Long > Big

Mark Ritson recently wrote a wonderful article about the T-variable. It’s about how marketing effectiveness and conversations about brand value need to recenter on how long-lasting effects are the greatest value creator.  

It’s a great reminder that timeless beats timely. Both matter, but timely almost never begets timeless.  

Against that backdrop, it becomes even clearer: The advertising industry has a speed fetish.  

Now, new, breaking, first, fastest.  

Speed of culture. 

Speed of getting to an insight, AI-assisted or not.  

Speed of getting to an idea. 

Speed of spread and virality.  

And of course, if the idea wasn’t a BIG IDEA, we’d better not talk about it.  

We need a reset.  

We need to take a breath with all the fast and big and celebrate LONG thinking. Big ideas usually are obvious only in hindsight, because they’re made big by how more meaning gets added to them over time. More depth. More nuance. Recurringly inventive work that builds upon itself (fluent devices, distinctive assets paired with novel storylines, etc.) is proven to be the most effective force in long-term brand value creation.  

So let’s stop idolizing fast and big. Let’s celebrate LONG thinking instead. Committed ideas over promiscuous ideas. It’s more challenging but more rewarding.  

An aside: This isn’t a nostalgic tirade for a bygone era or way of working. It’s not asking for us to slow down and get off my lawn. Great thinking doesn’t have to take forever or cost an arm and a leg. Fast still matters. Quality is a result of talent, not just time. But some heights can be achieved only through the benefit of time, persistence, and deeper perspective.  

LONG THINKING WINS, BUT DAMN IS IT HARD 

People are drawn to novelty.  

Consistency is tough to achieve. Boredom is real. Balancing the urge to chase something new and exciting and leave your personal mark on something can be at odds with measured, incremental stability. The value for brands will almost always accrue more slowly; personal rewards (and risks) are more likely to be seen from the person making a change immediately. That’s hard math to square.  

The nature of memory is to decay.  

Our memories are unreliable. The act of remembering something changes the substance of what was remembered, so the greater the distance from the initial experience to its getting recalled, the more hallucination can be overlaid on top of it. Building long ideas requires deft handling of distinctive assets, commitment to an organizing view of the world, and incrementally adding more chapters to the story – more neurons in the network of the memory to make it more dense and reliable.  

Shorter news, trend, and hype cycles.  

These cycles accelerate as concepts are more quickly dispersed and therefore diffused. The ability to cultivate a concept and allow it to permeate a group (to make it create more meaning within a subset of the world) makes it easier for the diffuse group to change the nature of what it means. In marketing circles, right now that’s my experience with attention: Everyone has a different take and stake in defining what it means, and as they do so, they are draining it of objective definition and widespread utility.  

Timeless can be harder to notice than timely.  

We’re evolutionarily primed to ignore things that don’t change. It’s harder to recognize the remarkable in the commonplace than to find the commonplace in the remarkable. But that talent – noticing and contextualizing – is the most powerful force in developing breakthrough ideas. We’re not wired to notice the big, meaningful things that change slowly. But they’re the things that matter most for building creative ideas that resonate deeply and broadly, because they are more likely to speak to something that’s a core unacknowledged truth for people.  

LEARNING FROM LONG THINKING 

I’ve had the good fortune to work on quite a few brands with long tenures, counted in multiple decades, at my agency. That’s given me a (perhaps) unique perspective on how we approach supporting those brands that is different than how you support a project-based client or one with an expected short shelf life. You think differently about:  

The Brand’s Story Over Time  

Is this something this brand can do? Why? What are we setting up for next – what door does this open? When working with long ideas, you have to beat yourself. Lapping on past successes is a fun challenge. This is best managed through a concept I think of as inventive consistency: the art of building more meaning into a campaign idea, layering something new, unexpected, and attention-worthy onto something familiar and stable.  

Patience 

You are more intentional about sequencing when to do what, and how. You’re more likely to progressively build toward something rather than having to take your one shot. That lets you plan with more nuance, more specificity. The restraint can be frustrating, but it typically has bigger rewards in the long term. Being patient enables you to consistently reframe the brand’s relative advantage – the constraints and assets you’re working with change over time. Consistency over time can become an advantage you can harvest, but you also need to re-evaluate the choices you’re making periodically. Can we still live with the trade-off we’ve made previously? Has the relative advantage we engineered for ourselves remained consistent, or has the audience, market, or landscape changed the value we’re seizing? 

Sincerity and Optimism 

Long thinking is simply more optimistic. If the goal is to be memorable, that inherently promises that you’re thinking longer-term. If you think advertising is direct response (see this, therefore do that) or about persuasion (don’t think that, think this), your view of advertising is more contained. The impact, or not, is discerned immediately. Aiming for making a memory that can be referenced, built upon, or acted upon later is the promise of something as yet unfulfilled. There’s an optimism in that.  

HOW CAN WE TURN THE TIDE TO CELEBRATE MORE LONG? 

We can play a role.  

Award shows – Add classifications for different awards that can’t be entered until a campaign has been in market past a certain length of time. Or feature only client-agency partnerships over a certain minimum duration. Best collaborations of five, ten, and 15 years.  

Trade publications – Dedicate a news cycle or an edition each year to giving the long-running campaigns and partnerships some due love. Let the “new” and “breaking” keep for a day to make sure the thinking, the campaigns, the partnerships that have endured get more flowers. They’re the ones that are more worthy of emulation.  

Every one of us – Try to retrain your “powers of noticing” to keep an eye out for the steady, consistently interesting brands out there. Give them the old mental tip o’ the cap.