Fooling the competition
Real creativity means doing things no one else would dare doing.
Something unexpected happened recently at the Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympics in South Korea.
Two Chinese female speed skaters, Yang Jingru and Li Jinzi, surprised everyone.
The story I'm about to tell you happened in the women's short-track speed skating 1500m final.
Imagine athletes racing against each other around a 111.12 meters indoor oval track in a 13.5 laps race.
There's not much space for skaters to battle for position.
Which is maybe why skaters are usually very tactical and prefer to start slow.
And why they love playing mental games with each other before the final sprints.
But on January 20th Yang Jingru used a different tactic. It's called the "Rabbit tactic".
Instead of starting off slow, Yang took off lightning fast like Usain Bolt. And completed the first lap suuuuuuuuuuuper quickly.
Then Yang did something cheeky. Yang slows down and stays behind the pack.
So the other skaters didn't even notice they were lapped.
As the race progressed, the other skaters finally start racing faster.
Then the bell rings for the last lap.
Suddenly everyone starts sprinting for the finish. But it turns out the bell was ringing only for Yang.
All skaters ended slowing down thinking the race finished.
Except, Yang Jingru who wins the race. And Li Jinzi who speeds up for the final lap and ends winning the silver medal.
The two Chinese skaters won the Gold and Silver medals by doing the opposite of their competitors.
We now live in a new World where AI is changing everything. A World where it is much easier to choose entering the race to the bottom with AI generated content and creative ideas.
Ironically this also means that big things can come for brands willing to do things differently. We could learn a thing or two from Yang Jingru and Li Jinzi.
㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡㋡
》”Dangerous” Ideas
1/ AI can beat safe creative work. But AI can’t beat weird.
2/ Modernity isn’t always the answer.
Which is precisely why as Bas Korsten recently said, “We need humans to do more crazy and outrageous things than AI ever could.”
3/ Small brands must be more creative. Or they die.
PS. I’m selling my dreamfootballjobs.com domain. Make me an offer.
Your pal,
🚀 Founder & Chief Copywriter: Teardwn ↬ “Hire me to give voltage to your website copy”
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