07/18/2009 08:09:34 AM 
"The one piece of work that got me really excited this year was Poke London's BakerTweet. Essentially, it's a live Twitter feed from a bakery (the Albion Cafe) that tells you what's being baked and when it will be ready to buy and eat in the store. It's about as far from the usual firework we rush out to salute as you can get but it just feels like an idea that I might just give a damn about. In fact, Poke's philosophy ("small, simple smart [and social]") is one we could all learn from. It would be great to see more of us getting excited about work that lives up to this."
I would argue that it's a tough thing for our business to get its head around.
Our legacy is that we've been to taught to want to make our brands and ourselves famous, because it's our pre-occupation, we favor the big spectacle because we all want to bask in the rays of celebrity. We want to tell our moms and dads that our ads were talked about on Leno and that we shot our new commercial with the legendary Frank Budgen.
We also want to be able to tell the story in a couple of sentences. The big stuff is very easy to tell. The small functional, digital utility work is a much harder story, it takes a 10 minute case study. It's the way our minds work, while digital is pervasive, somehow lacks the emotional potency of film, it's why we find it hard to recall digital ideas.
However, I am sure the win here for those in the world of creating small actionable ideas that deliver utility, is the business case. Unlike the big spectacle that's often all pomp and surface, these ideas are all about substance and ROI. This is the stuff that clients really love.
I do think the future isn't about either or, but both. Communication agencies have to play in both camps, but there needs to be an evolution. Culture is changing rapidly and because of the herd, I would argue that we still need the big spectacle, we want to be wowed and to share that wow. However, if the big spectacle wants to stay around, it has to learn to be more action-oriented and interactive. At the other end, sometimes those supposedly elegant utility ideas need to own up that they're just technology without a real idea at their center.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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