Hey,

Three brands told me the same thing in one week, and none of them said the words I expected.

Not one of them said they needed more creative. They all had plenty.

What they said was that they'd run out of ideas.

 

One of them put it almost exactly like this. The quality is good. Everything is well made. There's just nothing creative in it.

That's a founder describing their own content, and it's a much more useful diagnosis than "we need more volume."

 

Here's how a brand gets there, and it happens through good decisions.

Early in the year you find a format that outperforms. It's clear, it's repeatable, and your audience responds.

So you do more of it. That's correct.

Then it becomes the plan, because it's the easiest thing to plan. It's replicable, it's schedulable, you can brief it to anyone, and the output is predictable.

Meanwhile the new ideas get made, go out, and land softer than the proven format. Of course they do. New angles almost always underperform a proven one on the first try.

So you stop making them. Rationally.

Eighteen months later you've got good production and real volume. A saturated audience, too. And nobody in the building who can name an idea outside the proven format.

One of those founders said the way out loud. They need to lock themselves in a room and work out what they'd actually find exciting.

 

So this is a portfolio problem. Everything you own is invested in one position, because that position has the best track record.

Another partner shipping more assets does nothing about that.

 

The fix is a budget line, not a brainstorm.

I always preach the 70/20/10 rule.

70% of budget and effort goes into proven formats. Things you know have worked before, so they have a high chance of working again.

20% goes into adjacent bets. A new format on a proven concept, a new audience on a proven format, that kind of thing.

And 10% is the big swings. Something completely new, that you've never tested, where you genuinely have no idea whether it'll work.

That last 10% is the part that dies first when things get busy. Ring-fence it, and spend it on angles and formats you have no evidence for yet.

Then judge that 10% on a different timeline. A proven format gets judged in five days. A new concept gets three attempts before you call it. The first version of a new idea is almost never the good one.

And brief it as a question rather than a format. "What would make somebody stop who has already scrolled past us forty times" produces different work from "make four more of these."

The brands with deep creative benches simply never let the winning format eat the whole budget.

 

Your move this week: open your last 30 days of creative and count the distinct concepts. Not assets, concepts. Under five and your bench is thinner than your volume suggests. Q4 is a bad time to find that out.

If it helps, I wrote about why one winning ad is a risk rather than a strength a while back. Same problem, at a bit of an earlier stage.

Talk soon,
Andrej

PS: Reply "concepts" and tell me how many you counted. I'll tell you honestly whether that's enough for the quarter you're about to have.