There’s a lot of pressure in the advertising world to think big. Agencies compete for “big” clients, who in turn want big ideas for big returns in the form of increased customer awareness, sales and profit. Type “think big advertising” into your Google search bar and you’ll score no less than 165 million hits. The “big” mentality can be intoxicating, with its attendant rushes of adrenaline, awards and acclaim. But merely thinking big can leave some important things behind in the dust—things like integrity, loyalty and just plain human decency.

In their book The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval talk about how focusing on the details yields big results. They know whereof they speak. Their agency, The Kaplan Thaler Group, started as a two-woman ad firm with a single Clairol Herbal Essences account and grew to renown as the creator of the ubiquitous Aflac duck. An excerpt from the inside front cover flap captures the flavor of the book: “Our smallest actions and gestures often have an outsized impact on our biggest goals… Going that extra inch—whether with a client, customer, family member or friend—speaks volumes to others about our talent, personality and motivations.”

In addition to typing the phrase “think big advertising,” into my Google search bar, I also tried “think small advertising.” Interestingly enough, my research led me to a web page listing the top 100 advertising campaigns of all time. First on the list of a top five that included “The pause that refreshes” (Coke), The Marlboro Man, “Just Do It” (Nike) and “You deserve a break today” (McDonald’s) was a campaign created by Doyle Dane Berbach in 1959 for Volkswagen entitled “Think Small.” I guess it’s not a new concept in advertising, but one that’s all too easy to forget.

At Hile, we want to excel both in thinking big and thinking small. When we’re conceptualizing a new ad or marketing plan, we’re all about big ideas, because we know that small ones are often dull, ordinary and cliche. But when it’s time for a brochure or ad we’ve designed to go to press, we know we need to find the time to be there when the presses roll or do one last proofreading to make sure there are no “off” colors or typos to mar the finished product. To illustrate the point, we recently received a local business monthly in the mail, and on the back cover was a full-page ad for an award-winning agency. Unfortunately, there was a glaring typo smack-dab in the middle of the professionally written copy that would have probably been discovered by another set of eyes. (In Kaplan and Thaler’s book, they talk about how their in-house rule “read twice, send once” eliminates many e-mail errors that would otherwise be sent on their way with a single mouse-click.)

The real importance in discovering typos and making design tweaks is not perfection, of course, but trust. Continuing from the Power of Small book cover flap: “After all, if we can’t take care of the small details, how can we be counted on to deliver when it really matters?” We want our clients to be able to count on us to get the job done on time, within budget and with great communication along the way.

So how are we doing in giving our clients expansive creativity (big thinking) along with the detail-oriented precision that leads to mutual trust and long-term relationships? Only our clients can say for sure. In the meantime, we’ll keep working on it.

Tags: Aflac duck, Kaplan Thaler Group, Monica Getz, The Power of Small, think big, thinking big, thinking small, top ad campaigns

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.