The world needs wild ideas. But every wild idea faces a road of obstacles to bring it to life. The hard work comes after the brainstorming rumpus when you have to bring others along.

Few of these obstacles are as rough as the devil’s advocate. IDEO founder Tom Kelley once called the devil’s advocate the single greatest threat to innovation:

“Devil’s advocates remove themselves from the equation and sidestep individual responsibility for the verbal attack. But before they’re done, they’ve torched your fledgling concept…

“Because a devil’s advocate encourages idea wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that sees only the downside, the problems, the disasters-in-waiting. Once those floodgates open, they can drown a new initiative in negativity.”

This is exactly the uphill battle that Maurice Sendak faced with “Where the Wild Things Are”. When it was published in 1963, the book was hated by critics and banned in libraries. Wild ideas always attract naysayers. But wild ideas are the ones that make a dent. “Where the Wild Things Are” is one of the most awarded and influential children’s books in history.

Not all wild ideas are winners. And critical thought is essential to make ideas stronger. But too often wild ideas are smothered or diluted before they’ve really had a chance.

Here’s another tribute I drew to my hero Maurice Sendak two years ago.

And another I painted nine years ago for my new daughter’s room.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

There has never been a greater level of marketing clutter. Yankelovich Consumer Research charts that “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 marketing messages a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today.”

At the same time, marketing communication is often little more than a string of adjectives: bigger, better, faster, cheaper, etc.

So we marketers are interrupting consumers more, but with fewer meaningful things to say. I like how Professor Youngme Moon characterizes this dynamic in her business book, Different:

“Today we have more of everything. More brands. More products. More choices. But it all just feels like more of the same. A great big blur of similarity. And most companies are stuck on a competitive treadmill, competing like crazy trying to keep up with each other. But this only makes them just like everyone else.”

Against this noisy backdrop, it’s important to remember that we can’t break through the clutter by adding to it. We can’t draw attention by shouting louder. Instead, we break through the clutter by sounding different.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

One of my favorite idea killers is the statement, “if it were really a good idea, someone would already be doing it.”

In innovation, we often fixate too much on the competition. We benchmark and validate ideas based what everyone else is doing. This cycle of one-upmanship makes it hard to launch something truly new and different. It also creates a lot of me-toos.

My friend Sasha pointed me to “The Creative Monopoly“, a David Brooks piece on PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s business philosophy.

“Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too … He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time”.

Of course there’s a role for the fast follower in innovation. But when everyone is a fast follower, who is there to lead?

I once heard innovation writer Doug Hall say, “If you’re not meaningfully unique, then you’d better be cheap.”

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Should campaigns be media-driven or idea-driven?

Lately, it feels like the media tail is wagging the campaign dog. Many campaigns are built around a media platform, as if the media platform alone was the big idea. Most of the Foursquare campaigns I see feel like that.

Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the big ideas themselves.

The media channels developing today are creating an unparalleled opportunity for marketers. As a result, P&G, the world’s largest advertiser, is famously shifting media wholesale from TV to digital. Marc Pritchard, head marketer at P&G, recently said, “This is probably the most profound time of change that has occurred in brand building since the end of the Second World War when mass marketing really took off.”

As marketers worldwide make similar shifts, it’s important to remember that going digital is not a campaign strategy. Neither is a checklist of every available flavor of new media.

Instead, a campaign strategy is built on big ideas that take advantage of the best media channels to bring those ideas to life.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Every time I buy a new technology product, I wonder how long it will last.

I salivate over anything new from Apple. But, I’ve had a number of Apple products fail recently. My Apple Time Capsule, marketed as a “revolutionary storage device”, died after just two years, unfixable, losing all the files it was designed to store. My two-year old iPhone seems as clunky and quirky as an old car. The iPhone battery is one of the quickest components to fail, but there’s no easy way to change it.

I found scores of similar stories online and was told I shouldn’t have counted on any of these products lasting longer than two years.

“Planned obsolescence” is a classic consumer marketing strategy, particularly with technology companies. The shorter the lifespan, the quicker consumers will replenish. Getting rid of the old makes way for the new. Consumers theoretically forgive obsolescence because of the wonder of the new new thing.

I wonder though if that design philosophy will ever spark a backlash. Why do consumer products have to be so consumable? Will we ever prize longevity as a design criteria for consumer technology products?

I’m interested in the trend of designing products to last. Hiut Denim launched recently, featuring a History Tag. Each pair of jeans comes with a digital tag that chronicles the long life of that specific product, as long as the consumer owns it. The products are actually designed to get better with age.

“After all if we make a pair of great jeans that last, so should the memories that are made in them … And that’s the genius of making a product to last. It will give our objects more meaning. It will mean we throw things away less. Because it attaches the stories to the objects that we love.”

Innovation is magical. But so is craftsmanship.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Mobile is the next frontier for marketing. Not all mobile marketing is spam, of course, but many current campaigns feature exactly that — unwanted, unsolicited SMS text messages.

The potential of mobile marketing is far more powerful — location-specific, time-based, highly personalized messaging. It has the potential to offer real utility to consumers. But the current state seems more geared to interrupt than create value.

Spam is far broader than it’s legal distinction. Just because marketers can doesn’t mean they should. As marketers think about reaching consumers through their mobile devices, they should pay attention to this perspective from Seth Godin:

“Spam is unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk I don’t want to get. Not only that, it costs them less to send it than it takes me to figure out what it is and deal with it. That doesn’t scale. In fact, it destroys the medium … Maybe I’m getting cranky, but the relentless march of marketers into our lives is really getting to me.

In case you missed the first part of our show, the future of marketing is based on permission. It’s based on sending messages to people who want to get them, who choose to get them, who would miss you if you didn’t send them.It’s not easy and it’s not cheap to earn permission, but so what? This is my attention, not yours, and if you want to use it for a while, please earn the privilege.”

A brand that has earned that privilege in another medium is Betabrand. Betabrand sends out a weekly email. Most corporate email newsletters are considered spam, with open rates averaging in the low single digits. At a panel a couple weeks ago, I heard founder Chris Lindland share that his email open rates averaged at 45%. Their audience would miss the emails if they weren’t there.

As mobile marketing matures, that’s the level of permission marketing I hope that more brands follow.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

The gamification bandwagon continues, promising customer engagement and loyalty.

What some marketers miss is that gamification means a lot more than badges, points, mayorships, and leader boards. Those game mechanics don’t necessarily create experiences worth playing. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

More importantly, gamification can’t make an un-engaging brand engaging. It may be the shiny new thing, but it’s not a silver bullet. Game mechanics are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the big ideas themselves.

I enjoyed the recent Pinterest campaign from Peugeot. Peugeot wanted to interact with its Pinterest community, so they created puzzles and scavenger hunts that use the Pinterest platform to complete the puzzles.

What I liked about the idea wasn’t about the game mechanics. There were no badges to unlock. It was just about an engaging experience for the Pinterest community.

For every Peugeot that gets it right, there are many marketing campaigns that use games for game’s sake.

As games designer Sebastian Deterding said, “games are not fun because they’re games, but when they are well-designed.”

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

We all know the IDEO maxim, “Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner”. Rapid prototyping is a key principle of successful innovation. The sooner we make prototypes, the sooner we figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what to make in the next prototype.

Yet marketers are quicker to PowerPoint than to prototype. We spend more time on two-by-two matrixes and venn diagrams talking about ideas than actually making ideas happen.

I gave a talk last week that included a workshop on bringing ideas to life through doodling (video here). I talked about doodling as the simplest form of prototyping, a medium that anyone on a project team can use.

Marketers are sometimes hesitant to create prototypes, often leaving that job to engineers and designers. Yet everyone on a project team should contribute prototypes. Prototypes are the best way to investigate and share ideas.

This picture shows prototypes that led to a new laundry detergent at method. One prototype even featured a horse suppository that a marketer brought in for the form factor. Over 50 prototypes followed, before the product finally launched, made stronger by the sum of all of the prototypes that led to it.

Ideas don’t fully come to life in PowerPoint slides. They only come to life in prototypes. If a picture tells a thousand words, a prototype tells a thousand PowerPoint slides.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

I gave a talk this week on 5 ways to overcome idea killers. Brainjuicer partnered with Deutsch in Los Angeles to put on “Invent Fest”, a thought-provoking day on how we bring ideas to life.

In my talk, I argued that coming up with ideas is relatively easy. The hard work comes after the flip charts are put away at the end of the brainstorm. Too frequently, ideas are watered down in the process of bringing them to life.

It is a lot easier to kill an idea than to create one. Groups are often better equipped to critique than to create.

I was struck by a recent NY Times article on the challenges of group creativity: “The Rise of the New Groupthink“:

“Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases … The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.”

However groups and teams can also make ideas a lot stronger. The best ideas are the sum of many diverse parts and perspectives.

The answer I think is to allow for different styles of creativity. Some prefer quiet reflection. Others thrive in chaotic groups sessions. I once heard former Goodby planner Pam Scott give a talk on six distinct archetypes of creativity, ranging from “still-mind intuitive” to “editor”. The trick of the organization is to recognize that everyone expresses creativity differently and to figure out the right environment to get the most out of all six archetypes, sometimes in a group session, sometimes alone. We are all creative, even if we show that creativity in different ways.

The greater issue that I see in group creativity is the nature of groups to be critical rather than creative. Unless a group is holding a cordoned brainstorm, the tendency is to look at reasons why ideas can’t work, rather than why they can.

I’m giving a talk on this dynamic this week in Los Angeles at a Deutsch/Brainjuicer conference on Invention. My main message to the attendees is the importance of creativity in execution, long after the brainstorm is over. That’s when creativity is most needed.

We shouldn’t let our creative teams turn into committees.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)