‘We need big ideals, not big ideas’: Ogilvy Digital’s Jan Leth

Ogilvy's global digital creative vice chairman Jan Leth stated outright that he’s terrified of public speaking, but for the time that he took to the dias at Goafest’s Knowledge Seminars, he tried to be - in his own words – just be himself.

His speech, to cut a long story short – described all that has happened between the ‘old normal’ and the ‘new normal’.

“The old normal,” he said, “was pretty nice. It was the period when the series Mad Men was set in. I was part of that era too and that was the time when lines from David Ogilvy were famous. The view from his house was good too,” he quipped, which had the audiences giggling. “But as we all know, things have changed today. There’s a profound change in the way consumers interact with each other. Attention deficit disorder has reached epic proportions. So brands will have to constantly refresh their communication.”

“But the trouble is,” he said, “We are so in love with ‘the big idea' that we have to force fit everything. A TV idea has to be watered down to something for digital, outdoor, print, so on and so forth. I think big ideas have to give way to big ideals. Like Dove did. Unattainable beauty was making women feel bad about themselves. But Dove’s real beauty campaign was about something that made women feel good about themselves. Similarly Louiss Vitton feels that life would be better if we lived it as an exceptional journey."

Leth therefore insisted that creative briefs therefore needed to change. “We must ask ourselves – what value will the consumer get in exchange for their engagement with the brand? It makes us thing of a new creative, doesn’t it?”

He gave examples of websites such as Bigassmessage.com, Brandkarma.com, Kodak’s iPhone App and Radiohead’s album available on the web, as examples in this regard.

He also pointed out that the humongous amount of data out there was making people use their collective wisom in deciding what is good or bad. "The new normal is about going ahead and creating things yourself."