An Idea Reality Check

Ideas are these little sparks that happen inside our brain. And then, like the Big Bang, they rapidly expand. In just a few milliseconds, an idea is capable of creating a whole new universe inside your head that’s vibrant and detailed and yet at the same time, somehow lucid and bendy. That’s a pretty powerful power.

Now, a cool thing happens when you share that idea with another person. The spark jumps into their brain and it too rapidly begins to expand, and in a matter of milliseconds it creates an entirely new universe. It’s still the same idea, but that person sees it in the most spectacular way that only their brain can.

If advertising were truly an idea business our job would be easy. You could just go around telling people your advertising ideas and they would probably like your ads a lot, at least the way they imagined them. But the truth is, it’s not an idea business. It’s an idea execution business. We create ads. Physical things that people look at and hold and interact with and inspect.

When people complain that a movie isn’t as good as the book, what they are really saying is that they liked the movie they saw in their head a lot more. After all, imagination has no production budget and the acting is usually better.

The point is, our job in advertising is to execute ideas better than you or anyone could have imagined them. Truly great work surprises us. It actually turns our imaginations off. And in that brief, rare moment reality is actually cooler than anything we could have dreamed up.

So, until we invent a form of idea advertising that is created by and exists solely in the mind of the consumer, we need to stop talking about our great ideas and get much better at making them real. Just remember, it’s your ad verses millions of really vivid imaginations. (For instance this column was a lot better the way I imagined it.)