The Value of an Idea

The death of surprise

It’s amazing what a few weeks of sunshine can do to your expectations; Twenty-three degrees and cloudy suddenly feels a bit chilly. 

Three months ago we’d all have been outside in shorts calling it barbecue weather, whereas now I’m wondering how long I’ll feel comfortable in the shady spot of the pub garden. Humans are remarkably good at recalibrating ourselves without even noticing.

I’ve had a strange relationship with the internet this month.

I’ve been full of whatever lurgy is making the rounds (how can you have a cold in the warm?), so my energy has been lower than normal and I’ve spent more time sitting, thinking and generally staring into space than I usually allow. 

It’s been frustrating, because somewhere between coughing, sweating, the odd bit of work and trying to remember where I’ve left my umpteenth tea. In the inability to keep up with my normal self, I realised how relentlessly interruptive modern life has become.

I heard myself bark at the dogs for shouting at the postman, all because he dared touch the front door, and in doing so I thought what a miserly old codpiece I had become, and I was briefly reminded of John Cleese. 

I had to dig out the exact quote as it was muddled in my mind, but he was talking about creativity while promoting a book a while back and said that “interruption is the great killer of creativity because it pulls us away from the frame of mind where ideas actually form”. 

Since allowing that quote back in to ruminate, I haven’t been able to get that thought out of my head, partly because, whilst feeling sorry for myself, I’ve accidentally created exactly the sort of space he’s talking about.

The internet now, on the other hand, seems designed to make sure that never happens.

Spend ten minutes on LinkedIn and it’s surprisingly easy to predict what the next post is going to look like. Someone wasn’t going to share this, but felt they had to. Somebody else has found the meaning of leadership after missing a train. Then theres the AI drafted heartfelt story about resilience that somehow ends with a lesson about networking and overuse of the phrase “quietly discovered”.

Then someone else copies the format because that’s what the algorithm rewarded yesterday, AI copies that version a million more times today, and before long we’ve made a hall of mirrors reflecting the same tired idea forever. “Message the word ‘Marketing success’ in the comments and I’ll share my secret sauce” – Gross.

I had a giggle as Stu pointed out in a meeting recently there’s now AI detectors to identify AI slop because there’s so much turd floating around.

We’ve built machines to generate endless content and then built another machine to help us avoid reading it. What a mess of contradictions, now, that does feel wonderfully human.

It reminded me of a time when the internet used to surprise and amaze me, a time when I could get home from school and devour my evening chatting on MSN Messenger. A time when eBay first appeared.

Picture a keen teenager with plenty of time and a weakness for a cheap laugh: a few mates and I gave ourselves three quid each and set out to buy the funniest thing we could find before meeting up the following weekend, the eBay challenge was born.

One of them somehow found a rotating Lion King toothbrush holder, another turned up with something equally ridiculous that I’ve completely forgotten, of course someone failed entirely and I somehow ended up with Dale Winton’s autobiography on cassette, (which I forced us all to listen to) and from memory opened with the immortal line, “My father was a butch man…”

I think we can all agree it was three pounds incredibly well spent.

What I miss most about those days wasn’t really eBay itself, it was the feeling that the internet felt raw, unchartered and it rewarded curiosity.

You didn’t know what you were going to discover next. eBay felt like wandering around the world’s biggest car boot sale where somebody, somewhere, was selling something brilliantly odd.

Now it spends most of its time trying to predict what you’ll click next and feeding you more of what you’ve already seen. It’s undoubtedly more efficient at making money, but I’m not entirely convinced it’s more interesting; luckily, this category has survived.

The thing is, I don’t actually think AI is the problem. If anything, I think it’s exposing something that was already there.

The easier it becomes to produce outputs, the more valuable original ideas become. Or perhaps, more accurately, better questions.

The experience to ask a better question

Clients often come to us asking for a website, some SEO, a marketing strategy or a content plan, but over the years I’ve realised those things are rarely what they’re actually paying us for. They’re paying for the thinking that happened before any of those outputs existed.

One of my favourite examples of this is a long-term client, and now good friend, Rachel from Serious About Events.

When Rachel first came to us the business was, understandably, all about skittles. The website talked about skittles, the marketing patter talked about Skittles; it was where they had come from.

Except, people weren’t really buying skittles anymore, pubs were losing alleys, the sport was in decline.

People were still buying the outcome of the skittles leagues of the ‘80s though: somewhere they could laugh too loudly, dance badly, eat and drink too much and forget about work. Skittles just happened to be the game they joined to do it.

We shifted the messaging from leading with Skittles to leading with weekends away where there happened to be Skittles, alongside all the other benefits. Changing that one idea changed everything else.

We put the demographic first and wrote for them, and a few years later (after outputs like a website, SEO, video & design) they’re ranking nationally, picking up backlinks from major newspapers and growing steadily. 

But I still think the most valuable thing we delivered happened before we’d designed a single page or typed a single word.

The tricky thing about ideas is that they usually look expensive before they work and painfully obvious afterwards, they also hold all the value but are worthless without the perspiration for change that follows.

It’s the same conversation we’ve had with clients over the years who haven’t invested in SEO. Some invested consistently and now generate enquiries every single day without really thinking about it. Others didn’t and have spent years paying Google or Amazon for a niche they could’ve owned and been compounding for years.

It takes trust to buy something we don’t understand, that will benefit us slowly and in the long term.

In one of my bolder moments the other day (yep still dragging out this lurgy), I went for a wander, and down the steps at the end of my road I spotted a “delightful” homemade laminated sign aimed at dog walkers leaving poo bags behind. It threatened surveillance, fines and a good reporting to the authorities.

My obsession with design deconstruction always kicks in first (white space, positioning, alignment and font choices – always) then what immediately grabbed me was the message and wondering who it had actually been written for.

Because the sort of person who stops to carefully read a homebrewed notice about dog fouling is probably not the same sort of person who’s throwing poo bags into hedges in the first place.

As communicators, we’re forever making that mistake, and the closer we are to it, the harder it is to see.

Sometimes we can spend ages perfecting messages for the people who already agree with us while the people we’re actually trying to influence never stop to read the sign.

Whilst I am on this, a quick nod to Romesh and the excellent idea for the new BBC advert.

It doesn’t shout, chase outrage or try desperately to become the next viral thing. It simply understands that the BBC personally means something different to millions of people and trusts the audience to find their own connection with it.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that every genuinely valuable thing we’ve ever delivered started because somebody asked a better question.

Not, “How do we build a better website?” But, “What are people actually buying?”

Not, “How do we write a stronger sign?” But, “Who is this really for?”

The outputs follow remarkably quickly once you’ve worked that bit out.

Choosing where our energy is invested

It also made me think about where we choose to invest our creativity.

As a B Corp we spend quite a lot of ours volunteering (you can join us too through the Positive Nature Network). We organise walks, help with community projects and generally try to leave things a little better than we found them, partly because we think it’s the right thing to do and partly because, selfishly, I always come back feeling better than when I left.

Businesses, and in particular, the stereotypical business person, often tell us they like the idea but don’t have time for volunteering.

Then they happily spend six or seven hours every week creating content for LinkedIn. I’ve started wondering whether we’ve all become volunteers for social media platforms instead.

Think about it, we pour hours into creating free content that increases the value of somebody else’s platform with absolutely no guarantee they’ll ever show it to the people we’d like to reach, then charge us for privilege through advertising. At least when you spend an afternoon helping your community, planting trees or walking with people you’ve never met before, you know exactly who benefited from your time.

And of course, I wonder about the impact of AI, we’ve spent the last year investing hugely in research and development, and are shaping some exciting processes and tools along the way.

We’ve built systems that produce sitemaps, wireframes, first drafts of websites and content in hours rather than weeks because we’ve always found that the hardest part of a project isn’t actually building the thing, it’s helping our clients imagine what the thing could become. 

If you can get something tangible in front of people quickly, they can see the potential, they stop worrying about blank pages and start making decisions for a new reality.

I mentioned last month our new reporting dashboard that pulls together Search Console, Analytics, SEO, speed performance, sales/conversion data and… this month we’ve added the feature I’m probably most proud of.

It calculates the carbon footprint of your entire digital marketing.

By combining the weight of your website, your traffic, your social media activity and the visibility of your content, it gives you an estimate of the environmental impact of your digital presence. As far as I know, nothing quite like it exists.

It isn’t lost on me that the bit I’m most excited about isn’t the technology, it’s the question that started it.

“What is the carbon footprint of our digital presence, and why aren’t we measuring it?”

AI helped us build the answer, but it didn’t ask the question. Everyone still seems fascinated by how quickly AI can produce outputs, but outputs were never really the scarce resource. Websites, blogs, videos and social posts are becoming easier to create every single month. Original thought, lived experience and the ability to see a problem differently haven’t become any cheaper and live solely in the mind of the human, even if the next prompt enhances them.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve found myself oddly optimistic after a month of feeling under the weather.

The internet doesn’t need more content. LinkedIn doesn’t need more thought leadership. The world almost certainly doesn’t need another AI-generated inspirational story about resilience.

What it needs are more people willing to leave themselves enough uninterrupted space to notice something everyone else has walked past, because that’s still the one thing no algorithm has managed to commoditise.

Maybe John Cleese was right after all. Perhaps it’s simply protecting enough time to have an original thought, then having the courage to do something useful with it.

I wish you unwell for a productive month ahead 🙂