Don't Benchmark to Beige
Reject algorithmically curated mid mass culture
Virgil Abloh didn't become an icon by benchmarking his creativity against safe, predictable norms. He didn’t design to algorithms or optimise for beige goo mediocrity. If you benchmark against the mean, you benchmark against the most average culture has to offer. The least offensive, the least memorable. Virgil didn’t benchmark against Next and Superdry, neither should you.
He chose disruption, redefined boundaries, and inspired an entire generation by daring to be radically different. When he worked with Ikea, he found ways to turn everyday furniture and household items into art. He could have sloughed it in, but instead he worked relentlessly to question what a chair was, it’s function, the utility it offers, at what point it was design and functional and at what point it crossed over into becoming art and serving no function.
When was the last time you cared so deeply about questioning the weaknesses and limitations placed on you by a brief?
We’re led to believe that algorithms and culture are gamified and that if we ask ChatGPT nicely enough it can repeat back all the best practices we need to know for the channels we’re asked to work in. AI enriched listening tools will be able to benchmark against our competitors and other brands with similar audiences and followership sizes in a matter of seconds.
From here we just need to follow these five simple tricks and edit to these templates using the current trending tunes and presto! Something logically safe, that should promise the same results as the others already doing it, delivering the KPIs with minimal risk.
If it doesn’t do as well as expected, we’ll find an excuse. A big thing happened in the news that day, maybe it was a sports final or the hottest day of the year, maybe a politician did a thing, the CPM on paid media was higher than expected because of a thing. There’s always a thing to blame.
And if it did marginally better? That’s because we’re better than the competition, the product is stronger, the leadership better, the creative team more inspired, we worked harder, we worked smarter, the brand is truly authentic and relatable, our communications deep and meaningful.
Sounds familiar?
If it does than there’s little point in you or your work, and as soon as the CFO figures that out, there will be an AI tool found that can do it for them without sick days or a pension. A restructuring warning will be sent out, resulting in you and your department suddenly bringing homemade lunches to work instead of ordering in.
You didn’t get into this to fill in colouring books and deck templates of other people’s mediocre work.
Sure, 95% of briefs start with clients requesting bold, beautiful, unprecedented ideas. Yet, inevitably, they demand proof that similar brands have succeeded doing exactly the same thing.
Your job is to convince them to not aim to create work that safety dances somewhere around the 68% circling the mean, the heartland of mid. It’s to take a shot at the top 5% or 0.3%, and be happy to accept that for every fifty ideas you may land one unicorn and twenty donkeys, but that’s much better than landing fifty slabs of beige goo that nobody cares about.
Better a stable of interesting donkeys loved by those who truly understand your culture, than a collection of random swings at passing cultural events, selected by AI, that do nothing for your product or brand and are forgotten within seconds.
Don’t benchmark to beige.