Don’t you just hate it when that happens?!
You’ve had an epiphany, a Moment of Blinding Clarity, been left dumbfounded by your own smarts. You’ve looked into the darkest potholes of the human condition, seen truth, felt Genuine Understanding, surfaced into the light, articulated your beliefs with crisp, elegant simplicity, concocted a quite brilliant plan for contriving the spiritual confluence of “Brand” and “Consumer”, and the end product is... a TV ad... that looks just like the director’s last TV ad. And in truth like the one before that.
Your strategy has just fallen off a cliff.
A big cliff.
You can’t even make out the busted-up remains at the bottom.
It may even have evaporated on the way down.
At best, there’ll be a TV ad, some TV airtime; someone somewhere has bought some poster sites; and sometime soon after the brand and campaign tracking needle goes marginally up, or down (either is statistically irrelevant), and it’s really a "Planners Debate" (read: exists in a vacuum, like the original strategy) as to whether the sales figures are causal, coincidental, or may, in some near-to-far-off future become causal... or not.
All in all, it’s a less than great day in the office. Try and avoid them.
SP.