Bill Clinton and Ogilvy's Bill Gray: Big Ideas Need Brands; Brands Needs Big Ideas

The head of Ogilvy says brands need a big idea. President Bill Clinton says his big ideas need a brand.

At conferences last week across town from each other Bill Gray, co-CEO of Ogilvy North America, and the former world leader spoke about branding and marketing in the new world.

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Clinton said his administration had great ideas but the Republicans often got the upper hand. "They were brilliant at branding. They said they were about values," Clinton said at the Promax/BDA promotion conference. "Everybody is a values voter, but they got the brand… They said they were against the "death tax" God what a great brand." When doctors recently looked at Hillary Clinton's long-gone health care proposal, they told the former president it provided for manageable costs and better medicine. "But [Republicans] won the branding war on the health care bill."

On gay rights, "partial birth abortion," the "balanced budget amendment," and more, Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich carrying a "little red book" of slogans with which to lambaste Democrats, seized the initiative by defining the brand. "I did a disservice to the American people not by putting forth a bad plan," Clinton told a packed Hilton hotel auditorium in a keynote address, "but by not being a better brander, not being able to explain it better."

At the ANA Integrated Marketing Conference, Gray said that "brand has never been more important" in a multi-channel, multi-platform, multi-tiered and morphing world. "It's a compression of your idea, of what your company is and what it's about." As your messages run across the Web, TV, YouTube, outdoor media, even, if you're British Petroleum, on your gas stations, your brand can become a unifying theme, an expression of a big, important idea.

And you'd better have that big idea, Gray said, preferably one "rooted in a cultural truth or trend or movement." Gray held up Dove soap and its offshoots as a model. Their big idea, expressed in everything from magazine ads to viral videos, is that beauty needs to be redefined. Large women, old women, women whose necks aren't some perfect length and whose hair isn't just so, in other words real women, are beautiful. Not just some fake, made up, retouched version that, he said, only a half percent of women feel is within their reach.

Dove's integrated campaign helped increase sales 25 percent year-on-year, he told Jack Myers Media Business Report in an exclusive interview after his speech. "You need to think of it as the idea, first, and the medium second," he said. The best big idea, Gray said, will "leverage the power of a broadly existing but untapped sentiment," such as a redefinition of beauty, or, in the case of BP, the need to be environmentally sound. For Fanta soda, in a campaign constructed by two people he said had a total of five years' experience, the idea was "the end of grownup-edness."

"A movement is what ambitious clients should ask for," he said.

Clinton said his brand had been America as a place of opportunity, responsibility and community. The brand of the 21st Century, he said, is "interdependence," with more trade, economic flows, and people moving across borders than ever. "'Interdependence captures something very different from globalization," he said. With interdependence, "divorce is not an option." You can't kill or jail or occupy all your enemies, so the alternative is politics, a politics that emphasizes our common humanity, not our differences. Politics, he said, is also lot cheaper.

"We need to cooperate with others whenever we can, because there are few problems we can solve on our own," Clinton said. For that idea, the former president said, "We need better branding and advertising." Gray would probably agree that that's a pretty big idea.

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