What us folks in advertising can learn from guns
After spending years perfecting their swordsmanship, the Samurais got their heads blown off by tiny bits of lead.
That’s innovation.
Guns made all of the Samurai discipline, training, craftsmanship irrelevant.
The same amount of time the samurais could have spent inventing a gun were spent doing the same useless training over and over again.
And now, decades later, gun warfare is refusing to innovate. We’re still figuring out how to make guns more powerful. Or make them spray more bullets. Or improve their accuracy?
This is a shame.
Instead of small improvements, if we spent that same amount of time thinking of ways to render the gun useless, it would once again change the rules of warfare.
How about a device that jams bullets?
I walk into an alley in Basra and all the device in my hand would do is jam all the guns, grenade launchers and dynamites. Is that so hard to invent?
Problem is, nobody is putting their time towards making it happen. It’s the same problem with advertising. There was a time interruption tactics blew everything away. Now we’re just putting our time towards tweaking those tactics.
What say we spend a little bit of our time between meetings thinking about this because I think we can all do better than building a better gun.
