Coming home from an out-of-town trip this weekend, I passed a billboard (aka “outdoor advertising”) on the Interstate. It was a 3d board with a guy wearing a yellow cape reaching up to the graphic of the Super Yellow Pages. I immediately had two thoughts: 1.) Wow…are the Yellow Pages still relevant in the Google era? and, 2.) Are you really going to advance market share and brand awareness by ripping off the Chick-Fil-A cows?

And therein lies the problem with a lot of marketing. Something is successful and we rush in to copy it. I get the whole “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and all, but does it really work effectively in marketing? My experience is that the first person in owns the brand/concept (in this case for me, the 3D cows touting “Eat More Chikin”) and everyone else is viewed as the also ran.

It’s a problem I face every day in marketing new homes. Even I have had to go through the Saturday Home section a second time looking for my ad. That’s not a knock on my “agency” – certainly one of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with – it’s just that real estate has a formula we all follow for where the headline, copy and photos go. And pretty quickly, it becomes something easy to ignore or pass right by.

As I sit here pondering my 2010 budget, I was thinking my challenge was two-fold: How much to spend? Where to spend it? I’m quickly realizing the challenge is much bigger and will require a lot of creativity: Just how do I stand out from the crowd in a meaningful way to my target audience in this era of look-alike marketing compounded by the explosion of media outlets? Thank God I work with people emminently smarter and more creative than I am! I see some late-night candle burning in my future…