Fringe & FOundations
The fun stuff is almost always happening at the fringes.
The 10% innovation budget.
The passion-brand category where new & next is the only currency.
The audience that exists well outside the bounds of "normal" behavior and interests.
The challenger that knows they need to break convention & subvert norms to catch on.
The new business assignment that isn't grounded in realities.
The Alpha & Beta releases.
You get to experiment, often with less pressure.
There are fewer maps for these territories, so you're forced to play.
And because of that, you learn a lot. You uncover things others may not have figured out yet.
So you share it. Widely. Enthusiastically and dogmatically.
You found a better, more interesting, more fun, more effective, thing.
And your thing is the path to success.
All other things are now lesser. The case studies, awards, industry coverage and fame are all proof.
This is the fundamental driver of so much of the industry conversation you'll see day in and day out - "We challenged a norm and we found something new that works. This is the new way."
Scroll up and down, that's what you'll see in this feed. It's fun. You can learn from it, but you need to recognize that it's being developed at the frontier.
It may be the "Dessert" for the meal that is your plan. But that doesn't mean it has to be either relegated to the afterthought nor try to make a meal out of it. Girl/Boy Dinner may be a nice pattern breaker, hard to say it's nutritious enough to live on.
Things built in and for the frontier need to be interpreted for the masses - that's how things truly advance. Not only advocating for the brilliance of the initial breakthrough; the ability to replicate innovative thinking into common patterns. We need to interpret what parts of the new approach can be brought back as new ways to deliver foundational needs, and which parts need to be kept on the fringes and used judiciously.
That's how the frontier keeps moving further and further out. What got you here rarely gets you there.
But how do you translate something that works at the margins back into the mainstream? How do you go from fringe to foundations?
There are plenty of pushes towards the fun stuff, how to break new ground and break free of the past perceived constraints. But far less time and brainpower is spent on translating things back into patterns that are repeatable - for other categories, audiences, objectives.
Science offers a framework that we can tap into in the commercial arts. The most common development path for science has five steps:
Applying this to marketing, we might get something like this:
Where we run into so much trouble translating the fun at the fringes is that we misunderstand what level of experimentation we're focused on. Virtually anything done inside an agency, brand, or from a media platform is not Basic Science. It's Applied Research - trying to solve for a known issue in a new way (more attention, more resonance, more confident measurement - these are routes to achieving known benefits, not new knowledge), our incentive systems demand that.
Innovation at the Application stage will scale fastest not when you simply push that new approach further into development and deployment. Explain backwards before projecting forwards. Connect the dots back to foundational understanding - basic science, applied in a more innovative way - grounds the new idea in a more concrete way. It's how you expose hype & puffery vs. repeatable patterns. Why something worked, and where it stops working.
So as the ad world descends on Cannes to laud creative thinking and innovation, be sure to look for those folks who are helping translate things back into why it worked, not just shouting out it's craft & impact.
What is the same? What is being delivered in a new way?
The drivers of impact should be commonsense and well explained.
Translating backwards requires a few things that are often a challenge - first, our industry lacks foundation training for many. Just 26% of US marketers have had any formal training for their roles, which makes translating seemingly exciting and "groundbreaking" ideas back into a common language of impact much harder.
Second, competency traps and limited exposure across industries and sectors of the industry make it harder to expose people to either common patterns or unique conditions they may be working under. For example, access to new technologies & techniques flow across industries based on risk tolerance - in advertising, new things are most frequently tested in high-passion categories (entertainment, fashion, beauty, technology) far sooner than in less risk-tolerant ones (finance, retail, healthcare). Big brands work differently than small brands based on access to resources. Where you've learned things previously massively skews your perspective on both "what works" and "what's new."
Finding the discipline to translate "back" before forging forward is a challenge. But that might be one of the better ways for the advertising industry to reclaim a stronger voice in guiding businesses towards growth.
