Why best practice kills creativity. And your bottom line.
"There are people following best practice." While I love Tom Goodwin’s coining of average-a-tising at his recent ADMA keynote, it's the best practice line that stood out. I hate it.
The tyranny of best practice
You've heard them all before:
"It's best practice to have the logo in the first five seconds"
"Everything needs to be above the fold"
"People don't read long copy"
"Use the rule of thirds"
"Always include a clear call-to-action"
These aren't insights. They're shackles.
Lawyers vs. creatives. When precedents make sense
Lawyers have precedents, and they live by them. That makes sense; they're building on established law, seeking consistency and predictability. Legal precedents create stability in a system that needs it.
But precedents in advertising? No thanks. Because when we follow creative precedents, we're essentially saying, "Let's do what worked before." But the whole point of great creative work is to do what hasn't been done yet. To break through the noise. To make people stop and think and feel something they haven't felt before. Sure, we can borrow and be inspired by what’s come before us, but to follow is to be left behind.
The shield of mediocrity
Best practice is a shield for mediocrity. An excuse to play safe: “but we’re following best practice, it’s not our fault.”
When someone defaults to best practice, they're avoiding the hard work of actually thinking about the specific challenge, the specific audience, the specific moment in time. They're trading creativity for comfort, breakthrough thinking for bureaucratic safety. I call it wallpaper. It might be nice to look at, but it doesn’t do much.
If a tight brief is creative freedom, then best practice is a creative shackle.
The economics of average
But here's where Tom Goodwin really nailed the business case against this thinking:
"If we are going to save $50,000 of production money, but we're going to produce ads that no one really remembers, and then we're going to spend $1 million on media because no one's remembering it, the economics don't really work out."
This is the brutal math of average-a-tising. Sure, you can save on production, AI content is cheap and easy to produce. Or use stock, stick to templates, follow safe, tested formulas. But then you have to spend in multiples so you can rise above the generic noise, and hopefully into people's consciousness through sheer media weight.
It's like trying to make wallpaper more noticeable by putting it on more walls. It's still wallpaper.
The race to the bottom
The race to average is going to cost the majority of businesses everything. Because in a world where everyone follows the same best practices, or worse, uses the same AI with copied-and-pasted engineered prompts, everyone ends up looking the same, sounding the same, feeling the same.
When everything is average, nothing breaks through. When nothing breaks through, you need more media spend. When you need more media spend, your margins shrink. When your margins shrink, you cut production budgets. When you cut production budgets, you default to... best practice.
It's a death spiral dressed up as sound business thinking.
Breaking the cycle
The brands that break through aren't following best practice, they're creating tomorrow's case studies while everyone else is still copying yesterday's successes. They understand that the biggest risk isn't doing something different. The biggest risk is disappearing into the beige noise of average, where nobody notices you at all.
They know that a memorable campaign at half the media spend will always outperform a forgettable campaign at double the media spend.
The creative alternative
At the Pitch Collective, we've built our entire model around avoiding this trap. When creative specialists truly own their work from concept to completion, they're not hiding behind best practice. They're thinking from first principles about what will actually work for this client, this audience, this challenge.
Because the people who create the strategy are the same people who execute it. The people who develop the concept are the same people who see it through. There's no room for best practice hand-offs that dilute the thinking.
The bottom line
Best practice doesn't build brands, it builds beige. And AI just builds it faster.
The work that gets remembered, that changes minds, that drives business results? It comes from understanding the rules well enough to break them intelligently.
So the next time someone mentions "best practice," ask yourself, do you want to be the best at being average? Or do you want to be the only one doing what you do?
Because there's no best practice for being unforgettable.
Want creative thinking that breaks through instead of blending in? Contact our creative agency to discover how the Pitch Collective can help you escape the tyranny of best practice.