Where the Best Marketing Ideas Come From

My agency, BBDO Worldwide, has transformed Snickers and tons of other brands. We did it by producing lots of bad ideas first.

- by ANDREW ROBERTSON

Where do good ideas come from? After serving as CEO of the advertising agency BBDO Worldwide for 20 years, working closely with some of the largest brands in the world, I’ve come to an answer: Good ideas come from a willingness to have bad ideas—many, many bad ideas.

If you want the creative process to work, you must accept that it is messy. Instead of inching your way, step by step, from data to solution in a logical progression, it’s best to generate a chaotic array of possibilities and test them out on the problem until something clicks. Jump to conclusions without worrying about how you’ll cross the intervening gap.

I know that sounds abstract. So here’s a specific example: Snickers.

The origins of an incredible campaign

My agency came up with the theme “You’re not you when you’re hungry” for a Snickers campaign, which went on to become one of the most successful campaigns in advertising history. It launched with a Super Bowl ad in 2010, featuring the legendary Betty White being “tackled” in a football game, and has been expanded and localized to 83 countries around the world.

To this day, clients ask how we got the idea. They want to know what market research led us to the insight, then the foundational idea, and finally the Betty White script and campaign that drove millions of people to eat more candy bars. People always assume it was an act of brand-purpose-oriented, data-driven, logical deduction: When you’re hungry, of course you act irrationally.

But we did not arrive at that insight fully formed. Here’s the real story.