A few months ago I managed to meet my hero Lena Dunham, the creator, writer, director and star of HBO’s hit show ‘Girls’ who’s written an autobiography at the age of 27 – that’s how much she’s lived.
No matter what your personal opinion of her is, you can’t say that she doesn’t have balls.
This is a woman who has a FUCKING BIG IDEA.
She got mad at the stories that were told about young women on TV, in film and in books, so she wrote her own.
Now she is saying unsayable things and showing unshowable things on TV. She is portraying young women in a new, albeit somewhat appalling, light. And she is changing the way we feel about women and the way women feel about themselves (and each other!)
Take that campaign for real beauty because it takes real balls.
So for the purpose of this talk and this talk only, I am going to channel Lena Dunham in ‘Girls’ to be the voice of my generation.
And like Lena, there is something that makes me really mad.
We are all suffering from IDD – Idea Deficit Disorder
We have got too distracted by big data
by platforms
by touchpoints
by lighting a thousand small fires
we’ve lost sight of where real strategy (not tactics!) can make a real difference for our client’s businesses.
And somewhere along the line we’ve started believing people actually care about our new online viral for sausages.
But it’s time we start looking at the world not just the marketplace
To stop living in an advertising world and to make a real difference for real people in the real world.
For this we need more Big Ideas
We need more Fucking Big Ideas – FBI
And we need to move from IDD to FBI
To have Fucking Big Ideas and make cultural dents like Lena, we need to have opinions
We need to show our flaws
Have an edge
Make mistakes
Champion a cause
And we need to have real balls
To be noticed
To be talked about
To be relevant
To be loved