Maybe it’s time for marketing creative to stop thinking big and starting getting mini.

From the very beginning of our careers in marketing, we’re always being told that “think big” = “better.” Big ideas get your clients’ products noticed. They advance your career by getting your own ideas noticed. And they justify big budgets (whether you really need them or not).

Maybe it’s time to think again, to “think small.”  A few good reasons:
•    The current b2b marketing emphasis is on small business.
•    In today’s economy, most marketers are working with smaller budgets.
•    The Internet, and especially social media, help marketers efficiently target small audiences.
•    Smaller marketing initiatives can be green, using fewer resources.
•    Many marketers are discovering the advantages of working with a smaller agency (full disclosure: self-interest at work here).

But there’s one more way to think small….and this is the big idea.  To get your ideas notice, miniaturize your creative executions. For example:
•    Remember making dioramas in grade school? In the UK, East Coast Trains is reviving the idea to promote its “miniature” fares.
•    A different way to do dioramas – in Melbourne, Australia City Search took them out of the ad and onto the street.
•    Be smart and small with a half-size Smart Car wrap. Stand out among all the other marketers wrapping full-size Hummers and city busses with their promotional messages.
•    Use a few square inches to get noticed with a creative business card – like this graduate student’s electronic interactive card, and this security consultant’s card with built-in lockpicks.
•    When other direct marketers are sinking their hopes and their budgets into oversize dimensional mailers, consider sending something small, like this world’s smallest direct mail piece for Volkswagen Passat.
•    Billboards are big. But this report from New Zealand shows they don’t have to be, to be effective communicators.
•    And finally, the idea that claims to be the world’s smallest ad (and probably is): An Olympus mailer sent to scientist prospects for high-end microscopes, with a customer survey that could only be read through a microscope.

Give it a little thought: When everyone is shouting, why should you expect your yell to be heard? Try whispering instead. Because smaller and better can be better than just plain bigger.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” says the evil prison warden Strother Martin as he sentences Paul Newman to a night in the box (a small, hot punishment cell), in the classic 1967 film Cool Hand Luke.

Fast forward to today.
Exactly the same words could be used to describe the disconnect between social media advocates and their prospective customers. Those advocates risk a night in the box – or maybe a box on the ears – when they fail to speak the language as CMOs, CFOs and CEOs. It may be one reason why so many Cs say they’re “sick of hearing about Web 2.0 and related buzzwords such as ‘blogs’ and ‘social networking’” in a survey by the Marketing Executives Networking Group.

You’d think that in the communications business, the value of clear, effective communication would be taken for granted. But you’d be wrong, because some of our contemporaries require constant reminders, as in this Small Business Trends post by Zane Safrit.  He reminds us that “The story CEOs and CFOs want to hear is the story of numbers that go up and numbers that go down.”

Speak to the Cs.
It’s an issue we touched on a few months back, when we said “Help them decide in your favor by demonstrating ROMI — Return On Marketing Investment.” Now we’re wondering if Rosetta Stone could create a special version of its language learning software to teach social media advocates how to speak the language of business. It would turn social media’s jargon into a fluent translation for real-life business:
•    From “tweets, trackbacks, links, rss feeds, feed readers, community members, blogtrolls, stalkers, spambots, and organic SEO…”
•    …to “qualified sales leads, conversion rates, sales per customer, revenues, customer churn and cost of acquisition.”

It’s late summer now — back to school season for many marketers. And time for social media advocates who want to sell to Cs to go back to school themselves, before they receive a big “F,” which stands for “Failure to communicate.”

Sketch Me is a Facebook app that instantly creates a pencil sketch from the user’s profile photograph.
Another Facebook app, Crappy 80s Gifts, lets you “send your friends totally tubular 80s stuff that is like so lame, dude.”
iBeer, an iPhone and iPod Touch app, fills your screen with virtual beer. When it’s tipped the beer drains.
Bubble Wrap lets you pop away all day on a virtual version of the popular packaging material.
Voodoo! for Palm devices features a voodoo doll and a long pin. You figure what to do, to who.
And the list goes on and on: iFart, the Have2P restroom finder, Deviled Egg Bowl, Medical Poetry and more.

Consider what all this could mean.  Is it a symptom of decadence, a sign of the imminent collapse of our civilization, as rich and privileged people with computers and PDAs waste their money and time on silly applications that hardly ever get used after they’re downloaded?

We think it’s more like a grownup, more expensive version of the old Johnson Smith catalog (now six different catalogs), where preteen boys traditionally spent their allowances on novelties and practical jokes like joy buzzers, whoopee cushions and ice cubes with flies in them.

It’s play, part of the price we pay for creative thinking in any activity. Wise teachers know that play is the work of children, critical to their emotional and cognitive development.

We believe that play is also an essential part of the work of adults. Apple believes play is important in the development of software. And in our agency’s business, marketing communications, a playful attitude assures that the creative is more than just a rehash of the marketing plan. (You should see some of the ideas we don’t present to clients. Or maybe you shouldn’t.)

So the next time you see another silly app for sale, remember that when it comes to creative thinking, playing around eventually pays off.  Do you agree?

PS. Check out my friend Mike Kelly’s new app for iPhone, SwitchWith. It may be weird, but it sure is fun.