MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I learnt many things from adver­tis­ing, includ­ing how to instantly and rapidly gen­er­ate big ideas to explode your income. I’ll begin by tack­ling the definition.

What is a Big Idea?

A big idea espe­cially as rel­e­vant to our indus­try involves com­bin­ing the “knew” and the “new”.

‘New’ is some­thing totally unre­lated to the indus­try and ‘knew’ is some­thing exist­ing within the indus­try. When you com­bine them, you come up with some­thing inno­v­a­tive which explodes your profits.

They may be ‘big ideas’ in terms of adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, prod­ucts, mar­ket­ing or sales strategy.

Most peo­ple say that you can repli­cate suc­cess by using tried and true meth­ods; many say that copy­writ­ing is swip­ing a few files to repli­cate suc­cess. It works in some cases but if you want to take your suc­cess to a whole new level, you need a big idea.

Clay­ton Mar­ket­place says his biggest win­ners in terms of his copy­writ­ing and his let­ters were based on big ideas which, in their time, were almost rev­o­lu­tion­ary in nature. It’s from such big ideas that accel­er­ated growth can happen.

If you fol­low a pre­dictable route, the growth will be pre­dictable. Pre­dictably high, per­haps, but if you want to go to the next level you need a big idea.

If I had to describe the foun­da­tion for big ideas, I’d talk about a mon­key sit­ting at a type­writer. A thou­sand typ­ing mon­keys locked up in a room over a cen­tury will be able to pro­duce work the qual­ity of Shake­speare. What I mean is, when it comes to big ideas, it’s all about the num­bers. The eureka moment; the ‘aha’ moment is a myth. It’s about quan­tity not quality.

How do you gen­er­ate Big Ideas?

You don’t sit there and med­i­tate and sud­denly one big idea comes out…No, really. It doesn’t hap­pen like that.

You sit down, and gen­er­ate 50 ideas. Or 100 ideas. Or even bet­ter, 300 ideas. And from there, I bet you that at least one of them will be good enough to explode your busi­ness to the next level. That’s the foun­da­tion –it’s always a num­bers game.

But, how do you gen­er­ate as many ideas as you can, you’re won­der­ing? There are some who regard them­selves gurus who can gen­er­ate bril­liant, problem-solving profit-booming ideas, instantly. How­ever, the rest of us mere mor­tals need to keep try­ing and pushing.

This was how, in my pre­vi­ous life, I got hired as a copy­writer although I had no prior expe­ri­ence. My boss told me to gen­er­ate as many ideas as pos­si­ble for three prod­ucts. They didn’t have to be good ideas, but I had to come up with as many fresh angles as possible.

Within the space of 3hours, I came up with 300 ideas…and I was hired on the spot.

This is the key:

Be Avant-garde Out­side Your Own domain.

This key isn’t just for gen­er­at­ing big ideas, but for suc­cess in any­thing –even my suc­cess in adver­tis­ing. In my time in adver­tis­ing dur­ing which I won numer­ous awards, I attribute my suc­cess to this key. What’s inter­est­ing is this: this key isn’t from any busi­ness book.

It was actu­ally from an author by the name of Edmund White on a com­men­tary on Salon.com. He observed that artists are mostly only avant-garde in their own domains. Although they expose them­selves to the finest of their own field, every­thing else they take in is just like what every­one else is tak­ing in.

For exam­ple, as a mar­keter, if you want to be the best in your field, don’t just study your field, mar­ket­ing. When you do this, you cre­ate an inces­tu­ous loop, and you won’t cre­ate new ideas because they’re based on some­thing some­one else in mar­ket­ing has done before. Even if you read many direct mar­ket­ing and entre­pre­neur­ial books, you’re still going round the same circle.

But, if you step out of that domain, if you start, in the words of Brian Vaszily, “immers­ing your­self in genius”, where you immerse your­self in the great­est form of human expres­sion and cre­ativ­ity in every sin­gle field, good ideas will come out from there.

Imag­ine that fruit are ideas and the soil is your imag­i­na­tion. The fer­til­izer then is to make sure that the soil is fer­tile and pro­duces as much fruit as possible…that fer­til­izer con­sists of ideas out­side your own domain, out­side the realm of marketing.

But, here’s a disclaimer:

The state­ment says no artist is avant-garde out­side his own domain, and this basi­cally means you MUST be an artist to begin with.

This means that in order for this to work, you must mas­ter mar­ket­ing first. Before an out­side idea can work, you must know the rules of Inter­net mar­ket­ing before you can tap into being avant-garde out­side your own domain.

If you are not a mas­ter of your own domain, if you are avant-garde out­side your domain, every­thing will crum­ble because you don’t have the proper foun­da­tion to know what’s good or what works in your field.

Most copy­writ­ers say that to suc­ceed in your indus­try, you have to be an expert in your field and in your prod­ucts because when you know your prod­uct inside out, you can express it in new ways. It’s prob­a­bly part of the secret behind Agora’s suc­cess.

There are many ways to tap into gen­er­at­ing big ideas, but below are two fairly instant, prac­ti­cal ways to go about doing this. You have to immerse your­self in genius, in music and the arts, in dif­fer­ent spe­cialty mag­a­zines –you may find some good ideas. This is what I some­times do. I call it fun­nel vision in practice.

How to gen­er­ate a Big Idea

Fun­nel vision is a con­cept by Jay Abra­ham, the basic idea of which is this: if you look out­side your own field into another domain, what­ever is there –their cliches and norms –take them and apply them to your field and your prod­ucts will soar. It’s instant inno­va­tion, and there are two prac­ti­cal ways to do it.

i. From the Inside, Look­ing Out

Dan Kennedy says to list down all the norms of your indus­try –its stan­dard pic­ture poses, usual phrase­ol­ogy, etc. And then, you break and/or twist them, one by one.

ii. From the Out­side, Look­ing In

Take another indus­try, list their traits and cliches, and apply them in your indus­try and in every aspect of how you run your busi­ness. E.g. if you take the exam­ple of an air­line where they have free tick­ets and a check-in counter, think of how you would apply these to your business.

You can gen­er­ate a lot of ideas using these two tech­niques. List­ing the norms may take you a while, and just by twist­ing them you already have 20–30 ideas off the bat.

Overnight Test

To illus­trate this, I would use the exam­ple of some­body sleep­ing. That’s how sim­ple it is. In adver­tis­ing, it’s called the overnight test.

A good idea at that time may be the most con­temptible of ideas in the morn­ing. You might think it a genius idea when you first come up with it, you might find it amaz­ing, but sleep over it first and see if it’s still a ‘genius idea’ in the morning.

If, in the morn­ing, you are still equally excited about it, it most likely means yes, it is a good idea because it has passed the overnight test.

There are other idea-generating meth­ods, and I’ll con­tinue to share these with you later. In the mean­time, I am as usual curi­ous to hear from you how the prin­ci­ples I am teach­ing you are affect­ing the way you do busi­ness. (Don’t for­get that other like-minded peo­ple are linked to your web­site when you com­ment on our blog!)

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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

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