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Your latest campaign just came back with a click-through rate of .05%, or an open rate of 1.14%, or an average time on site of 00:00:14 with a bounce rate of 85% and you’re not excited. These numbers may be well above the norm, but you can’t help but wonder: What about the people who just didn’t do what I wanted them to do?

So what happens? You flip through your Rolodex of tricks, survey out a 30+ variable testing matrix that would confuse a rocket scientist, and try to “move the needle.” Brief, blow out, build and blast; you manage to make that K.P.I. look a little less S.O.L., and your client is happy to carry on doing the same thing with the same messages, just slightly better. The needle’s moved, but that silent majority? Still there.

Why doesn’t this inspire and infuse your work day? Why doesn’t this feel Innovative?

Lots of things in our day really are NOT innovative – and there’s nothing wrong with that. Great work relies on great execution. A cutting-edge process or idea will be the inspirational equivalent of a blank sheet of paper if it isn’t carried out with absolute attention to detail, timing, and budget.

But we confuse Innovation with The Work. We can’t block out 30 minutes to just “Innovate.” Innovation doesn’t have a deliverable, follow a flow chart, or wrap up neatly by Q2. Innovation is like a rainbow: ephemeral, beautiful, and impossible to precisely predict.

We’re all more than ready to Innovate – we’re just afraid of what it takes to get there.

The fear is that you might throw all your resources into a singular project to foster this innovative growth and… it doesn’t happen. Worse yet, you take your baby idea out of the incubator, try to introduce it to the real world and guess what? It fails.

You know what we call ideas that succeed? Innovation.
You know what we call ideas that don’t? Failures.

If you see every new venture, every weird idea, every novel concept as ultimately falling down the plinko machine into one of those two buckets, the risk is always 50-50. You’re always that fixed distance away from utter disaster, and you’re always going to stay there.

Take a moment to think of the enormous gamut of problems you work with every day – from a way to remember to pick up the dry cleaning, to resolving conflict with a co-worker, to influencing an audience to buy your client’s product.

The wrong thought is to rank these solutions the same way we would a coin flip - heads/tails, right/wrong, successful/not. We deal in a work that so tightly integrates with the human experience – that of communicating and carrying understanding of a client to groups of other humans. We play on emotion, on aspirations, on cognitive dissonance. So how can we call one idea absolutely innovative, or another absolutely a failure? How can we not appreciate the campaigns that “showed a small ROI” or “did sorta well” for what they are– learning opportunities.

If asked about his greatness, Edison would tell you about the thousands of ways he discovered how NOT to make a light bulb. Einstein would tell you about the 42 years of life BEFORE he won his Nobel Prize for Physics. Greatness only germinates from the ashes of failure. Innovation will only spark after countless ideas are tried, tested, and most are found lacking. The world’s Next Big Idea isn’t sitting out on the sidewalk like a lost penny – it’s hiding behind a veil of missteps, mistakes, and missed opportunities.

The clear fact is that in order to foster innovation in ourselves or in our organization, we need to create a mentality that ALLOWS for failure. We need to build into our campaign plans an aggressive process for correctly identifying results, then extracting every single bit of meaning or understanding from them – both “good” and “bad.” This knowledge then needs to feed our future works. This knowledge must be immediately shared within our organization. This knowledge needs to be openly celebrated in front of our clients, to prove how we’ve positively built from failure and made our partners’ money really worth something in the long run.

We need to innovate, or we will become irrelevant. Therefore, we need to fail, or we will never find success. And when we fail, we must intensely scrutinize the results in order to innovate.

Eric Swayne
eric.swayne@rapp.com