Big Ideas That Work is a manually curated library of advertising tactics backed up with a vast range of campaign examples, both old and new, awarded and not.
What's the advantage of the BITW database?
Most campaign databases are organised around brands, categories and case studies. Useful if you want to find something to look at.
BITW is organised around the tactics and mechanisms that made the work work. So instead of asking AI, “What campaigns are like this?”, you can ask much more useful questions:
What kind of problem have I actually got? What creative move might solve it? And where has that move worked before?
In other words, less inspiration safari.
More usable precedent.
What is the BITW Starter Pack?
The BITW Starter Pack is a collection of seven creative thinking systems designed to help your AI find better ways into a brief before you start generating ideas.
It includes tools for reframing value, finding useful antagonists, challenging stereotypes, exposing absurdities, dramatising consequences and benefits, and creating stronger visual metaphors.
Each tactic comes with guidance for your AI on when to use it, how it works, what to avoid and relevant campaign precedents. The idea isn’t to use all seven. It’s to diagnose the problem, find the tactic that fits, understand the mechanism, then give AI something much more interesting to work with. You can find out more here.
What exactly is a BITW Engine?
Each BITW Engine is built around a particular creative or strategic job — like Pick an Enemy, Dumb Thinking or Parody.
Give it your brief and it helps you work the problem from that angle: asking the useful questions, retrieving relevant campaign precedent and turning the underlying mechanisms into creative territories worth exploring.
You could spend hours reading case studies, hoping the right question eventually occurs to you. Or you could run an Engine.
How do I use BITW with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini?
Simple. Download the Markdown files that come with your Starter Pack or Engine and upload them to the AI you already use.
If you use ChatGPT or Claude, the neatest option is to create a Project, drop the files in once, and leave them there. Then open the Project whenever you have a brief and start asking questions.
If you use Gemini, you can keep the files in Google Drive and bring them straight into Gemini when you need them.
And if you’re using a free account without Projects or anything fancy?
Also fine.
Just upload the particular tactic you want to use into the chat alongside your brief.
That’s it.
No proprietary AI wrapper.
No being forced to use our chatbot.
No credits disappearing every time you ask a question.
No “come back tomorrow, you’ve thought enough for today.”
Just useful files that work with the AI you already pay for.
Can't I just feed AI a load of campaign examples myself?
You can.
And sometimes it’ll be useful.
The problem is that examples mostly show AI what happened.
Tactics tell it what the move was, why it worked, when to use it, when not to use it, and which version of the tactic best fits your brief.
Feed AI the famous Avis We Try Harder campaign and you’ve given it one very good example of turning a weakness into an advantage.
Feed it the Dumb Thinking Engine and you’ve given it nine different ways of doing that, each with its own logic, creative rules and campaign precedents.
Cut-and-paste gives AI examples.
BITW Engines give it a map
Do you offer refunds?
Short answer: no. Every article on this site was written primarily by an Engine, so in effect the site is one long product demo of the thinking available to you. Plus, we offer several free editorial tactic series for you to read before committing to a paid membership. For that reason, we don't offer refunds once you've decided to purchase.
Who's behind this site?
George Webster, a content marketing consultant based in the UK. He's worked on no cool brand accounts, has won no creative awards and has no tattoos.
What he does have is over fourteen thousand catalogued ads and a decade-long obsession with working out why they worked. He's certainly no thought leader, but fortunately that's not what is needed to crack AI's creative-thinking problem. What is needed is someone willing to do the unglamorous work of curating the world's best campaigns into tactical containers that AI can actually learn from. Fortunately, that's the kind of gnarly content work George has been doing for a long time.
Is this site written by AI?
Every tactics article and product demo on this site is written by AI, using the thinking engines as its primary source. So the writing is a live demonstration of what the tools produce (and what you could produce).
That said, every article is edited and reviewed by George, the founder, before it goes live. Which means any overzealous use of 'em dashes, or any slightly breathless closing sentence that you spot - that's on him, not the AI. He offers his apologies in advance.