Good ideas are the unicorns of advertising. There’s no science to the best idea. They’re usually a mix of creativity (duh), an understanding of the brand, fertile ground for brainstorming and sheer luck.
At Stone Ward, we believe that a good idea doesn’t care who had it. When a team comes together, each member’s job is to support the others and create an environment for ideas to flow freely. In a brainstorm, your ideas are your team’s, and your team’s ideas are yours. This perspective allows each person to embrace and build upon every concept.
But good ideas, even ones produced by teams, are nothing without proper execution. Throughout history, most ideas have been used and reused, but not necessarily executed. A great idea needs to be planned, concepted, strategized, built, positioned, and secured to make its mark.
Think of the credits at the end of a movie. They seem to scroll on and on and on… Each of these people poured significant time and resources into the film you just watched. Which one of these people came up with the original idea? Does it matter? When viewing the final product, you appreciate the hard work and talent it took to produce it. You don’t applaud the original idea, because without its execution, the movie would not be.
Similarly, in advertising, a good idea doesn’t belong to one person. A good idea isn’t too big for the budget or too small for the brand. It caters to the media habits of its audience and delivers exactly the right message. A good idea belongs to the group that brainstorms it, the team that executes it, the client that supports it and the audience that receives it.
By the launch of a campaign, a good idea is so entangled in its producers, that it’s impossible to attribute to any one person. But that shouldn’t matter. Because a good idea doesn’t care who had it.
