less compelling. For Brian, brands live in four places – culture, environment, products, and the mind – and give us a blueprint to design systems that connect those spaces. The orientation is around the customer and their experience, so we put systems designers and engineers alongside the storytellers. And we use the brand to connect architecture, history, culture, product – so that when we get a brief from Hershey’s to design a Times Square billboard, we instead give them a chocolate factory tourist destination. (Actually, we even generate revenue as our “billboard” became the highest grossing retail space in New York City – a real return on brand value). In surveys, clients consistently express disappointment about the degree to which their presence is fragmented. Mark Addicks, CMO of General Mills, has complained that marketers “are living in a world of chaos. They are desperate for order. They need a rulebook.” Marketers, no longer able to keep track of customers across myriad touch points, find it increasingly difficult to get a single view of their customers. The reason is that the digital world is intrinsically biased to the tactical, to ingenious small solutions, bubbling from the bottom up, but which do not really add up to anything. The cure is simple. Find your own Big Idea. Then milk it mercilessly. Telling Stories If 30 years ago you had asked someone what Beowulf (whom I have already mentioned once) had to do with advertising you would have got a funny look and not much of an answer. Since then it seems that everyone has become a storyteller. Just as ideas have become more important in the digital age, so, too, the power of storytelling has been re-discovered. It was always there, of course. But the internet puts the onus on the advertiser to attract users, and as advertising cannot rely solely on editorial content to bring them in, so it has become quite central. It is stories that attract. And our stories have to be as good as, or better than, their stories.