Bringing Good Insights to Life

That's the power of great insights. Insights, not ideas. There's a difference. Ideas, valuable though they may be, are a dime a dozen in business. That's certainly the case at ad agencies, where even the mailroom people spit out ideas as if they were candy from a Pez dispenser. Insight is much rarer -- and therefore more precious. In the advertising business, a good idea can inspire a great commercial. But a good insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand commercials. The notion of the New York Miracle was an insight, and the six spots took on a life of their own. We got people feeling good about New York again as a city of possibilities. Tourists came back in droves.

In a business world bedeviled with the problems of differentiating yourself from the crowd, moving the needle and selling enough stuff to have a measurable impact, telling the world you've arrived, fighting off or attacking the competition, and establishing or improving an image, insights are essential. They're as essential to the budding entrepreneur as they are to the master marketers at Nike. Insights are what will let you stay in business, build market share, open new income streams, cement relationships with old customers, and attract new ones.

When you're in search of an idea, big or small, there is a singular moment when insight rears its lovely head. The moment may pass in an instant, it may sail over you unnoticed, or it may smack you in your frontal lobe. I don't have guaranteed rules to help you recognize these moments. I have some suggestions: If it sounds like Mark Twain could have said it, keep it.

In my 40-year career in advertising, I've learned that you can't legislate insight. You can't make your people be creative on cue all the time. But you can orchestrate insight. You can create a favorable environment for it. You can steer people toward it and demand it -- and you can reject it when it doesn't meet your standards.

Sometimes insight walks right through the door. That's what happened to us at BBDO when we were invited to pitch the HBO account.

As we listened to the HBO executives explain their business goals, my mind was racing, turning over every word they said, hoping to find some supercharged phrase that would help us identify the one product benefit, large or small, that would break through and let us position HBO as slightly better than its competition. And then it hit us. What was HBO comparable to? There was nothing out there like HBO. That's when we realized that the insight -- what television could be -- had walked through the door with the HBO executives.

The insight may have been apparent, but you still have to see it, seize it, and know how to run with it. We almost didn't. As we prepared our presentation, we lapsed into old habits, still thinking in terms of how to identify a little morsel of distinctiveness to slightly differentiate HBO from free TV. One of our false starts was to establish HBO as "the entertainer" -- because we saw it as a pure entertainment channel. No news, no local sports. Entertainment wasn't an insight. A lot of stuff on TV qualified as entertainment. In the end, all we were saying was, "Hey, we're like the other guys, but we're a little better."

That's when we came back to our senses and committed ourselves to the insight that walked through the door: There's nothing out there like HBO. In fact, that led to the theme line of our pitch: "There's no place like HBO." None of the other five agencies competing for the business took that position. They all attempted to give HBO a small edge over the competition, when in fact HBO was the only game in town. We won the account.

Since then, HBO's entire image still hinges on the same insight, albeit with an updated theme line, "It's not TV, it's HBO." HBO has eclipsed parity, it's unique, there's still nothing else like it -- even as it

has become the place for The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm much more than the home of "uncut and uncensored" movies.

How do you go from an idea that might make a good ad to an insight that reshapes a business for a generation? Let your gut guide you. This is what customers do, but beyond that, it's the most trustworthy meter for measuring the power of an insight. If you laugh, it's funny. If you cry, it's moving. If you feel a jolt of any kind, it's breaking through the clutter. When you don't feel it in your gut, chances are no one else will, either.