh it into an ongoing decades-long campaign, the company got tired of paying all the royalties the actors were receiving and moved on to some other (less successful) ad campaign.
What a waste.
