The Sea of Sameness

The sea of sameness - where brands go to die.

For far too long, I swam in that sea - that monotonous, derivative, boring sea of obsessing over our competitors' socials or looking in Ads Library at what everyone else is doing.

Then, we define success as making tiny incremental “improvements”, for instance, to take my CTR from 2.234% to 2.235%.

It seemed to make sense at the time.

There was logic to doing this, after all.

“If I could channel the collective ‘creativity’ of everyone making content,” I thought, “I’ll KNOW what’s working.”

Then the probability my content will “perform” will be nearly 100%, since I “looked at the data”.

It’s predictable, and, for a while, it seems like it “works”.

It’s safe to use Ads Library and stay on top of everyone else's socials.

It’s fun to use Gen AI to get one zillion ad variants with the click of a button.

Life is good.

…

Until it isn’t.

Then, I got hit with the arresting fear when I realized I RSVP’d YES to the “Race to the Bottom” Party for my brand.

Yes, swimming in the sea of sameness works well enough in the short term, and it was fun because there were lots of cool people there. But when I stepped back and looked at this over a longer period of time, I realized that if we continued down this road, we'd go out of business.

I learned that while all the ads of all the brands swimming in this sea of sameness will perform relatively similarly, we will all experience the same degradation of performance over time.

So while I realized it's nice to not feel alone, it's even nicer to stay in business.

...

What did we do?

Not that we totally stopped looking at other brands' ads, but we placed the vast majority of our focus on OUR process, OUR story, OUR frameworks, and OUR feedback loops.

This allowed us to think from first principles much more freely and create content that would truly add unique value to the lives of our audience.

We wouldn't always hit the mark, but we'd open ourselves up to the infinite upside that comes from exploring real creativity, rather than being obsessed with mitigating the downside that results when you look exactly like what everyone else is doing.

...

How can you apply this to your brand?

1) Stop being so other-focused. When you focus on 'what they're doing' so much, you lose sight of who you are. That awareness fading is nearly imperceptible, but is existentially dangerous. Shift the vast majority of focus internally, to what makes you you. Let that drive your creative process.

2) Be different. Stronger brand = bigger profits. Stronger brand ≠ looking like everyone else. A stronger brand can only happen when you present your company to the world as something singularly unique. More profits never come from being the same as anyone.

3) Do the opposite. Use the limited time allocated to everyone else's socials and ads to inform what you should be the opposite of. If they're doing X, explore what the complete opposite looks like