Why looking for formulas in advertising can backfire

Wake at 5.12am. Eat cornflakes. Walk briskly. Become a genius by lunch. Business books adore visible rituals because rituals can be sold. Judgement is awkward, tacit and annoyingly resistant to a seven-step diagram. So we copy the founder’s morning, the creative team’s workshop and the salesperson’s exact script, hoping talent was hiding in the stationery.

This is corporate cargo culting with better coffee. A company borrows another brand’s short-video cadence but not its point of view. A product team installs stand-ups, sprints and sticky notes, then wonders why the decisions remain timid. The ritual survived the journey; the reason for it was lost at baggage reclaim.

Process is useful. It protects time, coordinates people and prevents avoidable mistakes. But once compliance with the method becomes evidence of quality, the scaffolding has started charging admission as the building. Following the framework does not rescue forgettable work.

Formulas should provoke questions, not close them. What is peculiar about this customer, this problem, this moment? Which assumption does the template smuggle in? Where does the current case refuse to fit? Often the useful idea is precisely the bit the worksheet calls an exception.

Anyone can copy breakfast. The scarce skill is seeing which fact deserves provocation and which fashionable routine deserves the bin. If a formula could reliably produce original advertising, it would immediately produce a great deal of identical advertising—which, come to think of it, explains plenty.