The beginning of greatness in advertising is the courage and discipline to be different.
The beginning of failure in advertising is to be orthodox - to conform.
This post is in spirit of a quote from David Ogilvy on advertising: if this is true, what does it exactly mean?
It means that most people, even when they consider themselves or their agency creative - they are simply not. That most agencies pride themselves in being creative and original when that is exactly what they are not: interchange the logos - they are all the same. At least for me when I look back, I always had the spirit of being contrarian but what you realize is that you need not only the spirit of being different - you also need the ability to have the courage to actually be different in reality.