BIG QUESTIONS
What happened to “The Big Idea?”
Back when ad gods walked the face of Madison Avenue and artisanal briefs were chiseled in stone by Account Planners, The Big Idea was the holy grail. Just do it. Think different. A diamond is forever. The ultimate driving machine. We speak these words and the logos and campaign images instantly pop into our heads. As copywriting legend Luke Sullivan put it in “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This,” it was the single, shining concept that could slice through noise, anchor a campaign, and maybe… just maybe… get your client to finally trust you. A great Big Idea didn’t just sell soap, suds, or soda, it told a story people wanted to hear again and again. Simplicity was power. Consistency was gospel. And the right line, image, and/or metaphor could become part of the cultural wallpaper. Welp, the era of The Big Idea, that one headline to rule them all, is over. Now we’ve got fractured feeds, fickle attention spans, and AI that spits out a hundred (shitty) headlines before your first sip of coffee. In a world in constant motion, ideas that evolve are the soup du jour. Tiny, modular quips, trendjacks, creative hacks, and narrative nudges that move and evolve as fast as the feeds they live in. Instead of a one-size-fits-all idea, they’re built to be broken apart, remixed, and adapted across channels, formats, and moments. They’re short-lived, experimental, and fueled by feedback. Think Liquid Death’s meme factory, the Barbie campaign, and Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” series. It’s not a static Big Idea anymore, it’s an idea ecosystem.
TOOL JOY
Soulmark fights the slop
AI can write like us, reason like us, and even intonate like us. It’s reaching a point where it’s hard to know what is real. This is especially true on social media. People are using AI to both generate new posts AND comment on those posts. It’s a truly bizarre, entirely synthetic, and bafflingly hollow engagement loop. Soulmark is a Chrome extension that asks you for a five-second voice recording, then analyzes the voice patterns to verify you’re you. It then adds a little “Soulmark” to your post or comment to signify that you did, in fact, say that thing instead of AI. Currently for LinkedIn and X, but coming to Reddit, Discord, and many other places soon. Their slogan: Building a more human internet, one voice at a time. Yes, please.
DESIGN WE ❤️
Apple liquid glass
If you’re above a certain age, you’ll remember the early days of the internet when shiny gel buttons with drop shadows and sound effects tempted users to click. That visual aesthetic, called skeuomorphism, reigned supreme until it was unceremoniously dethroned by the now ubiquitous Material Design aesthetic, meticulously developed by Google. But on June 9, Apple teased their new liquid glass design system at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). This is the most extensive update to Apple’s visual language in quite some time, and naturally, the announcement generated a tidal wave of chatter, and no small amount of condemnation. Liquid glass is a revisiting of skeuomorphism, only now it’s supported by compute power and graphics cards that enable a level of hyper-reality that is genuinely impressive and beautiful to behold. Light refraction, reflection, translucency, depth, and elements melting into each other in real time all come together to give that top-shelf feeling that only Apple could pull off. Material Design isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s refreshing to see a bold new take on how we interact with our little black rectangles.
BEEP BOOP
Anyone know how to grow food? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns emerging AI could wipe out up to half of all entry‑level white‑collar jobs, potentially triggering 10% to 20% unemployment in just one to five years. In fact, it’s already started.
The golden clickit: The average LLM visitor is worth 4.4x organic search visitors. The theory goes: LLMers are better prepared to make a purchase decision than organic search visitors.
Unsung heroes: According to a recent PMI survey marketing project managers have gone from back-office schedulers to team motivators and strategic leaders. Nine in 10 creative pros agree (rare!): “Great creative campaigns do not happen without great project management.”
Fake it till you make it: Perhaps hallucination is the wrong word for AI’s fake facts. LLMs regurgitate answers based on training data, then try to rationalize it through grounding efforts and link citations. In other words, it’s the world’s best bullshit artist.
Round and round: Peleton has named its fourth CMO in five years. How’s that for an average tenure? We wish the best of luck to Megan Imbres. Better start in zone 5.
WORD TO THE WISE
“And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns… that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale… that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.”
—Bob Dylan
WHAT CLIENTS WANT
Are you clipping yet?
“Clipping” is the low-lift content hack turning podcasts, livestreams, customer videos, webinars, and more into scroll-stoppers. Creators are slicing up longform content into snackable social bits and bites – and audiences are lapping it up. Quick and cheap to produce, built to perform, and tailor-made for short attention spans. If you’re sitting on longform video content, talk to us about clipping.
ICEBREAKER
What piece of media was so deliciously good, that you wish you could experience it for the first time again?
Melissa: Sheesh – just one?! My mind went right to “Homicide: Life on the Street.” One episode in particular stands out for me thanks to the acting of Andre Braugher. If you haven’t watched Season 3, Episode 4 you are missing out.
Irene: “Adventure Time”! It’s like 10 seasons worth of a third grader’s most ridiculous fantastical dreams.
Sarah: Seeing “Return of the Jedi” at age 5. It marked my first-ever trip to the movies and the start of a lifelong love affair with the big screen. (And my first forbidden glimpse at MTV when I was 5 – complete awe.)
Todd: The entertainment highlight of my adult life was experiencing the “Game of Thrones” series for the first time. First I swallowed the books whole, then binged the show. The more time goes on the more relevant it gets to present-day reality.
Laura: “Sea Wall” with Andrew Scott is the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen on film. I think about it all the time.
John: When I was 12 years old and had just returned from a cross-country road trip, I went to see “Dances With Wolves” on the big screen. I was enamored with Native American culture at the time, and the epic cinematography, paired with a beautiful score by John Barry, made it a singular experience.
Jason: Reading the book “The Hobbit” by J.R.R. Tolkien when I was a child. It was the first book that I couldn’t get out of my head even after putting the book down. I know “The Lord of the Rings” gets all the love, but “The Hobbit” was the first book that blew my mind.
FALLACIES, PARADOXES & THEORIES…OH MY
Johari Window
Mirror, mirror on the wall, do you ever wish you could see yourself the way others do (well, minus the existential dread)? The Johari Window is a psychological model from the ’50s that splits your personality into four neat quadrants: what you know (Open), what others know (Blind Spot), what you’re hiding (Hidden), and what’s still buried in the dust and dirt of your psyche’s crawlspace (Unknown).
The goal is to grow the “Open” zone – where honesty lives and communication thrives – by shrinking your blind spots and sharing (just a touch) more than your LinkedIn-approved self. Great for teams, therapy, awkward icebreakers, and anyone brave enough to ask, “What don’t I know about me?”
Eyes open, ego in check. Welcome to better conversations. (Speaking of better, thanks to our brilliant Pinwheel client Claire Clark @BetterUp for the tip on this one).
