How can your brand benefit from this technology? While the applications to travel, tourism and news based brands are the fairly obvious, there really is an opportunity here for any brand. As long as there is a consistent voice and an identity, your brand can have an opinion, anecdote or suggestion for just about anything. Recommend a restaurant that shares your brand’s taste for the exotic. Show your customers you care by sending get well wishes when they check in at the doctor’s office.

As is often the case with new technology, the true possibilities have yet to be imagined.

Naturally, video has many more advantages to the broadcaster – for instance, they can place an ad in front of the video story and force viewers to watch it. But like most people, when I’m forced to do something I rarely do it.

Big is plodding. Big runs at the speed of its slowest employees. Big is hard to maneuver. The economies of scale that big used to command are supplanted by the need for nimbleness and the ability to constantly re-adapt and re-focus. The way forward for the economy is based on millions of small businesses built to do specific tasks, not on a few big business that promises to do them all.

One can see a parallel in the production of technology itself. In the early 90s, software began to be built with a method called object oriented programming. Developers created individual modules that served a particular purpose – like, say a calculation function. These modules could then be joined to others to create a program: a new app was really just a bunch of pre-existing objects.

We already see businesses operating in this way: Google allows companies to port their map function to a plethora of devices. PayPal offers an easy way to introduce e-commerce to your site. Even on a Facebook page consumers can add functionality by introducing weather forecasts or show times. And outsourcing has been standard practice in the manufacturing industry for years.

This also provides a much-needed financial model for online businesses, too. After all, even though entrepreneurs are unable to charge consumers anything for their online services, someone, somewhere has to make money on something. In the object-oriented economy, new companies can be built by paying for and bundling the services created by a multitude of small existing ones.

Small is not only beautiful, it’s profitable. Big is neither.

It seems Rory, who only married his delightful wife because Mrs. Thatcher was already taken, has become a socialist. In his fortnightly column on technology he argued, quite rightly, that the power of the community is now more powerful than the corporation and, among other things, that hyperlinks destroy hierarchy. He concluded his piece by encouraging wikiers (sic) of the world to unite.

If that’s not communist talk I don’t know what is.

Marx always argued that socialism would come not to agrarian cultures first but to developed and industrialized nations because it was the only possible answer to the eventual crisis in capitalism. You can’t really blame Marx for the fact that so many nut jobs decided to inflict a totalitarian version of his theories on peasant societies before he could be proven right.

The defining tenet of socialism, that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned by the community as a whole, is probably the best description of the internet one can write.

Who owns the internet? We all do. Who holds the power? We all do. No hierarchy. No class. No borders.

Not Thatcher or Reagan or even Adam Smith seem so prescient as old Karl. Perhaps the only person it wouldn’t come as a shock to was Lincoln. After all, he talked about a government of the people by the people for the people in 1863. A mere 15 years after Karl published the Communist Manifesto.

It is clear to anyone with a conscience that untrammeled capitalism invariably breeds greed and corruption. It’s equally evident to anyone with a brain that putting a few fanatics in charge generally leads to misery and poverty.

The internet is the synthesis of a corrupt capitalist system and a dictatorship of the proletariat. It makes capitalists honest and destroys oligarchy.

Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. Pure Marxist dialectic.

Welcome, Comrade Rory.

There is one alternative though and that’s making the consumer your media. Yes, it’s old fashioned word-of-mouth but with a socially-networked-wiki-twist.

Today the circle of your consumers’ friends is not limited to their neighbors or colleagues. Potentially you could tap into an audience that ranges from hundreds to hundreds of thousands as your consumers digitally-network their way across the planet.

It isn’t actually that hard to do either.

You can engage your consumers with entertaining content. You can reward them for recommendations or for loyalty (that’s called putting your media money where your customer retention budget is). You can let them into your development so they feel part of process. You can treat them well, like answering their questions when they have them. You can solve a problem if they have one swiftly and politely. You could even make your product or service really useful and make sure it doesn’t break down.

In fact, if you start treating your customers as though they are the brightest stars in your organization, you might not need a media budget at all. Then again, if you want to continue to foist boring advertising and poorly designed products on the public, you’d better get the check book out.

Everyone’s favorite self-promoting adman of that era, Donny Deutsch, still calls his CNBC program The Big Idea. But the days when an agency and client could foist their big idea onto the public have long since past. We are no longer the arbiters of size, the consumer is. The consumer will decide whether you have a big idea or not – by ignoring it or by passing it around. They will decide whether your advertising idea is worthy of repeat viewing – not your media buy. They will decide whether the product is any good, not by buying it once, but by reading web reviews from other consumers. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken wasn’t a big idea until 14 million visitors decided it was.

So where does that leave an industry who is used to tying the size of its ideas to the size of the media budget? An industry that is fueled by big ideas and even bigger egos? Getting a decreasing amount of attention, money and responsibility from their clients.

In his book, the Long Tail, Chris Anderson argues that the internet creates a mass of small markets. And small markets demand not one big idea that means little to many, but many ideas that are relevant to a few.

Most clients intuitively understand the changing environment. You see it in the infinite array of niches now available. Did you ever think there’d be a market for reduced-fat fresh garden herb, hand cut and hand-cooked potato chips? When you stop caring about the size of your ideas you also find the time to have a lot more of them: and having a lot of ideas is key to building a brand these days. Media selection becomes irrelevant because you create ideas for all media. Forget being media-neutral, be media-comprehensive.

Small is practical as well as beautiful. A small idea doesn’t need as large a budget as a big idea. Which means your idea is under less scrutiny from the lawyers, accountants and naysayers. You don’t need to perfect a small idea. If 80% is good enough for a Microsoft, it’s certainly good enough for an ad. You don’t need to focus group a small idea: you can afford to test it in the real world. If it works, you’ll have achieved something spectacular at a fraction of the cost. And if it doesn’t, you won’t have blown the GDP of a small African nation on a single initiative – and no-one will be any the wiser.

Producing a lot of small ideas has only been possible because of two key changes in the last few years. The fragmentation of media and the technology revolution in production.

Most agencies and clients bemoan media fragmentation – they see dwindling audiences as a threat. And it’s definitely of concern if you believe in the world of the big idea – a big idea needs a big audience. But think small – as VW once asked us to do – and you can take advantage of the startling price decreases that have taken place over the last years. A spot on some cable TV networks these days will set you back a whopping $25. Still too rich for you? Then you can upload to youtube for nothing. The cost of production has come down just as dramatically. These days, a short film will cost you what used to be spent on the craft service table.

James Collins, in the book Built to Last: Succesful Habits of Visionary Companies, talks about the tyranny of “or” and embracing the genius of “and”. The combination of media fragmentation and decreases in production costs allows us to try out different things. Why choose between ideas when you can choose all of them?

The big idea, today, is small ideas.