Read a category’s campaigns back to back and a strange thing happens. The logos change. The idea does not. The same aspiration, the same tone, the same tidy resolution, dressed in a different brand’s colours. Everyone is making the same campaign and paying to make it themselves.
This is not a talent problem. The teams are good. It is a structural one, and it starts long before anyone opens a deck.
What actually makes ideas converge
Four forces push independent teams toward the same idea. They compound.
Briefing from the category, not the brand
Most briefs begin with a competitive audit. You study what the category does, find the gaps, and aim for them. But every serious competitor runs the same audit and finds the same gaps. You converge on the same “white space” because you are all reading from the same map. The brief that produces a different idea starts from what is specifically true about this brand, not what is missing in the category.
Judging execution instead of tension
In the room, ideas get judged on how good they look and sound. Craft is easy to feel and easy to agree on. The tension underneath, the reason anyone should care, is harder to interrogate, so it often goes unchecked. A beautifully executed idea built on a generic tension is a generic idea with good production values.
Confusing the idea with the execution
“A film where the product saves the day” is not an idea. It is an execution of an idea that a hundred brands could run. The real idea is the specific thought the work is built to prove. If your idea only survives as one asset, you have an ad, not a platform.
Choosing safety at the fork
Every idea reaches a fork: the sharper, riskier version and the rounder, safer one. Committees select for consensus, and consensus rounds every edge. Ten teams facing the same fork, optimising for the same approval, land in the same safe middle. Interchangeability is the predictable output of a process tuned to avoid disagreement.
What will not fix it
The instinctive responses treat the symptom and leave the cause in place.
- More ideas. Volume from the same starting point produces variations on the same average idea. You get a longer list, not a different one.
- Bigger production. Spending more to execute a generic idea makes it a more expensive generic idea. Craft raises the floor, it does not move the idea.
- A louder execution. Turning up the volume on a swappable thought does not make it un-swappable. It makes it a louder version of what everyone else is saying.
How to break out of it
- Find the tension only this brand can own. Not a category truth everyone shares. The specific friction, belief or contradiction that belongs to this brand and this audience. If a competitor could sign off on your tension, it is not sharp enough yet.
- Commit to a point of view. A platform says something the category will not. Decide what you are willing to stand for, and against. A position that makes some people nod and some people bristle is doing its job.
- Pressure-test the idea across formats. Take the thought off the film and run it through a launch, an activation, a key visual and a line of copy. If it holds its meaning everywhere, it is a platform. If it collapses without the film, it was an execution.
- Protect the edge at the fork. Name the sharper version and the safer one out loud, and make the safe choice a decision someone has to argue for, not the default the process drifts to.
The through-line is simple. Interchangeable ideas are not a failure of imagination at the end of the process. They are the natural result of a generic tension at the start of it. Sharpen the input and the output stops being swappable.
