Familiar things feel safer, truer, or more likable.
More quotesPeople paid to inspect an advert every day become bored long before the public has properly noticed it. The remarkable bit is how quickly this occupational condition gets promoted into a national mood.
An agency watches every edit. Brand managers see each adaptation, research debrief and internal deck. Six months later, “everyone is tired of it” means twelve people have suffered industrial quantities of exposure. Nobody has counted public frequency.
John Bartle’s phrase “imaginative repetition” captures the escape from the false choice. Recognition can persist as situations change. A character can enter a new story. A sound can signal a different joke. A familiar behaviour can appear around a new product. The repeat belongs to memory; the invention belongs to what happens next.
Fresh routes feel exciting inside the business because novelty is visible immediately. Recognition is quieter. It saves a fraction of effort when a message appears, which is commercially useful and emotionally underwhelming during a creative review.
So fourteen handsome routes appear on the wall. Remove their logos and five could advertise insurance, four beer, three a bank and two practically anything. Their freshness is undeniable because nobody has seen them before. Their ownership is equally mysterious.
The research brief asks which route feels most original. Brand attribution appears nowhere in the questionnaire. The fieldwork agency has requested a decision on whether to add it.