WHY I REFUSE TO STOP TRYING. OR, OH, HEY THERE, DR. RICK.

Advertising today? It’s a dumpster fire of stupidity. Flames everywhere. Smoke, choking the sky. Birds dropping like bricks due to the current climate of safe metrics. 

D'oh.

Brand erosion is everywhere with the possible exception of Dr. Rick and a handful of other advertisers like Apple, and Etsy, to name just three.

Somehow, the tenacious and the stubborn— the people with real stones— are still doing great work despite the onslaught of smoke and mirrors. 

Case in point, the good doctor up above.

DIFFERENTIATE OR DIE. OR, MAKING TENACITY YOUR BFF.

The answer?

It's sure as shit not in buzzwords, PowerPoints labeled "Vision 2025", metrics, or god forbid mergers that further water down the tea of differentiation.

I may not have all the answers, but I’ll tell you what I do have. I have ideas. Wild ideas. Loud ideas. Messy ideas. Big ideas. And it's because of the best brands out there that I refuse to succumb to mediocrity. 

Ideas that lead to discomfort and oftentimes, corporate hand-wringing. This is not a bad thing. It's a damn good thing, as I see it. Good work makes people nervous.

I WORRY MORE ABOUT MAKING STUPID ADVERTISING.

I worry about the day I stop listening to my gut and following my instincts.

My ideas don’t ask permission to show up. They just do. No RSVP. They crash into my head like a spinning race car that’s hit an invisible oil slick. 

They haunt me like a handful of bolts in a spinning dryer, waking me at ungodly hours with their relentless clanging. 

No, I don’t worry about advertising making me look stupid. I worry about making stupid advertising. So I never go back to sleep with a germ festering in my brain.

GET UP AND WRITE ME DOWN. NOW, BEFORE I’M GONE. 

I get up. I write it down. I do.

I type barely negligible notes into my smartphone at 3:43 am. These ideas don’t wait, and they sure as hell don’t come back if I ignore ‘em. 

They’re the kind of ideas that don’t just answer the brief—they push past it. They take a hard run at differentiating.

Making something or someone uncomfortable is the price my ideas often pay.

They come from free thinking — and reading the brief in its entirety right before I crash at night. Yes, I entrust my imagination to subconsciously work the graveyard shift while I sleep.

NEVER STOP DREAMING. EVER.

Forget the ping-pong tables. The brainstorming sessions. The tidy group-think decisions that check all the boxes and get dressed up as passable solutions. 

Forget everything foisted upon you in the office. Listen to your gut. Follow your internal compass. Free think morning, noon, and night. If you want to survive in this business, bring something sharp to the table every time. 

A shiv of true insight. A shank that’s impossible to extract. 

Something sharp that cuts.

SHOW UP WITH WORK THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE. 

The brief? It’s not scripture. Nor is it the Ten Commandments. It’s a suggestion, a placeholder arrived at through a process.

A hypothesis.

If you’re stuck, the hypothesis might be the problem. Try focusing on a support point, just on one facet of the brief, and flip it on its head. 

Push it until it snaps, then walk it back just enough to escape being accused of sheer lunacy.

WHAT’S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN? 

“Too bold,” they may mutter. “The client won’t buy it,” they might grumble. “We can’t show that!” 

The point of my job isn’t to make people comfortable. My job is to drag the client to somewhere better. Agencies, too.

Advertising isn’t about rules. It's about having an idea that rules.

DON’T BRING METRICS TO A KNIFE FIGHT. 

I bet on my gut.

Because betting on myself means taking the swing, even if I miss and the bat catches fire on its way down.

I’d rather go down differentiating than aiming for milquetoast. 

Advertising done well is about risk, about noise, about making people pay attention. 

SO WHAT’S IT REALLY ALL ABOUT? 

It’s about a man named Dr. Rick who is unwilling to allow people to become their parents but is, however, willing to help save folks money by bundling their auto and home coverage. 

It’s about the gift of cheese to France from your friends at Etsy as a way of thanking a great country for gifting us the Statue of Liberty. Oh crap, the gift bar has been raised.

It’s about an AI technology that diplomatically helps a human being negotiate the return of stolen officeplace pudding. Apple AI, no less.  

It’s about making the world slightly uncomfortable and becoming impossible to ignore because of it. 

Did I do The Dr. Rick, The Etsy cheese spot, or the latest Apple AI spot? 

Nope. 

But they’re the three most current reasons why I refuse to stop trying.

#theadvertisingsurvivalguide

Cameron Day is the Author of The Advertising Survival Guide trilogy, available for all your holiday gifting needs. He's available for pep talks, public speaking, and motivational mayhem of all kinds, including ideation workshops. He refuses to cut his hair. Maybe he just hasn't received the right offer yet.

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