The episode that really drove your point #3 home for me was when the Sterling Cooper gang presented a plan to their department store client (you know the one where Draper shtoops the daughter of the store’s owner) and instead of presenting ad creative or media flowcharts, they talk about redesigning the store layout and putting a fancy restaurant on the main floor.

My lessons learned from that show:

1. Good ideas can and should come from anywhere.
2. Don’t limit your thinking to what the brief asks for.
3. Don’t shtoop the client… that never ends well.

Sometimes we have to explain to people the difference between a tool and the idea/story (and which comes first). And this post, and that carousel clip from Madmen, will make our job doing that a million times easier… most excellent.