Ideas alone are worthless. Implementing ideas can be worth billions, save lives, overthrow governments. Testing ideas is as old as ideas themselves. It’s the underwriting of man’s progress.
Advertising great George Lois is known for proclaiming “Great ideas can’t be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested.” and helped spark the creative revolution of American advertising that has fed the egos and lined the pockets of many smart, clever ad men and women since. The mid-20th century formula for success was the Big Idea plus reach and frequency. A world where you could reach a high percentage of your audience in several key placements and the audience trusted your claims.
I’ll spare you ed-op about traditional advertising’s decline and significance of post-Google advertising, or how measuring success by GRP is incomplete at best. (quick note: roughly 96% of Google’s 29 Billion in 2010 revenues came from advertising). This article isn’t about media buying strategies, it’s about challenging that great ideas can’t be tested.
How did you test ideas in 1959? Well, we know George didn’t have the amazing tools we have today; he lived in a world without software or Google Analytics (or websites like kissmetrics, Clickable or Kickstarter. George’s clients didn’t have the ability to automatically capture real-time customer shopping behaviors, track conversion metrics of multiple concepts, headlines, call to action, button color, or button location, etc.
The best they had was their two-martini-lunch-filled guts, accounting, and agency reviews. Don’t get me wrong, mid-20th century advertising in NYC was some of the most innovative thinking of it’s kind, but it’s marginally meaningful in today’s post-Google world.
But not much has changed apparently. What I’ve learned from working with certain ad agencies is they’re scared to death to test live ideas. When pushed why they won’t run a simple A/B test on a banner ad: defensive, irrational, and bogus reasons abound. One client tried to argue they couldn’t afford the $25 media surcharge for an A/B test. The media budget was over a quarter of a million dollars. Obviously there was other reasons.
What I’ve learned is this: testing ideas for banner ads or landing pages or call to actions undermines the ego-centric “agency knows best.” It dilutes the drama in the big pitch where they present and sell the almighty Big Idea. Testing concepts, the agency must park their ego outside and actually adapt a different problem-solving approach.
Agencies still do things no other business can do, and are capable of more than clients typically give credit. But it’s hard not to by critical, if not cynical, of the myopia agencies live in if they think their untested ideas are great. They’re not great until customers act on them and they help achieve clients’ objectives.
Like the radical ideas George and his conteporaries changed modern business in their pre-Google world, the new post-Google radical ideas are among us. Time to adapt and test their greatness, or die.