There is a lot of advertising in the world. Most of it is exactly where you expect it to be. Ads are on Instagram. Commercials are on TV. Billboards are on the side of the road. Brands sponsor concerts, sporting events, and festivals. None of this is inherently bad. In fact, a lot of it works.
But expected rarely creates conversation.
A few weeks ago, Netflix put a man inside a billboard on Sunset Boulevard to promote The Last House. Not a photo of a man. An actual man, living inside a fully furnished room 30 feet above the street. He ate. He read. He waved at people. He communicated with people below using a whiteboard. People stopped, took pictures, posted about it, and local news covered it. Suddenly a billboard wasn't really a billboard anymore. It was something people had to talk about.
At the same time, brands like Nike and Lucky Charms were showing up somewhere you probably wouldn't have found on most media plans a few years ago: sorority rush. Nike pulled a customization trailer up outside a sorority house at the University of Alabama. Lucky Charms leaned into the rituals and spectacle surrounding rush. Both inserted themselves into something that already had an enormous cultural conversation happening around it.
That's the opportunity. The question isn't always whether your brand belongs somewhere. It's whether you can make it belong there.
It's something we've challenged our own clients to do. In 2024, we worked with Levi's to create the Levi's Leisure Club around the Waste Management Phoenix Open. On the surface, golf and denim don't make a ton of sense together. For decades, golf has had a pretty clearly defined uniform: polos, performance fabrics, khakis, golf shoes. Denim wasn't supposed to live there.
So we put it there.
Instead of trying to make Levi's behave like a traditional golf brand, we leaned into the tension. The Leisure Club brought Levi's into the culture surrounding one of the biggest events in golf without pretending Levi's suddenly made golf clothes. The fact that it felt a little unexpected was exactly the point. We weren't asking Levi's to conform to golf culture. We were finding a way for Levi's to add something to it.
That's where I think brands and agencies have an enormous opportunity right now. As creative agencies, we have a responsibility to pitch more ideas that make our clients a little uncomfortable. Not irresponsible ideas. Not weird for the sake of being weird. But ideas that don't immediately fit inside the boxes where brands traditionally spend their money.
And brands have to be willing to buy them.
Because some of the best marketing happens when you put something somewhere people aren't expecting to find it. Netflix could have bought another traditional billboard for The Last House. Nike could have run another back-to-school campaign. Lucky Charms could have bought TikTok ads against RushTok content. Levi's could have decided golf wasn't their space.
Instead, they showed up and found a way to belong.
We talk constantly about impressions, reach, engagement, earned media, and amplification. But the best amplification strategy is still giving people something worth amplifying. You cannot manufacture conversation by asking people to talk about you. You create conversation by doing something interesting enough that they want to.
That means we should probably stop asking only, “Where is our audience?” and start asking, “Where would our audience be surprised to see us?” A golf brand at a golf tournament makes sense. A denim brand at a golf tournament makes you look twice. A food brand at a grocery store makes sense. A cereal brand showing up in the middle of sorority rush becomes a story. A movie on a billboard is advertising. A man living inside one is news.
There is obviously strategy underneath all of this. Unexpected doesn't mean random. The best ideas have a reason for being where they are. They create just enough tension to make you curious, but enough connection that once you understand the idea, it makes complete sense.
That's the sweet spot.
Our job as agencies is to find those ideas and have the conviction to put them in the deck. Even when they're harder to produce, even when we know there will be questions, and even when the safe idea sitting next to it is easier to sell. Our challenge to brands is to occasionally buy the idea that makes everyone in the room say, “Wait, can we actually do that?”
Because consumers have gotten very good at ignoring advertising. It's a lot harder to ignore something that isn't supposed to be there.
So maybe the question isn't, “Does our brand belong here?”
Maybe it's, “How do we make our brand belong here?”
Find the answer to that and you might just give people something worth talking about.