Before the Algorithm, there was an Idea

My daughter asked me last week if I had heard of a book called A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young.

“Of course,” I said. “I might even have a copy somewhere.”

Young was one of the early giants of J. Walter Thompson, one of the agency’s forefathers and the man who started its Chicago office. His little book is barely a quarter of an inch thick. But it contains more wisdom about advertising than many books ten times its size.

Today, it might be regarded by some as an archaeological artefact. A relic from a time when advertising people actually sat down and thought.

And that got me thinking.

How do we think about communication today?

There was a time when we took advertising rather seriously. Not ourselves, necessarily. Advertising people have always had an overdeveloped sense of their own importance. But we took the work seriously.

We spent time understanding people. What they did. What they believed. What they worried about. What made them laugh. What made them angry. What they secretly aspired to.

We argued about headlines.

Sometimes for hours.

We argued about one word. Whether it should be “and” or “but”. Whether the picture should say something the copy didn't. Whether the idea was genuinely interesting or merely clever.

And, above all, we asked a rather unfashionable question:

What will this do to the brand?

Because an advertisement wasn't just something you put out into the world. It was another contribution to the personality of the brand.

Today, I sometimes wonder if we have reversed the process.

We have fantastic technology. We have access to more consumer data than David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach or James Webb Young could have dreamed of. We can target people with astonishing precision. We can measure everything.

How many saw it.

How many clicked.

How many shared it.

How many seconds they watched.

And yet, somewhere along the way, we seem to have confused measuring communication with understanding communication.

A click isn't necessarily persuasion.

Engagement isn't necessarily affection.

And a million impressions don't necessarily mean that a million people remember what you said.

Then there is the tyranny of the content calendar.

Every brand needs something to say today. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow.

So we put a few words on a picture, add a hashtag, push it onto Instagram and congratulate ourselves on being relevant.

But relevant to what?

To the consumer's life?

To the brand's purpose?

Or simply to the algorithm?

The irony is that while technology has made communication faster, it may also have made us less patient with the process of thinking.

And thinking takes time.

Young's little book is essentially about how ideas are produced. His proposition is beautifully simple: ideas come from combining existing knowledge in new ways.

That hasn't changed.

AI hasn't changed it. Instagram hasn't changed it. TikTok hasn't changed it. Algorithms haven't changed it.

People still respond to ideas.

They still remember stories.

They still recognise something that touches a human truth.

And they still know when someone is trying too hard to sell them something.

Perhaps the problem isn't that advertising has become digital.

Perhaps it is that advertising has become too obsessed with being busy.

We need to get back to thinking.

Not necessarily the thinking of the past. Nobody is suggesting we abandon data, technology or metrics.

But perhaps we need to put them back in their proper place.

Because the job of advertising was never simply to get noticed.

It was to make something matter.

And that, I suspect, is something even James Webb Young would still recognise.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.