DIGGING DEEPER, CASTING WIDER

During a recent* webinar interview* a senior L’Oréal Consumer Engagement Exec. was asked:

‘How do you come up with ideas?’  

A question of considerable, if not existential, importance for many of us in The Business of Pleasure.

And one that has bedevilled most of us at some point or another.

On this occasion, the interviewer was trying to surface how L’Oréal promulgates Social First/Earned First thinking; ideas that are so strategic, culturally relevant or emotionally relevant that they can connect with an audience and earn attention organically -through shares, comments, press coverage, memes or DMs. Think of it as the creative sweet spot where big ideas meet internet instincts.**

L'Oréal Exec: ‘They (ideas) come from many sources, right? I think that’s the beauty of campaigns or content ideation.  It can come from anywhere. It can come from consumers, it can come from social listening, it can come from big agencies, it can come from small agencies, it can come from internal team members …the core tenet, and the North Star that we really strive for (is) is it earned first, like is it going to be talked about, is it shareable, and that should really guide the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the idea at the end of the day.’

And while the approach is eminently logical, and consistently yields huge success for L’Oréal, I can’t help wondering if there isn't ever just the tiniest particle (just a whiff, no more) of another celebrated example of Gallic Genius, The Great Oil Sniffer Hoax 'Avions Renifleurs’ of the mid 1970s.  

With the middle-east conflict strangling European oil supplies, and therefore national economies, the French Government paid $80 million for seemingly miraculous devices, mounted in ‘sniffer planes,’ which could supposedly detect hidden oil reserves in any area they flew over.  And Bingo! (Et voila!) the miraculous machines bleeped whenever they passed over a known oil-bearing area. Because, yep, you guessed it, these little darlings had been pre-programmed with maps of all known oil reserves.

Journeys without maps

The Business of Pleasure, like advertising (and aviation?) relies on the manufacturing of a constant supply of ideas that connect with audiences.

But our Production Lines, like the minds of our audiences (and those of brands) are seldom linear...

The idea for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (Symphony Number 6) was inspired by birdsong (nightingales, cuckoos and quail) not the infamous 1960’s cigarette brand.

Just as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later sprang from the film-maker noticing how eerily empty London Looked in the morning, not a broadband providers' average customer service response time.

And of course, the French take the biscuit here as well, with Marcel Proust dipping a sponge cake into his cuppa and pulling out 'À la recherche du temps perdu' (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) a modern literary masterpiece which came in at gobsmacking 1 million 200 words (roughly double the length of Tolstoy’s War And Peace).

And just as most hero myths require a period of exile (before a triumphant return) the really great ideas often hit us when we step outside of our usual routines and away from the daily grind and guardrails.

As consumers, it will normally take a huge price drop to lure us away from our customary purchases and take a leap into the dark.

Think of the bulging, Babel-like shelves of the much-mourned Remaindered Bookshop, where publishing companies would hope to minimise their losses on poor-selling titles or over ambitious print-runs.

Or the supermarkets’ Ever-So-Close-To-Sell-By-Date cabinets, where a whopping 50% discount might lure us into savouring untofore untried (and presumably uninsurable) delights.

Not to mention online bucket-shops offering 'Seven Nights, Six Hours Away, For Only £XXX'

And while there is no Tesco or Lastminute.com for summoning up the creative spark (yet) and no downloadable touchstone-app to ignite the imagination (I know because I’ve checked, frequently) here are a couple of inexpensive (BBC license-fee) fixes that are, in my opinion, absolutely brilliant at magicking ideas both out of the box and out of the ether:

The Patch

Each episode begins with a member of the public pressing a button on a random postcode generator, and the team then have to dig out compelling stories from within that specified area. The latest episode*** had the excellent (and much-travelled) Polly Weston despatched the coastal village of Longframlington, Northumberland, approximately half an hour north of Newcastle (“really rural/lots of fields”).

The episode starts inauspiciously enough (for me) at The Northumberland Hedgehog Sanctuary, before a survey of council planning applications (I kid you not) reveals a scheme to expand a local Bird-Breeding Facility.

And then the episode really took off.  

Because these were not just any old birds, but falcons, the ultimate, must-have accessory for major movers-and-shakers from Genghis Khan to Henry VIII (distant relations?) to Ming Dynasty Emperors and Ottoman Sultans.

It seems that the rugged Northumbrian landscape is ideal terrain for cross-breeding Peregrine Falcons, the fastest birds on (or rather, off) the planet, with the sturdier and better-looking (to falcon-fanciers) Gyr Falcons. These high-flying hybrids are then exported to the super-rich of the Gulf, where they sell for between $100,000 and $300,000 per bird (and sometimes swooping up to $450,000!).

The thought of these bonny Geordie superstars, soaring through the desert skies, before returning to the wrists of their princeling owners, conjured up images of A Thousand And One Arabian Nights (or flights) to me.  And who knew that falcon-racing (F1?) was a hugely lucrative sport and rapidly growing sport?  At last year’s prestigious ‘King’s Sword’ event in Saudi Arabia (which had a prize-pot of $16 million) the winning falcon, a Dubliner, took first place on the winner’s rostrum (perch?) by covering the 400 metre course in just 17.1 seconds.****

For the Idea Hunter-Gatherers of The Business of Pleasure who are not plucky enough to stick a pin in a postcode map, Add To Playlist offers a different winning formula.

Each show invites four musicians (two regulars and two guests) to choose one piece of music each.

The only catch being that each successive track has to have some kind of link (musical, historic, thematic, biographic, etc.) with the previous track.

Oh, and the first track of each episode must be linked to the last track of the previous episode.

This musical daisy-chain currently runs to 105 episodes, and (IMO) if you were to dive into any one of them (like jabbing a random postcode on The Patch) you would find some amazing stories, connections and ideas.

Last week's episode***** went (very roughly) as follows:

Track from previous episode:  A Gallic folk-song from the Outer Hebrides

Link to this episode opener: Music that reflects landscapes...

Track One:           Ill Manors, Plan B,

                              ‘Let’s all go on an urban safari

                              We might see some illegal immigrants

                              Oh look there’s a chav

                              That means council house and violent’

Link to Track 2    The lines from Ill Manors:

‘There’s a charge for congestion, everybody’s got to pay

                               Do what Boris does and rob them blind.’

Track Two:       The Coronation Scene from Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov

After pointing out some striking parallels between the Borises Johnson and Godunov, we learn that The Coronation Scene (which IMO could have been a Bernard Hermann score for a Hitchcock movie) is constructed around just two chords, a limited palette, similar to Ill Manors but rendered monumental by orchestration across a range of instruments.

We also learn (or at least I did) that the composer was a civil servant, without any formal musical training, who, plagued by alcoholism, died in his early 'forties. And while not gaining much recognition in his own time, his influence was enormous:  “The influence of, particularly timbres and using different instruments… Without Mussorgsky you don’t get Stravinsky, you don’t get Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. That’s how Modest is important to modern music.’ (and Emerson, Lake and Palmer of course)

You get the idea.

And you'll get the ideas.

Promise!

Just put together four passionate experts, who are also excellent communicators, and let them riff off each other for half an hour, weaving connections, and intersections, from the most unlikeliest sources (the more disparate the better!) and just see where it leads you.

DT

5 Sep 2025

 *Brandwatch, ‘The marketing leader’s playbook’ 27 Aug, 2025

**Connie Cermak, https://www.socialnectar.net/earned-first-conceptual-thinking/

***The Patch edition: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002d06h

 ****A Formula 1 car would cover the same distance in 9 seconds from a standing start

*****Add to Playlist edition:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002hmrg.