Double Edge.

Last week, the remarkable Bob Brihn and I published the weekly "fortune cookie” you’ll find at the bottom of this post.

In case you’re curious, "fortune cookies" are our code for the agency ads-cum-thought-starters-cum-why-nots we run on a regular basis. Always designed to go down with a crisply satisfying crunch, we hope you’ll be hungry for more of these snack-sized tidbits in a few hours.

Whiffing that, the following week.

This one was triggered by a hard-earned observation that a brand's decision to shoot for great in advertising says something important about the brand, not to mention the people running it.

But somehow, once the thing went public, I couldn’t help thinking about how this is a sharply serrated edge that cuts flesh, bone, and sinew both ways: just as the decision to aim high is a character signal, the decision not to is equally revealing.

It’s a truth I first encountered very early on, after being invited to spearhead a national project for a good-sized player in CPG food.

How that happened is still a bit of an ancient gobsmack, but it’s a story for another day.

What’s more on topic is how that led to an invitation to be the sole agency body, pulse still discernible, invited to sit in on a meeting of the company’s most senior product and marketing executives.

If memory serves, there wasn’t anyone below the senior director level in the room, moi being the all-too-nervously visible exception.

The Cirque de Comedie began with the second-most senior poohbah, and that is very senior indeed, standing up and delivering a decent imitation of a throat-clearing walrus.

“Let me kick us off by saying that here at (brand name redacted), we don't want to be on the leading edge of the leading edge. We’re much more comfortable being on the trailing edge of the leading edge."

“Wait, what?” I recall thinking, long before that trope got well and truly hackneyed. “They don’t want to be a leader but a follower? And, if that results in slow-but-marginal being the result, that’s okay?”

Answer: You bet.

It was reflected in the kind of advertising that’s traditionally made, packaged goods advertising so damned dull.

Now, here’s the full disclosure: I can’t say that was a bad management choice.  The company did just fine until it didn’t, and that was more than a few years later.

But it did result in the brand progressively losing more and more control of its fate.

And market share.

And competitive zest.

And, I have to believe, being able to attract top-tier people.

Gretzky, the hockey GOAT, famously observed you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Brands that don’t strive for uniqueness are certain not to achieve it. Especially in an era of frictionless AI-While-U-Wait production.

Creative folk, on all sides of the conference room, fall short every time they don’t work to stand tall.

So maybe choosing not to pursue greatness in how you market isn’t a character flaw. Maybe it’s a surrender.

But what fun is that?