How To Keep An Idea Alive (After It’s Pronounced Dead)

I’m here to tell you – in blatant defiance of The Big Lebowski – that you do not have to “abide.” You do not have to accept the “death” of an idea as the end. It’s really just beginning.

Nearly two years ago at adam&eveDDB NY we presented an idea to Gift of Life. They’re a bone marrow donor registry. Which means, they swab people’s cheeks to collect HLA - a complex set of genes in a person’s DNA. If those genes match the genes of somebody with blood cancer, they can do a transplant and save a life. We wanted to make the process more approachable by using chewing gum instead of a cheek swab. The clients loved it. But it seemed too expensive. Too hard to implement. Oh, and the science of collecting DNA with gum had to be proven.

We thought all those obstacles meant the idea was dead. So we took a day to be sad. Always take a day, then get back to it. The longer you do this job, the shorter the recovery period. The next day, we started pushing. The first job is always to ask, “why?” Why can’t we get a lab to validate the science? How much would that cost? What if we partnered with a gum brand? Does our agency network have a gum client? We bothered a lot of people. But there is great power in being annoying. Use this as permission to question everything and interrogate all assumptions.

Turns out, the client had a diagnostics partner, Labcorp. They got excited about the idea and could help with the science. And yes, Mars happens to be a DDB client. In a fun twist, our tests found the Mars brand Doublemint worked great for collecting DNA. This paragraph of progress took eight months in real time. To avoid idea-death, you have to be in it for the long haul.

But the long haul is never something you do alone. To be clear, it wasn’t just the ad agency pushing for this idea. The client was in it with us, every step of the way. Without true partnership, you can’t sustain a good idea as it evolves and grows.

Meanwhile, we still had the tiny budget problem. This is where a good creative shines. How do you keep the essence of an idea, but do it for it less? Could we do a soft launch instead? What if we changed the insight? Baseball players chew gum, what about that? Maybe it’s an influencer play? Who can do us a favour? Two years was a long time to keep this up.

We overhauled the idea dozens of times. Setbacks (and lawyers) were everywhere. But if you reframe each roadblock as feedback like you’d get from a creative director, you can think your way around them. By the way, having to get on a call with a lawyer is a good thing. It means your idea has an edge to it.

We finally launched Hero Gum this August at a New York Mets game. Also, that was not the original name. We had to change it and the entire design two months before launch. Always one more hurdle you never see coming.

Minimal money. Maximum begging. It was scrappy. Which is a word lots of ad people use to mean, “do it for cheap.” But scrappy is more than that. It’s getting into the weeds. Forgetting your swim lanes. Our creatives shot the content for the campaign. Our clients made the t-shirts and printed the donor kits. We both handed out gum on launch day. We assembled the packaging. We mailed press kits to influencers. We called friends in the press and leveraged every personal, professional contact imaginable. Client and agency in the trenches together.

That is scrappy. It’s being resilient. It’s being persistent. And that’s the key. If you want to keep an idea from dying, everyone has to hold hands and go through hell to get there. Which is especially worth it when the idea has the power to save lives.