In advertising and marketing, there is one important basic tenet. Stand out from the crowd.

But that requires fresh thinking.

And thinking takes work.

“Ugh,” says a brand manager, somewhere, probably. “Isn’t there some way to get out of that? I’ll just say I’m working ‘smarter not harder’. Yeah, the VPs will love that.”

This has led to the rise of the “best practice”.

A go-to standard that’s repeatable, predictable, and expected.

Wait a minute. What was that basic advertising tenet about again? Oh yeah. The exact opposite of repetition, predictability, and the expected.

You see, in a world where everyone has the same playbook, and formulas take the place of real, invested thinking, you’re setting yourself up for mediocrity.

After all, best practices are only best practices until someone comes up with a better way of doing things.

And that’s how a real creative marketer thinks.

Your ROI, or Return On Investment, is all a matter of perspective.

Just like any market, some strategies are short-term, and some are long-term. But as any investment broker would tell you, you should never let your short-term goals guide you at the expense of the long-term success.

Unfortunately, as more client-side employees job-hop from company to company, the (apparent) short-term gains are becoming the only things that matter.

Growth strategies are suffering because the emphasis is on immediacy.

Think about a company who advertises in the sale paper. They may bring in more money that week. But a sale-price is unsustainable. A long-term customer would be a more valuable ROI.

If you’re a CMO and your brand managers are focused on clicks and engagement, they are more likely building their resume than building your brand.

By the end of 2007, the global market was tumbling into a recession. And the marketing budgets were the first to get cut.

Agency layoffs came swift, as usual. But this time, the heads of marketing, brand managers, and CMOs weren’t far behind.

When the dust had cleared, those who kept their heads down had, well, kept their heads.

And there was a miraculous new media promising infallible results—which was perfect for this new breed of marketer.

As an unregulated Facebook promised incredible “engagement” and CTRs, all that was needed to show value to the top was to hit print on the report.

Meanwhile, we were being pulled from the recession into one of the largest growth markets of American history. And the proverbial rising tide was lifting all boats. So no one noticed that we were pouring more and more money into reaching less and less people. After all, the data was telling us everything was great.

Unfortunately, that data was misleading. Because the true way to get results—standing out and being creative—hadn’t changed, through any of the tumultuous times.

But suddenly, this art was being viewed as a science. Unfortunately for all involved, it wasn’t being reported truthfully like one.

You can rest assured your phone is not targeting you with ads based on what you talk about. Well, it is. But it isn’t doing it by “listening”.

As much as AI has improved, it can barely hear. And it definitely can’t parse syntax.

Hell, Alexa starts playing John Mayer from Spotify every time you try to turn on the lights.

See, as humans, we think “listening” is the best way to gather information. But for a computer, “listening” is too complicated. BUT, it can crunch massive data sets in seconds. And the connected world provides a dataset larger than any we’ve ever amassed.

So, are our phones “listening”? No. We’ve connected so much data (our location, our purchases, our common interactions) that our actions are just that predictable to AI.

And that should scare us much more than a cellphone’s stereo mic muffled by our pocket.