A few years back I met with a senior ad-person in Minneapolis. He asked me what kind of work I wanted to make.
I told him (and this is still my driving motivation) that there was this ad for MINI, the MINI driver's contract, that I had torn out of a magazine and put in on my wall. It was cool. Mostly because I was 14 and these were some tips on driving not like my parents. I still take a piece of advice from it:
"When you reach the apex of a curve: accelerate."
That kind of work, the work that people put on their walls (or share, or talk about), is what I want to make. He told me that's all fine and good, but not every brand or category we work on is going to be as cool as MINI.
I argued back that Old Spice wasn't really cool until W+K made it cool. That I thought every brand, every brief provided the opportunity to change the way people think about a product. And we, as creative people, should be grateful for that.
He still disagreed with me. Thus I left his agency, which I really liked, feeling dejected and confused. In retrospect it is just two different ways to look at the industry, then it was soul shattering.
As I said above, I still believe that it just takes a little more caring and divergent thinking to make a huge impact. What reminded me of this is the Dollar Shave Club video that has been making rounds. If budget razors can be cool then anything can be cool.
Even if no one cared about budget razors a week ago, they do now.