There are two words that strike more fear in a creative team than a budget spreadsheet. ‘Been done’ is the hardest thing for a creative team to hear when presenting ideas and the easiest thing for a creative director to say. If you’re a CD, take a left off Easy Street and take a stroll down the Walk of What If. If the idea is relevant, build on it, make it radical. Interrogate the proposal to help find a creative twist and most importantly, make it better.

Stanley Kubrick said it best: “Everything has already been done, every story has been told, every scene has been shot. It’s our job to do it better.” Alexander McQueen went further: “Everything’s been done, everything is a remix.” Fashion, art, cinema, music, literature, video games and yes, advertising; everything has been done, everything is a remix of what’s come before. Nothing is immune.

Even the world’s most famous meme is recycled, century-old content. The ‘distracted boyfriend’ meme is a remix of a concept that first hit our slightly larger screens in 1922. In Pay Day, Charlie Chaplin plays the role of a somewhat ‘distracted Charlie’. Imagine if, when the modern version was created, someone leant over and muttered the ‘been done’ death knell. Distracted? Furious, more like.

‘Been done’ could have killed the greatest campaign of all time. ‘The Best Things Come To Those Who Wait’ was a Heinz Ketchup campaign from the 1980s featuring Matt LeBlanc patiently waiting for his ketchup to ooze out of the bottle. A decade later, when presented with a similar idea, a lazy CD could have thrown the baby out with the ketchup bottle. Instead, minds remained open, the team ran with the opportunity and ended up with the best advertising campaign ever created.

So why is it that advertising creatives in particular are obsessed with dismissing anything that even remotely resembles something someone else has done before? Ego, maybe. That desperate urge of a creative director to prove that their encyclopedic knowledge of ads from 1982 makes them superior. We get it, you were there. But now it’s someone else’s turn to build on the past.

The founder of Liquid Death, Mike Cessario, saw metalheads sipping water from Monster Energy cans to maintain their cool whilst staying hydrated. He didn’t throw a ‘been done’ at the idea and walk away. Instead, he doubled down, remixed the concept and made water hardcore. Suddenly, H2O was irreverent, edgy, and every kid was downing it like it was the new blood of rock. The real game isn’t who did it first, as Kubrick said, it’s who does it best.

As with most things in life, we can learn a lot from Bananarama; “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” Next time you’re in a creative review, staring down an idea that feels eerily familiar, don’t kill it. Nurture it. Tickle it. Take it for a spin, see if you can shift it into a new gear.

You might just stumble upon the next billion-dollar water brand or the greatest ad campaign of all time. At the very least, you’ll avoid being the CD griping that everything’s already been done, while someone younger and smarter just does it better.

Rick Chant is the co-founder and ECD of We Are Pi; wearepi.com; Top image: Shutterstock