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 Creedle 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 why it matters for every creative person working in the industry today.

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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 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 to not look like advertising characters and 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 spot. 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. She was joking, of course. 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 people. 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.

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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 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?

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 Creedle'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.

That's not a bad thing to aim for.