The Big Idea Philosophy: Characters, Campaigns, and Cultural Impact

If you've ever watched a commercial and thought, "Wait, that didn't feel like an ad" — you've experienced the Susan Credle effect. Over a career that spans some of advertising's most beloved campaigns, Susan developed a philosophy that sounds simple but is deceptively hard to execute: the best ideas don't look like ads.

This lesson unpacks what that actually means, how it played out in campaigns like M&M's and Allstate's Mayhem, and — critically — what it means for you, right now, working in an industry being reshaped by AI. Because Susan's story isn't just worth reading. It's worth applying.

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There's a difference between a good ad and a big idea. A good ad communicates a message clearly. A big idea creates a world.

Susan's career is a masterclass in the distinction. At BBDO, she spent two decades with her creative partner Steve Rutter working on M&M's — not just making commercials, but building an entire universe of characters that audiences genuinely cared about. The goal, as she described it, was audacious: "If we had gotten the M&M's characters right, people would actually believe they exist."

Think about what that standard demands. It's not "make a funny spot." It's not "communicate the product benefit." It's: make something so real, so human, so emotionally resonant that the audience forgets they're watching an advertisement.

That's a completely different creative brief. And it changes everything about how you approach the work.

Key Insight: The question Susan asked about M&M's — "How can we get them not to look like advertising characters but to actually start to feel human?" — is a question worth asking about any brand persona, mascot, or recurring campaign character. If your audience wouldn't miss the character if it disappeared, it's not real enough yet.

Big ideas also have a certain quality of inevitability once you see them. The famous M&M's Christmas spot — where Red and Santa Claus both faint upon discovering the other exists — works because it treats the characters' reality as completely non-negotiable. The joke only lands if you believe, even for a second, that these candy characters have an actual inner life. That's not a production trick. That's a writing philosophy.

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Not every big idea announces itself as one. Sometimes the creative's most important job isn't generating the idea — it's recognizing it.

Allstate's Mayhem character is one of the most successful campaign platforms in recent advertising history. But it started as a single summer campaign. What turned it into a cultural phenomenon was someone in the room saying: this is bigger than one execution.

That someone was Susan.

This is a skill that doesn't get talked about enough in creative circles. We spend a lot of time discussing ideation — how to generate ideas. But the ability to look at a piece of work and understand its full potential, to see the campaign inside the execution, is equally valuable and far rarer.

Pro Tip: When you're evaluating creative work — yours or someone else's — ask not just "is this a good ad?" but "is there a world here?" Can this character, this tension, this premise be extended across seasons, media, and years? The best campaign platforms have an engine inside them that can run almost indefinitely. Mayhem works because the premise (chaos personified) is infinitely renewable. Every new disaster scenario is a new execution. That's a platform, not a campaign.

Susan's instinct to champion Mayhem beyond its original brief is a lesson in creative leadership. Big ideas often need an advocate — someone willing to say "we're not done here" when the client is ready to move on.

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Susan spent most of her career at large agencies working on large brands — and she was deliberate about that choice. She understood something that smaller-scale creatives sometimes miss: the size of your audience is a creative responsibility.

When you're making work that millions of people will see, you're not just selling a product. You're contributing to the cultural conversation. You're putting images, ideas, and narratives into the world at scale. That's power — and it comes with an obligation.

As Susan put it, advertising at its best "looks at where the world needs to go and can push it there." Not leaning into stereotypes. Not reflecting the world as it is, but as it could be. Making audiences feel comfortable with the uncomfortable. Pushing progressive images that haven't been seen before.

This is a high standard. It's also a genuinely exciting one. It reframes the creative brief from "how do we sell this product" to "how do we use this product as a vehicle to say something true and important about the world?"

Key Insight: The mass reach of advertising — the fact that more people might see your campaign than read the year's bestselling novel or watch a hit film — is not just a media metric. It's a creative mandate. What are you doing with that access to people's attention?

This doesn't mean every ad needs to be a social statement. It means every creative decision carries weight. The characters you cast. The relationships you portray. The problems you show being solved, and by whom. These choices accumulate into a picture of the world that audiences absorb, often without realizing it.

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One of the most underrated aspects of Susan's M&M's work is how deeply the team thought about the characters as people — with personalities, quirks, and even off-screen lives.

In an interview, Susan described telling a reporter that Yellow was actually the difficult one on set — always late, wouldn't come out of his trailer — while Red was surprisingly sweet off-camera. The reporter replied, "You're kidding." Her retort: "Yes, I am." But the fact that she could construct that fiction effortlessly, and that it felt completely plausible, tells you everything about how she thought about those characters.

They weren't brand assets. They were real characters. And that's why audiences treated them that way.

This approach — building characters with enough interior life that you could tell stories about them that never make it into the ads — is a technique worth stealing. When you know more about a character than you ever show, the work has a depth and consistency that audiences feel even if they can't articulate why.

Pro Tip: Try writing a "character bible" for any brand persona you're developing — even if it's just for internal use. What does this character want? What are they afraid of? What's their relationship history? What do they do on weekends? You'll never use most of it. But the work will be richer for the fact that you know. And don't forget, brands are abstract characters.

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Running through all of Susan's work is a philosophy she absorbed early in her career, partly from BBDO's Phil Dusenberry: advertising has every right to be as entertaining as anything else in culture.

Not "entertaining for an ad." Just entertaining. Full stop.

This is a harder standard than it sounds. It means you can't hide behind the excuse that "it's just a commercial." It means you hold your work up against the best films, the best writing, the best storytelling — and ask whether it belongs in that company.

Phil Dusenberry believed advertising could sit beside other entertainment and hold its own. Susan internalized that belief and built a career around it. The M&M's Christmas spot isn't charming "for an ad." It's charming, period. Mayhem isn't a clever campaign character "for insurance advertising." He's a genuinely compelling character, period.

This standard is what separates work that people remember from work that people skip.

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Susan's story is instructive. But a story only earns its place in your life if you do something with it. So before you move on, stop and ask yourself the harder questions:

What kind of creative do you want to be? Not what job title — what standard. Susan held her work up against the best storytelling in culture, not just the best advertising. What are you holding yours up against?

Where are you settling? Every creative has a version of "it's just a commercial" — a rationalization for work that doesn't push hard enough. Where are you using that excuse? What would it look like to drop it?

What's the big idea you're sitting on? Most people have one. They're waiting for permission, or the right brief, or the right moment. Susan's lesson is that you recognize the platform and champion it — you don't wait for someone else to.

Who needs you to advocate for their idea? Creative leadership isn't just about your own work. It's about being the person in the room who says "we're not done here" when everyone else is ready to move on.

These aren't rhetorical questions. Write down your answers. The gap between reading someone else's story and actually changing how you work lives in that space between reflection and action.

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Here's the uncomfortable truth about the moment we're in: AI can generate a competent ad. It can write copy, produce images, iterate on concepts, and optimize for performance — faster and cheaper than any human team.

So if your value as a creative is "I can execute," that value is under pressure. The tools are getting too good.

But here's what AI cannot do: it cannot recognize that Mayhem is bigger than one summer campaign. It cannot decide that M&M's characters should feel like real people with off-screen lives, and then hold that standard for two decades. It cannot look at a brief and ask, "What does the world need this to say?" It cannot push culture forward — because it has no stake in where culture goes.

Those are human judgments. They require taste, conviction, and the willingness to fight for an idea when no one else sees it yet. They require exactly the kind of creative courage this course is about.

AI is a power tool. A genuinely extraordinary one. It can help you move faster, explore more territory, and produce at a scale that wasn't previously possible. But a power tool in the hands of someone without a point of view just makes more noise, faster.

The creatives who will thrive in this new landscape are the ones who bring what AI can't: a genuine perspective on what the work should mean, the judgment to recognize a big idea when it appears, and the courage to champion it. Susan's philosophy — make it real, make it human, make it matter — isn't a relic of a pre-digital era. It's the competitive advantage that becomes more valuable as the tools get more powerful.

Because when everyone has access to the same AI systems, the differentiator isn't the tool. It's the person holding it.

Key Insight: AI raises the floor of creative work — competent executions are easier to produce than ever. That means the ceiling matters more. The question is no longer "can you make something?" It's "can you make something worth making?" That's a human question. It always has been.

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Susan never articulated a formal framework — great creative instincts rarely come packaged that way. But looking across her career and philosophy, a pattern emerges. Before you call something a "big idea," ask:

Does it feel like entertainment, not advertising? Would someone choose to watch this if it came up in their feed, even knowing it was a commercial?

Is there a world here? Can this premise, character, or tension sustain multiple executions over time?

Does it treat the audience as intelligent? Big ideas don't explain themselves. They trust the audience to get it.

Does it push something forward? Does it challenge a stereotype, offer a fresh image, or say something true about the world — even in a small way?

Could you tell stories about it that never make it into the work? Is it real enough to have an off-screen life?

Would AI generate this? If the answer is "probably yes," push further. The ideas that emerge from genuine human conviction — from a point of view, from a fight, from a belief about what the world needs — are the ones that AI can't replicate on demand.

If you can answer yes to most of those questions, you might have something. If you can answer yes to all of them, protect it fiercely — because that's rare.

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The through-line of Susan Credle's creative philosophy is a kind of radical respect: for the audience, for the medium, and for the potential of a genuinely great idea to do more than sell a product. It can make people laugh, make them feel seen, and — on its best day — nudge the culture an inch or two toward something better.

In an age of AI, that's not just a nice thing to aim for. It's the whole game.

That's not a bad thing to aim for.