It’s important to make sure your message is in the right place, reaching the right audience, at the right time. However, that kind of technique—which, as you correctly point out, is almost cost-of-entry these days—only gets a company so far. The digital landscape, which once was relatively underserved, has become as cluttered with advertising as Times Square is with neon billboards.

To stand out, you need to look to the past, not the future.

Since the earliest days of advertising, the elusive Big Idea has remained the constant goal. Or at least, it should have. How many meetings have we all sat in where people have extolled the virtues of this or that “new” or “cutting edge” digital messaging platform? Often, the message being delivered is a distant second to the shiny new device method of getting it across.

A Big Idea can take the form of an iconic visual that will cut through the virtual clutter, cure “banner blindness,” and stop the finger hovering on the “next” button. We bet you still remember the simple, stunning visual idea offered across communication channels by the makers of Vytorin: lookalike food and people to hammer home the notion that elevated cholesterol was due partly to genetics and partly to lifestyle.

That visual (did you wait for the next “episode” in the campaign, like we did, to see what they’d come up with next?) worked for one simple reason: it was great. When the focus becomes more about how many “eyeballs” a particular campaign will draw and less about what those eyeballs will see, something critical is lost.

You don’t need a twist. What you need is what companies have always needed: talented creative that will make customers—wherever they are, however you reach them—sit up and take notice. Be sure the marketing firm you partner with can draw on that type of talent.