The Blinder’s Advantage

I often get asked the question “why did you start an agency?” Truth be told, I didn’t. Or rather, I didn’t know I was starting an agency. Because I didn’t know what an agency was. I was standing at the base of a new mountain, and I didn’t realize I was supposed to have a map.

When I started Movers+Shakers with my co-founder, we set out to work with brands to tell their stories in a fun and entertaining way. This was inspired by my background as a storyteller, creating music and dance videos for myself, with my friends, and posting them online. My partner Evan (now co-founder, husband, and co-dad) saw the work that I was creating, how people were loving it, and sharing it, and asked if I’d be interested in doing that for brands.

Me: You mean, like dancing around a Coke can?”

Evan: Sure, maybe!

Me: Would they pay us?

Evan: Totally - brands are always looking for fun and entertaining ways to capture attention and tell their story.

There was no “do you want to start an agency” or “let’s go create our own shop and do it better than the rest.” We set out to tell great stories, work with brands who wanted our style and approach, and make some money. It wasn’t until a few years later when we received a proper ‘agency brief’ from a client that the concept of an agency hit my radar. And at that point, I thought to myself “is that what we are?”

Race horses wear blinders to keep them focused on the race ahead, and to keep them from getting thrown off by the chaos happening all around them. There’s no peripheral vision, no comparison, no looking over your shoulder. Just vision and drive.

Creating something new requires vision and drive. Periphery can be a dead weight, limiting innovation.

Insiders will try to improve the status quo by 10%. They’ll work harder, or smarter, to make things better, more efficient, faster. OK, maybe 20%. The superpower of the outsider is that they will, by virtue of their ignorance, accidentally create something ten times different because they didn’t know what was possible (or rather, that it was supposed to be impossible). The horse runs as fast as it can, not “10% faster than the horse next to it” because it can’t see the other horse. Outsiders do it differently because they don’t know the playbook exists.

Years after starting M+S, I learned that most agencies are started by insiders who are all reading the same playbooks and hiring from the same pools. It leads to an echo chamber effect, and a kind of intellectual incest - a gravitational pull towards sameness that results in work and new agencies that is, at best, a 10% improvement on the status quo.

When you do not have the industry manual, you create your own. This often means doing things that may seem ridiculous to people around you. Here are some of the things we did that we later learned were outlandish for our industry:

Job Titles
One of our first hires was a “creative” because, well, they were pretty creative. Apparently the industry prefers titles like “Copywriter” and “Art Director.” Seems a little limiting to me.

Culture of Joy
Early on we decided we wanted to create a positive, joyful place to work, filled with optimism and possibility. We later learned that was quite not the norm in the advertising industry, and heard horror stories of corrosive behavior, of creative work thrown across the room, of people just dealing with it because that’s how it’s done. I still prefer our approach.

Music
When we did our first campaign on TikTok, we had the idea to create or own song for a client. The team at TikTok told us “no, no, you use popular music that’s already on the platform, you don’t write your own.” We did it anyway. That campaign 7 years later still holds the record for the most viral campaign ever on TikTok, and kicked off a tidal wave of other brands who (you guessed it), wrote their own branded songs for TikTok (many that were created with us).

Once you realize that ignorance itself can be a superpower for innovation, a hard truth sets in. Ignorance only lasts so long. The true superpower is to hold on to that ignorance, to not lose the outsider perspective, and to intentionally ignore what lies beyond the blinders.

There’s a story I love about a woman who was cooking dinner for friends, and she cut off the end of a brisket before putting it on a pan and sticking it in the oven. Her friend asked her why she did that, and she said “oh, it’s how you cook a brisket – my mom taught me.” And so she asked her mom why she cut off the end of the brisket and she said “oh, it’s how you cook a brisket – your grandmother taught me.” And so they asked grandma why she cut off the end of the brisket. She said “I only had one small pan and the brisket didn’t fit in it, so I had to cut off the end.”

Insiders are often operating in a world of small pans; limitations handed down by mentors and bosses. They find themselves wasting good meat because they were taught the pan wasn’t big enough, and they never questioned why. That is the center of gravity of sameness.

It’s not nefarious, it’s necessary. People join a company, they learn how it’s done, not because they lack creativity, but because it makes it easier to work together. Ultimately, this becomes their playbook. They bring it to their next place of work, tweak their playbook (oh, we use this tool here? That acronym? Cool.) and guess what…more of the same. It’s one of the issues that I don’t believe in portfolio schools, because they are essentially assembly lines for brisket-cutters. They are training the next generation to master the limitations of a pan that no longer exists.

Even as an outsider, you will inevitably feel a gravitational pull towards sameness, towards ‘the way it’s done.” I experienced this as we grew our company, hiring people who had industry experience. I quickly found myself surrounded by canonical expectations and rules, rituals and thinking that seemed absurd to me, but safe and standard to everyone else.

The true work is to define the noise as just that – noise – and to ignore it. There will always be people saying “that’s not how it’s done” and you must say to yourself “good, because I’m not trying to do it how it’s done.” It will be a fight. It will be hard. It will be worth it.

And then there will be times where you have this brilliant idea, one that in your mind, will completely transform the industry. You’re giddy, like you’ve unlocked this secret, and can’t wait to share it. And when you do, someone will say back to you “oh yeah, I did that at my last company, it’s called a ______.”

You can’t really break the rules unless you know what the rules are.

When I started writing musicals, I got accepted into a writing workshop where, over the course of years, I learned from some of the masters in the industry; the tips, tricks, standards, best practices, and rules of writing for the theater. This training was life-changing for me, and unlocked a whole new arena of creativity. It also taught me a valuable lesson: you can’t really break the rules unless you know what the rules are.

There’s an obvious tension here between the idea of keeping your blinders on, and learning the rules. That tension is critical to success. In my writing workshop, there were a few peers who didn’t want the rulebook – they didn’t want to bear the weight of “best practices,” they wanted to innovate, to do it their way, to write what made sense to them. Most of the time those songs….didn’t sound very good. They were unique and out there, sure, but they lacked a foundation. It sounded like New Age Jazz, so untethered that no one could make sense of the song. You can’t break the rules effectively unless you’ve mastered the craft to support your creativity.

See, with music, there are some known rules that are tried, tested, and frankly, just work. The A-A-B-A form was the predominant song structure for all music written between 1920-1950, including almost half of all of Rolling Stones’ songs. The I–V–vi–IV chord progression is the most widely popular and widely used chord progression in a pop song. Ever. These “rules” don’t need to be re-invented, because they work phenomenally well. In fact, if you embrace them as your sandbox, you can unlock an entirely new avenue of creativity, as proven by the thousands of popular songs, and famous artists, that wrote infamous sonds grounded in these rules.

There is, however, a danger here. If you misinterpret your superpowers of The Blinders Advantage as a license to ignore fundamentals of your craft or industry, you’re not pursuing innovation. You are pursuing ego.

I’ve certainly found myself doing this on occasion, digging in my heels to push my new-age idea forward (and make everyone else wrong in the process) because I wanted to get my way. I wanted to “innovate.” Ultimately, what I learned was that I wanted to do it differently because I could, but different for the sake of being different was just my ego in disguise. And the question I had to ask myself was, am I making it unique or am I making it excellent?

It’s important to make your ego itch; to be willing to lead with your curiosity hat rather than your ego hat. Because at the end of the day, Outsider Intelligence is not about innovation for innovation’s sake, effort put in to being different. It’s about driving excellent performance.

In the business world, it’s easy to become obsessed with the mindset of “was it delivered.” This values speed and checking the box above all else. In my world, checking the box is a failure. What I ask my team is, “Did it deliver?” It doesn’t matter how outsider your process was. The client, the audience, the boss, they only see the final product. They don’t care about how much you fought the industry playbooks. They don’t care which rules you followed and which rules you broke. They only care if the work moves them.

The true Blinders Advantage is having the drive to ignore the gravitational pull of sameness; the discipline to pursue innovation even at the cost of ego. Embrace your outsider status. Trust your gut. But hold your work to a standard that makes the insiders look like they’re the ones who are missing the map at the bottom of the mountain.