Field Note 11: "Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."

From Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist:

"Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."

Most people read "seeing what everybody has seen" and think it means "copy what works elsewhere." So they benchmark competitors, steal formats, and call it "strategy" or even worse..."innovation".

That's not the lesson.

The principle isn't imitation. It's observation with fresh eyes.

There's a difference between looking at the same data everyone else has and actually seeing what it means.

Most briefs come with the "insight" already written. The challenge lies in questioning whether the stated problem is the real problem.

The best campaigns don't come from better briefs. They come from refusing to accept the brief at face value.

I've stopped treating briefs as instructions. I treat them as starting points.

When a brief lands, I ask: "What's the thing everyone's ignoring because it seems too obvious or too difficult to solve?"

Usually, that's where the idea is hiding.

We once had a brief from Qantas US. The ask was ambitious yet simple: get more Americans to visit Australia.

The brief, at face value, was a standard awareness play using display banners. In and out.

But something didn't sit right. Australia is at the top of every American's bucket list and we were targeting cash-rich empty-nesters, so time and money was not an issue.

So we looked at the data everyone had access to, but no one was really seeing.

Only 63% of Americans hold a valid passport.

Let that sink in. Australia is their dream destination, but 37% of them can't even leave the country.

We soon realised we actually had a friction problem, not an awareness one.

So we gave them a discount equal to the cost of a US passport.

The client didn't ask us for this; we just added a "goodie bag" concept to the back of the deck to bring it to life. I helped sell it in, informing the client beforehand that we'd give them what they asked for - and then some. The client bought it immediately. It went live in 8 weeks, and it made headlines. But fundamentally, it worked.

The campaign accounted for 20% of Qantas US's annual website traffic in 10 days and led to a raft of great work for Qantas off the back of that single insight. It got the creative team and me promoted - and made the client a hero internally.

Everyone had access to that passport stat. It was public data. But no one thought to do anything with it because it wasn't part of the brief.

The magic appeared when we asked ourselves: 'What's the real barrier here?'

The best ideas come from looking at the banal and seeing opportunity.

The full case study film can be watched here.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Murph

mcmurph.com