“Too fast to live. Too young to die.”

-Malcom Mclaren

In the merciless world of professional advertising, there’s no time to fuss. Which is why in the first round, creative teams typically launch a fusillade of quick ideas at the wall—often accompanied by some kind of hasty sketch—to see if anything sticks. Once the dust settles, a handful of ideas live to see another day, and the rest are just… dead. They can’t all be winners.

Given the circumstances, It’s no surprise that the majority of first-round creative ideas face certain death. It’s a suicide mission; not exactly conducive to scholarly rumination. When the first wave of ideas inevitably gets thinned out, and all the misfires start to quietly fizzle, most hardened creatives simply deep-six the evidence and move on. But not this creative.

That’s when the real fun begins. As I dutifully make my way back to the bottom of Sisyphus’s hill with a notepad full of incoherent scribbles and half-baked headlines, my mind becomes engulfed in a fog of subjectivity. I mean seriously, some of those ideas had potential. Now what, more arbitrary notions of what makes a “good” idea? How many bad ideas have to die before we realize what a colossal waste of psychic energy has transpired? What drives us to so casually surrender our dreams – madness?

Well, it’s complicated. I mean, who can pretend to know the riddle of the creative mind, right? I realize this is going to disappoint many of you, but my years of advertising industry experience has revealed to me the true nature of creativity, and it goes something like this; no self respecting creative person in the history of advertising has ever really known what the hell they’re doing. It’s true.

Let’s face it. Bringing something new into existence is messy. It usually involves a volatile mix of knee-jerkery, procrastination, overthinking and bouts of desperation and self-loathing. Knowledge is useless when you’re trying to roller-skate in a tornado. When you venture into the unknown, the world gets fuzzy and you start seeing things that probably aren’t there. The distinction between good and bad ideas becomes nebulous, so you write down whatever pops into your head – because by then your brain has already moved on to the next random thought and you’re afraid you might forget whatever it was that led you in this odd direction in the first place. You’re chasing shadows, catching glimpses, getting lost in the wonder of it all. You’re now relying on pure instinct and the only tether back to the real world is a flimsy line in the brief that could snap at any moment and send you adrift for eternity. I ask you, what could be more exciting than that?

The problem is, you can’t expect the rest of the world to recognize your genius unless of course you can make them feel something first. Feelings make ideas tangible. And feelings, like bad ideas, are hard to define, unpredictable and known to spontaneously combust.

Denial is your secret weapon. It’s the default reaction when you first discover your first-round idea isn’t quite on brief. Nobody gets it, but you don’t give up that easily. You convince yourself that truth is an illusion, everything you know is probably wrong, opposites do not attract, k-pop is actually kinda catchy, and all bad ideas actually aren’t all bad. Of course, those distinctions depend on who you’re asking, the time of day, and the direction of the wind at the moment you discover their particularities. Why? Because unlike the machines that provide us with an endless stream of predictive consumer data, actual people make terrible algorithms. Rational consumers make irrational decisions all the time. Paradoxically, some of the most successful ideas didn’t test well, and some of the biggest, world changing notions were discovered hanging out in the most unlikely places—like in a small business on a Saturday.

Round-one ideas are like teenagers; they’re immature, irresponsible, impulsive, they think they’re invincible, and they usually make very little sense. Yet somehow they are the vanguard of popular culture. What the rest of us seem to have forgotten is that sometimes obvious and stupid is actually witty and cool. Sometimes when we indulge in the occasional stupid idea, stupid rises to the occasion.

Round-one ideas have something refreshing to offer; a willful indifference towards their own badness. They’ve got a license to suck if deemed necessary in the never ending quest for attention. They simply don’t play by the same rules and they’re unbearably honest about it. What’s good about these bad ideas is that they get to be irreverent, ironic, disarmingly accessible and unflinchingly truthful—and still be charming. Any one of those things is enough to get you noticed. Which is kind of the whole point. They’ve also got built in tensions that have the potential to lead to something unexpectedly entertaining, in fact some bad ideas are just one twist away from becoming great ideas. Others are so shockingly bad that you can’t look away. It just takes one brave idiot to go poking around where nobody else thinks to look, and another even braver idiot with a budget to say, “What the hell, let’s do it.”

The thing to remember about round-one is, If you’re going to go down, you might as well go down in a blaze of glory. That makes it our chance to throw out the rule book and get really creative. It’s the ADHD round. It’s our time for asking questions, ignoring answers, exploring tensions, taking naps, losing your keys, aiming for the fences, moving the fences,… My point is, you gotta step out of your perfect advertising bubble every once in a while and get your feet dirty. Over-rev your engine. Get out of your lane. Think across disciplines. Follow your gut and spend some time on an ill-conceived romp in the weeds and you may find the scenic route quite productive. I know, I’ve lost my keys there a few times. I think what I’m trying to say is never stop chasing after those foul balls.

Cause as much trouble in round-one as you can, because by round-two, you better have your shit together. Sometimes, bad ideas are hidden doorways to creative magic, Other times, they’re just a bad idea and should be approached with a long stick and extreme caution. Like you should never run down a hill at top speed. So please, use your best judgement and indulge me as I dust off some real stinkers. The following collection of postmortem thumbnail sketches is my tribute to all of the “other” ideas that have ever been conceived and then killed in the name of advertising.