AboutWhy 13th Pencil
Here is a positioning line for a creative agency. It is brand new. Nobody wrote it.
We craft bold brands for a changing world.
None of those were wrong. That is the problem.
Every line that machine produced is grammatical, on-strategy and perfectly presentable. You could put any of them on a wall tomorrow and no one would object. That is exactly what makes them worthless.
Getting to competent used to be the hard part, and it was most of what an agency was paid for. It now takes seconds and costs nothing — for you, for us, and for every competitor you have.
So the value moved. It is no longer in producing the first workable answer. It is in what happens after it: the judgement to see that workable is not the same as worth doing, and the appetite to keep going when you already have something you could ship.
We use these tools constantly. That is not the argument. The argument is about where we stop.
We start where the generator stops
The obvious answer is the first thing on our wall, not the last. It shows us where the category ends.
You will see the rejects
Including the ones that were perfectly good. Watching what we threw away is how you know what you bought.
It costs more time, not more money
Fixed fee, agreed up front. The extra distance comes out of our hours, not your budget.
