Balancing originality with strategic relevance
Launch library · evergreen read
An idea can be genuinely original and still fail completely in practice, if the originality has drifted so far from the underlying strategy that an audience is left admiring the cleverness on display without ever understanding what it was actually meant to achieve, particularly once a decision has already been made public.
Equally, an idea entirely tethered to strategy but stripped of any real surprise rarely earns attention in a crowded environment full of competing messages, however sound its underlying logic looks on paper to the people who happened to approve it internally, regardless of how the internal debate was originally resolved.
The useful discipline is asking two separate questions of any idea together rather than in isolation from one another: does this genuinely stand out from everything around it, and does it still serve the objective the work exists to achieve in the first place, even before any formal metrics have been agreed upon.
Ideas that pass only one of those two tests tend to look impressive in a pitch meeting and disappoint afterwards in practice, whether through indifference from the audience or through results that never quite connect back to what the campaign was meant to do, especially when the story involves more than one organisation.