"When you are armed with a powerful insight, the ideas never stop flowing," writes Phil Dusenberry, former chairman of BBDO North America, in his 2005 memoir Then We Set His Hair on Fire (the book title refers to the infamous accident during the filming of Michael Jackson's commercial for Pepsi).
Dusenberry draws an important distinction between insight and idea: an insight is a grasp of the fundamental truth that sets one brand apart from its competitors, where ideas illustrate the insight so that everyone else can grasp it too.
Dusenberry gives the example of his brand claim for General Electric. "We bring good things to life." This slogan went beyond the obvious fact that GE was so pervasive, making everything from lightbulbs to toasters to railroad engines to nuclear reactors. The key insight was not that GE makes everything, but rather, that the things GE makes make life better. Simple as it sounds, Dusenberry's rivals in the ad business had failed to get it. Hundreds of good ideas flowed from this insight, which endured as a slogan for nearly a quarter of a century.
George Lois, the iconoclastic creative adman, laid out much the same manifesto a decade and a half earlier, in |
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