The Wiki Man | 28 August 2010

Some time in the mid-1990s I spent a day in a windowless room watching endless presentations of European television commercials. In the style of the times, most were filmed in exotic tropical locations with lavish production values, sumptuous photography and a pulsating soundtrack.

As the day drew to an end, the creative director of an Oslo advertising agency stood up to present his own work. He gave a self-deprecating cough. ‘Back in Norway we have no advertising money at all… so unfortunately we have to have an idea.’ He went on to show charming and imaginative advertisements, typically shot on video cameras. One series simply featured two people talking on a tram.

As he proved, imagination can be a good substitute for a big budget. Winston Churchill said something similar: ‘We have no money so we have to think.’ I have a friend who believes there is a direct relationship between inventiveness and parsimony, encouraged by the fact that supposedly stingy people (Scandinavians, Scots, Midwesterners, Jews) originate the world’s most important ideas. Certainly a DTI survey a decade ago revealed that, relative to population and GDP, Nordic countries are far more inventive than anyone else; interestingly Småland, home to both IKEA and Linnaeus (i.e. the world’s two most baffling systems of classification), is known as the Scotland of Sweden for its legendary tightfistedness.

If you ask me to describe in one sentence what is truly significant about the technological leap of the last 15 years, it would be this: that while imagination has always been a substitute for money, since about 1994 the exchange rate between imagination and money has shifted dramatically in favour of the former. In other words, in attempting to solve any problem, or to improve the lot of mankind, Return on Idea has improved faster than Return on Investment.