Big Idea

What it is

Ogilvy used the term for the one idea at the centre of a campaign that is strong enough to be noticed, to affect what people buy and to keep running for years. In his account it is rare: he said that fewer than one campaign in a hundred has one. He also said that big ideas come from a well-informed unconscious, which is a statement about how they arise and not a claim he tested.

He gave a set of checks for deciding whether an idea qualifies. The checks ask whether the idea startles its reader, whether its author is envied by colleagues, whether it is unique, whether it fits the strategy and whether it could run for thirty years. The last check carries the weight of the term. For Ogilvy, no idea is big unless it can run for thirty years.

The examples he gave are campaigns that ran for decades with the same central device. They are not named here, because the point is the standard and not the cases.

In effect

In branding the standard turns into a question about consistency over time. Work built on one durable idea can be repeated across many placements and years, so that each new exposure builds on the last. A team that hands over guidelines for a core idea gives a client's own staff something to apply long after the project team has gone.

There is research that points in the same direction without testing the claim directly. Kevin Lehnert and colleagues reported in 2013, in the International Journal of Advertising, that creative commercials were recalled better and were less prone to wearout when repeated, in a study of individual commercials. The result concerns repetition of single advertisements and does not show that any brand idea can run for thirty years.

The Advertising Creativity page covers the 2020 meta-analysis on originality and appropriateness, which gives a second way to examine a proposed big idea: whether it is both fresh and a fit for its task.

What it does not say

Ogilvy's thirty years is a practitioner's benchmark. It has no experimental or survey source behind it in the book, and this page treats it as his standard and as a useful question to put to a portfolio.

The term also does not tell a team how to find an idea, and the claim about the unconscious is his own account of his working method. It would be a mistake to read the fewer than one in a hundred figure as a measured rate. He gave it as his judgement of how seldom such ideas appear.

---