This YouTube masterclass (Dan Kennedy with host Darcy Juarez) argues that a clear "big idea" or differentiator is essential to effective advertising. Kennedy lays out five persistent advertising goals—get attention, interest, excite, prompt action, and create memory impact—and says many ads fail because they "say nothing." He cites David Ogilvy as a canonical proponent of the big idea and references Al Ries and Jack Trout (Differentiate or Die). Kennedy gives concrete examples (MyPillow’s strong memory impact; rapid copycatting post-Shark Tank; the shrinking barrier-to-entry compared with infomercial-era lag times) to show why distinctiveness is more critical now than ever.
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You used to get to market with something and at least have a lag time before the imitators caught up. Now it's like, boom, boom. They're right there. Right.
Hello and welcome to this month's masterclass. I'm Darcy Juarez here with Dan Kennedy. And Dan, you know, you talk a lot about we need to have a big idea when we are marketing, when we are doing our businesses. And so I'm really excited about this class because I want to dive deeper into. When you say the big idea, what you're. What you're really talking about. So can we talk a little bit about its history and how the big idea became a thing in advertising?
Yeah. Is the thing missing from an awful lot of advertising?
Yeah.
Right. They're spending saying nothing. And. And that's always been a problem. The greats fought it back in the 40s. The five problems haven't changed. Right. So we need to get somebody's attention. Yep. We need to interest them, we need to excite them. We need. We, we, ideally, we want them to take some action and we want them to remember us. So if there's not immediate action, we at least want memory impact. Yep. Right. So if you look at, if you look at somebody like my pillow right at the beginning, all you could say he was accomplishing was selling pillows. Right? Right. But in the memory impact category on the back of that, he was enormously successful because who doesn't know it and who doesn't know it? Yeah. Nobody. Yeah. I mean, nobody. Right. They all. Everybody knows them. Everybody recognizes them. So he's accomplished what brand advertising tries to do at zero expense. And now where the product appears somewhere other than TV, it's in hundreds of catalogs, for example, it's in some retail, etc. There's impact there, right? Yep. So those five things are what we're always after. And without a really big eye, it's very hard to accomplish. So it probably. Probably the person most committed to it of the. If you watch the show Mad Men of the madman era of advertising, its first real golden age in America was. Was David Ogilvy. And if you don't read them all, if you don't study them all, if you're going to read somebody, you should read Ogilvy. And Ogilvy was totally committed to the big idea and violently offended by advertising that didn't have it more contemporary from what, 2000. Al Reese and Jack Trout, great ad guys. Al Reese has been a member of ours for years. I think now his daughter is the member. Not Al. But Trout wrote a book in 2000 summarizing his advertising philosophy. Just like if you go back and get Ogilvy on advertising, you'll get David's philosophy. There's also from Ogilvy a thing called Five Lanterns, which is like the five T's. The five. Right. Which was his internal presentation to everybody they hired in the agency. I stole one from a Ogilvie and Mather office when I was very young, and I have it, but. But it's hard to get. But if you can get it, it's, like, brilliant. But anyway, so Trout wrote a book. Now Fast forward to 2000. So Ogilvy was. Was on this in the 50s. Jack at 2000, wrote a book called Differentiate or Die. And he was right then, and he is even more right now, because the clutter, the competition, the copycat. Yeah. Is unbelievable in quantity and speed.
Yeah.
So you used to get to market with something and at least have a lag time before the imitators caught up. Now it's like, boom, boom. They're right there. Right. I mean, Mary appears on Shark Tank this week with her new, you know, thingamabobber. And somebody's manufacturing one in China tomorrow. Yep. I mean, that's how fast it is. We used to have a year lag with infomercials. Yeah. You got like 10 minutes. I mean, it's just that barrier to entry isn't there anymore. So the big idea that you can hold on to. Right. That you could differentiate with is now more mission critical than ever. Yeah.
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