All my friends are dead (ideas)
In October 2019, I went straight from spending my birthday weekend surfing in Montauk to Portland to pitch Nike and Wieden + Kennedy on the 2020 Olympics.
I had a post-birthday glow. The weather was crisp and fine. We stayed at a hotel with cucumber water out for the taking. There wasn’t a hint of a pandemic brewing. It was a wholly different time.
Nike had asked Conde Nast for culturally-impactful ideas that would create a movement. I started my part of the presentation with a provocation that brands can’t create cultural movements, but they can amplify and ride them. Publishers can, however, and that was part of our pitch. One of our actions, in concert with Nike, would be to remove gender qualifiers from sports coverage — why call a woman a “female soccer player?” It would be part mea culpa, part setting a new standard for fellow publishers. Nike would get credit by being there alongside us.
The idea died for a number of good reasons. But it still died.
Shortly after, I worked with one of my favorite creative director collaborators ever (s/o Mindy) on a brief for Tiffany’s. They were launching a line of bracelets meant to be bought for oneself rather than as a gift. We wanted to position the line as a reward for those goals so deeply personal, important, and symbolic that other people wouldn’t even know you’d set them. It was still familiar territory to Tiffany’s (i.e., jewelry as reward) but enough of a flip that it could get attention.
That idea died too.
I worked on a couple briefs for Volkswagen that had potential to be really cool. We wanted to launch Jetta as a car that symbolizes you’re on your way up. And Arteon — a ~$40k, 4-door fastback — would be about thinking for yourself.
Those died too. (I went into how and why on Adam Pierno’s podcast a few months ago.)
I’ve been re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The author, Milan Kundera, often breaks the fourth wall to offer the reader insight that a simple narrator couldn’t. He writes, “The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I’m equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.”
Dead ideas are like that.
Dead ideas are haunting because they were that close to happening. They usually start as scraps of thoughts, then morph into prototypes of narratives, then solutions to brand problems will feel fresh to an audience. They turn into decks that get shared and commented upon and presented to decision-makers for the ultimate thumbs up-thumbs down vote.
But somewhere along the way, they become something you really want to say. I think if you’re doing it right, audience research reveals something in the audience that it also reveals in you. You become the steward of that thought and if you’re lucky, it’ll turn into something they see IRL.
