The Marketing team at Atom Analytics panicked today after their advertising agency delivered on the company’s request for “out-of-the-box” thinking. Pandemonium erupted following the initial creative presentations. Senior executives immediately scrambled to shove all the “out of the box” thinking back into the box. 

“When I said “out of the box,” I didn’t mean way outside,” said chief marketing officer Dwayne Clutterbuck. “Like, if the box were a house I wanted the ideas to be, maybe, like in the tool shed.” 

Top brass who sat in on the meeting were even more blunt. “This is not the type of out of the box thinking we’re used to,” said Connie Jennings, director of Status Quo. “We see out of the box thinking every day, and it never looks like this.”

Middle managers, however, hoping to quickly restore order initially gushed over the marketing plan and then mercilessly picked apart the presentation, blaming the agency for delivering precisely what they’d asked for.

The plan included a number of thought provoking ideas along with a robust digital marketing plan and some stunts that would most certainly garner publicity. “There was something with Dennis Rodman walking on a tightrope over Times Square. It was just way too attention grabbing for us. You don’t need ideas to get attention when you have a great product,” said Clutterbuck completely contradicting the entire purpose of brand marketing and advertising.

Executives across the board feared that these new ideas might actually make the company appear different from the competition. Following the meeting, a feedback email from Atom Analytics to the agency read: “We were talking about next steps, and decided a safer approach would be to make TV commercials that point out our features and benefits like you know, those Ped Egg commercials. Would you be able to get us a script by Tuesday?”

Days later, Atom Analytics again asked the agency for “out-of-the-box” thinking, as if they completely forgot everything that just happened.

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