Long ideas benefit more from continuity than linearity

Making parallels between ideas and stories is useful — to a point. Truly integrated work, the thinking goes, is more about the core concept than the channel where it lives. Which is to say that it can live in multiple forms across channels, and in multiple formats within each channel. In other words, great concepts can be broken down, split into smaller chunks, in a way that provides continuity and provides context to the bigger story.

There is, however, an easy mistake to make there — the mistake of confusing continuity with linearity. In a world of algorithmically selected news feeds and fragmented media consumption, there’s no such thing as linear communications. People’s first point of contact — and indeed, second, third and tenth — can be whatever channel that you thought during the comms planning process, and probably a few others you didn’t even have budget to include, or time to consider. Comms planning aims to simplify and simulate, but indeed like hyperreality as described by Baudrillard, it’s a mirror of an otherwise messy, disorganised and very unpredictable reality.

The answer lies in making ideas work in whichever environment people are likely to see them. Many ad people call this ‘long ideas’. As opposed to ‘big ideas’, in which the goal is to create fame quickly, ‘long ideas’ help create sustained spikes of fame over a longer period of time — and, in theory, over a set of ever-expanding channels. But despite our best efforts to produce simple enough comms ecosystems or models, those spikes are never perceived in a linear fashion. So instead of saying that asset A is the lead up to assets B and C, as if it were a chapterised novel, we’re more likely to unleash something close to the timeline of Memento, in which each thing is introduced without context and somehow it still needs to make sense.

Long ideas provide useful answers to when we design any comms planning model, but the real world runs more on continuity than linearity — as should the work we think about and produce every single day.

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