Great is the enemy of good.

At the risk of raising the flag of hackdom, it seems that many of us in this business use the quest for “great” as a copout. By all means, let’s aim high, swing for the fences, blah blah blah. But, if great still means what it used to mean, it’s rare for any of us to have a great idea, and highly improbably for most of us. Hanging our hopes on executing a great idea can undermine our motivation to execute what is realistically the best we can do most of the time—a really good idea.

Very often, I see creatives who fight like crazy for what they’ve deemed a great idea. When it doesn’t get sold (because it wasn’t so great, or for a million other reasons having to do with agency and client myopia, paranoia, stupidity and the like), the creatives retreat and immediately resort to “let’s sell something” mode. Whatz!?

Maybe a handful of times in my experience have I witnessed a creative team going back to the drawing board, especially after the second round fails, armed with that legendary Chiat Day battle cry to return to the client with something better than what they couldn’t sell the first time.

This phenomenon of the quick retreat and shift from “create great” mode to “Let’s sell something” mode explains, at least in part, why the vast majority of ads, regardless of medium, fall into the just okay-to-dreadful range. Not only do many of us give up on great, we can’t even seem to get it up to go for good.

Would you trade our ad world in which the very occasional great ad is sold and produced, but where 95% of the ads are pretty bad or worse, for one in which, say, 40% of the ads were quite good, but we never saw a great one?

Littlejohn! RE: An Idea Reality Check, loved it overall, but . . . reading a book is experiencing a movie in my head? Whatz!? Experientially speaking, movies and books are similar experiences in only respect. Either way, someone tells you a story. Beyond that, they are profoundly different kinds of experience. At least in my head.