Once a year, the New York Times magazine section salutes the year in ideas. As they put it, they have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009. The most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations.

And once a year, I salute the section.

The ideas they cover range from the finding that empty beer bottles make better weapons to waste tracking to the kitchen sink that puts out fires. But since this is a blog about marketing ideas my favorite is headlined, “The advertisement that watches you.” It tells of a poster in a bus shelter in Berlin sponsored by Amnesty International. It showed a couple, with the man having his arm around his girlfriend or wife. But if no one in the shelter was looking at the poster, the image changed; now the man was raising his fist as if to strike the woman. (There is a slight lag in the switch, so you can notice that the poster was changing its image.) It used a camera and face-tracking software, to demonstrate what may happen when nobody is looking.

It was designed by Jung von Matt, a firm that bills itself as being in the business of “attention warfare” (love it/hate them).

Take a look at the poster, and all the other ideas in the magazine. It’s more stimulating than a double latte extra shot Grande.

The above is a recent ad for Ireland. The slogan is, “Innovation comes naturally,” and the headline is “Step-by-step logic will only take your business so far. Maybe it’s time for a leap.”

I had seen the ad a while ago, and thought it would make a good blog post someday, since it is a sentiment with which I completely agree. But I hesitated using it, since I thought it might make too brief a post, and would perhaps be repetitive rather than insightful.

Then I saw an interview in The Wall Street Journal with Michael O’Leary, Chief Executive of Ryanair, the Irish no-frills airline. His philosophy brings to life the kind of thinking that makes the ad for Ireland credible. And his beliefs are worth paying close attention to.

Turns out Ryanair carried more international passengers last year than any other airline in the world. But you don’t get there only by lowering costs, because then anyone could do it. You do it with a good idea; in this case, the basic positioning that differentiates you, and from which everything else follows. In Mr. O’Leary’s analysis, “air transport …is a commodity. It’s not some life-changing sexual experience, which is what the other high-fare airlines have tried to convince you that it is.”

How do you bring that to marketing life? “You have to come at it (cost cutting) with some imagination and some passion.” Then came the words I want you to memorize…or at least write down: We do that by having an open, enthusiastic culture that encourages people to come up with wacky ideas—the madder the better.

Do you have a strategy that differentiates you from your competitors? Do you encourage your people—and yourself—to come up with crazy ideas?

Maybe it’s time for your leap.

Lately I have been reading about the amazing insights you can get from the collective wisdom of crowds. "The more the better" seems to be the rationale; thousands of people offering their opinion will lead you to results you could not otherwise get.

Maybe. But I do have to inquire about the respondents, as was asked in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”

Add up your results, and you will, by definition, get an average outcome. For every keen, actionable insight, which you will have to identify, you will gets tons of off-target, obvious, just plain dumb input.

The Zagat Survey uses this technique for their restaurant reviews. Anyone can voice an opinion, results get tabulated and voila, a score is printed for the food, ambiance, etc. But would you rather see what thousands of people think about a menu—people whose opinion on clothing, politics, and football teams you would completely disagree with— than take the word of your favorite restaurant critics? Do the opinions of random strangers mean more to you than the insights of Frank Bruni, Ed Levine, or for that matter, a friend whose opinion you have come to respect?

Further, how many people make a crowd? Do you hire one consultant when needed? Or two, or three or forty?  Should a focus group (a traditional research technique, using a panel of six to ten random participants) with qualitative results mean more than the quantitative responses of thousands? Yes, the Internet does make it easier and quicker to get thousands of opinions. But does this make the results more meaningful? (There are exceptions, there always are. But since this is my blog, I don’t have to talk about them.)

I suggest you use any “mob” research you do as a guide, not as proof that your preconceived concept is the way to go. If you really believe in what you have created, it is a good idea to take the opinions of the crowd with a pound of salt.

What do you think?