Haystack Needles.

“Too many people’s portfolios only show what they’ve done rather than what they’re capable of” —Tom Tieche, an early star in the Hal Riney pantheon.

Puts me in mind of something a creative partner once attributed to Helmut Krone: “The job is to show them the dark side of the moon, what’s never been seen.”

And thence to the twisted dimensions of present-day advertising per System1’s Jon Evans: “Half of advertising is no better than watching cows eat grass.”

Lovely image, that. 

Not very arguable when all the channels and all the screens are all filled with an unending parade of been there, seen that, will see it again in the next few seconds.

So here’s the question:

Where the hell do we find the different-thinkers, the driven adventurers, the creatively ambitious, the “people crazy enough to think they can change the world” who are willing to change all that?

I know, for a fact, they exist.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with, hiring, and being hired by people who are every bit as hungry to make the leap from good to great as any of the names written on hall of fame walls.

They are rare to the point of painful exasperation.

As if trying to find a blade of hay in a sky-scraping stack of needles, equipped with only a malfunctioning magnetometer.

Goes double for the client types who demand ideas they’ve never seen before, instead of retreads they have.

Calling them uncommon would be an outrageous understatement.

Your actual mileage may differ, but the clients I’ve truly admired are those who hire you because of—not in spite of—a lack of category experience.

They aren’t looking at where you’ve been and what you’ve done in previous lives; they want to know where you can take them.

And they know that reverting to saved isn’t just bad for morale. 

It’s crazy bad for business.

On this point, we now have reams of data proving that “Creatively effective ads generate 5X the ROI of 'dull' campaigns." 

We also know that making a brand and/or its advertising un-dull starts with the obvious: being unique.

Unique in the value you offer. Unique in what you stand for. Unique in how you present yourself.

The remarkable Bob Brihn, who, by the way, is an exemplar of a relentless reacher for the previously unseen, counsels that “the loss of uniqueness has become ubiquitous.”

Especially when it seems inevitable that the world is about to explode with automated ad-making, all predicated on best-guess approximations of what’s worked on a statistical basis.

What could possibly go right?

Answer: with the right brands run by the right people who agree “if it’s been out there before, it ain’t going out the door” — quite a bit.

Otherwise, not so much.

Brings me back to Tieche, who I call “Ten Buck” because of his, well, hit-and-miss NFL and NCAA betting track record. His favorite Monk quote: “The only cats worth anything are the cats that take chances. Sometimes I play things that I never heard myself." 

Got to dig that.