Lipstick on a Pig

I can clearly recall the straw that broke the camel’s back on my ability to tolerate agency desire for cost savings over true commitment to breakthrough creativity.

It was a traditional post-mortem meeting. Happens after each pitch. This one revolved around one we didn’t win. Instead of dissecting our agency offerings, discussing why our research missed the mark, reviewing if we put the right team together, this meeting focused on the edgy creative props my team created for the meeting. The client loved them. They even asked us to ship them to their offices so that they could be displayed. The agency leadership hated them. They hadn’t ordered them. My team had taken creative liberties to make our pitch stand out, but we didn’t follow protocol. We didn’t get permission to be creative.

The meeting ended with that straw: “At our agency we have five approaches we like to use. They save us money. Let’s stick to those from here on out.”

The reality is that most agencies are stuck in the same rut… committed to cost-saving repetition. It’s not that there is a problem with figuring out good approaches to bringing ideas to life and then leveraging them over and over for expediency. But putting a different shade of lipstick on the same pig over and over? C’mon!

Inspiration is all around us. As effective storytellers, we succeed the most when allow ourselves to constantly be stimulated and when we demonstrate unique approaches to even the most mundane assignments. We are most relatable when we engage in ways that leverage moments in time, that seek to be real and transparent, that speak in the voice of our target with insights, anecdotes, idioms and ideas that sound like they do.

And you won’t find that inspiration just sitting around the office. From plays to movies, meals with diverse audiences, trips and adventures, books, magazines, podcasts, concerts, galleries, even simple walks down the street. Ideas come from the various inputs we enable to impact our thinking. All serve to stimulate ideas and generate inspiration. You can certainly find ways to generate ideas in a cost-effective way, but make sure you're not allowing yourself to fall in a rut. Don't sacrifice routine for amazing.

Are you being inspired? When’s the last time you did something out of the norm that pushed your thinking in a new direction? Have you changed up your routine to enable new stimulus, new ways of thinking, new inspirations? As a brand storyteller, these are crucial questions to consider. The way you answer will mean the difference between mediocrity and breakthrough success. Pick a different starting point to keep things fresh. And throw that lipstick out.