The Marketer’s Guide to Slow Internet and Fast Ideas
Over the summer, I lost WiFi for four days. Somewhere between the groaning of my 4G hotspot and a rogue Vodafone maintenance crew, I was left with a browser that took 45 seconds to load Instagram and a marketing brain starved of distraction. It was glorious. With nothing but offline notes and a few stubbornly cached deck slides, I started thinking about how ideas move.
Not *where* they move. Not in channels, or pipelines, or to-market strategies. But how they actually slither through a business, catching eyes and picking up speed. I realised the best ideas seem to act like gossip. They get passed around between departments too quickly for approval cycles to keep up. Someone in Finance hears it and suddenly it’s on the CEO’s lips. No decks. No meetings. Just velocity.
The campaigns that shake people loose aren’t just clever. They escape. They spread themselves. And they do it within organisations too, long before the public sees a frame. Great internal contagion is the real test. If your idea needs a ten-slide rationale to survive the hallway, it’s probably not ripe yet. Let it ferment longer. Or ask a copywriter to simplify it into ten words and see where those ten words go. Gravity-grade clarity is underrated.
When my internet came back, I flushed everything I’d drafted with WiFi. It was all second-guessing and PowerPoint polish. Gone. What stayed were the ideas I could tell someone about over a slow-loading Zoom call. No slides, no fluff. Just human-to-human transmission speed. Unbranded. Unbuffered. Intact.
Not *where* they move. Not in channels, or pipelines, or to-market strategies. But how they actually slither through a business, catching eyes and picking up speed. I realised the best ideas seem to act like gossip. They get passed around between departments too quickly for approval cycles to keep up. Someone in Finance hears it and suddenly it’s on the CEO’s lips. No decks. No meetings. Just velocity.
The campaigns that shake people loose aren’t just clever. They escape. They spread themselves. And they do it within organisations too, long before the public sees a frame. Great internal contagion is the real test. If your idea needs a ten-slide rationale to survive the hallway, it’s probably not ripe yet. Let it ferment longer. Or ask a copywriter to simplify it into ten words and see where those ten words go. Gravity-grade clarity is underrated.
When my internet came back, I flushed everything I’d drafted with WiFi. It was all second-guessing and PowerPoint polish. Gone. What stayed were the ideas I could tell someone about over a slow-loading Zoom call. No slides, no fluff. Just human-to-human transmission speed. Unbranded. Unbuffered. Intact.