Ideas are made of other ideas
One of the Genius Steals creativity exercises is demystifying ideas as combinations by exploring the elements of inspiration that informed an idea. We call it idea archeology.
This is harder the further the idea takes the inspiration and easier the less far it has gone, but no idea comes from nowhere.
“It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.” — Jean-Luc Godard.
Good ideas are, to steal from Aristotle, “lucid, pleasing and strange”, because the achieve clarity and satisfy the mind through the combination of non-obvious things.
I saw an new [to me] social idea format:
Since the it doesn’t resolve in the embed, here is format I was ReTweeting
This was the first time I had seen the zoom meme — and the amount of coverage it has received since suggest I’m not alone.
Buzzfeed called it a new meme. USA Today covered it a week later, which often happens with the online to offline media lag.
A few days before this zoom meme tweet, a parody account called Nihilist Arby’s tweeted this:
Arby’s is a competitor of Denny’s, so the social media team would be doing competitive monitoring of the brand and the brand term, which would include parody accounts.
Add the zoom meme to the Arby’s tweet and voila — you have one of the most shared brand posts ever.
The CMO even got this article in Adweek to explain the strategy behind the tweet:
“While we’re thrilled about the response we’ve received to our take on the ‘zoom’ meme, for us it’s just another great example of our social media team knowing our brand — and its audience — and using that connection to tap into timely topics that are trending online.”
Strategy aside, we can see the fossils inside the Denny’s Tweet, derived from the two elements above. Ideas are new combinations.
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