The Death of the Big Idea

And the Birth of the AI-Generated Proven Idea

In 1913, mathematician Émile Borel popularized what is now known as the Infinite Monkey Theorem. A monkey sitting at a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will (eventually) produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Was Shakespeare a genius or a very lucky monkey?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this analogy as it relates to another creative pursuit, advertising. In the mythical 1960s Ad Land, Don Draper is our Shakespeare, and out of his tortured soul pops out true genius: an advertising campaign (like for the Kodak Carousel) that changes how we think about a product and drives massive sales. Every CMO is looking for their version of the Carousel, the big idea that will change everything.

Advertising has always thrived on Big Ideas. The tricky part, however, is figuring out if a big idea is truly a Big Idea, or if it’s a dud. No amount of old-school research can accurately predict if folks will embrace it in the real world. So marketers cross their fingers, hoping they'll strike gold. It’s why the 19th century retailer John Wanamaker reportedly quipped "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half." And when you spot a cringeworthy ad in the wild, remember this: no one sets out to make a lousy ad. In fact, those bad ads probably seemed like winners on paper – it's just that they didn't quite hit the mark. It's a bit like the movies. Nobody jumps into the movie business aiming for a film to get a "Rotten" rating.

But what if we stop betting that creatives will produce the perfect ad every single time? Instead, let’s embrace today’s version of monkeys: AI. With enough monkeys taking a swing at advertising for a brand, we can produce Hamlet.

Thanks to AI—with a helpful assist from content “creators”, who will write, shoot, star in, and edit inexpensive social ads—we can produce large volumes of ads in (almost) no time and at (almost) no cost. We also have Meta, Google, and TikTok – with the world’s greatest algorithms – that can figure out which of those ads resonate with which audience. Put these together and we no longer need to do all the upfront strategy and creative ideation to find a Big Idea (and hope it works). Instead, let’s test all the ideas, all the brand positionings, all the creative ideas possible for each positioning, and all the executions for each creative idea. We’ll use AI to generate and test (by using small budgets on the ad platforms) every possible derivative and see what wins. The result is something better than a Big Idea – a Proven Idea. Better yet, we can keep the “AI Create-Test Loop” running to test new executions that can make a Proven Idea even better. 

Executing this brute force, test-centric approach—what I call Launch Everything—is a radical departure from the way advertising has historically been done. Instead of a strategist spending hours formulating the perfect positioning, they instead define the universe of all possible positionings. Creative teams aren't confined to one brief for one Big Idea. Instead, they explore countless creative approaches for each positioning. When it's time to bring these ideas to life, production perfection takes a back seat to AI Prompt Engineers, who generate dozens of executions for each creative approach, while Creative Managers coordinate the logistics of content creators shooting their own executions. Media similarly shifts. Instead of one big, relatively static plan, we allocate a small budget to continuously test everything, reserving the bulk of the budget for the Proven Idea. And we can keep the AI machine churning out and testing new ads, always ready to replace the current Proven Idea with an even better execution. It's a whole new advertising ballgame.

We can even utilize this approach for a big, TV-centric campaign launch. First, Launch Everything to see what works. Once we've got a Proven Idea, create the TV ad and invest in everything else (experiential, PR, shopper marketing, etc.) needed for the big splash. The beauty is that by this stage, the risk is low because the idea is Proven. We already know it works.

The result: Hamlet for every brand.