Sometimes you need to copy the best people in your field, to learn from them, to profit from the new markets they have opened.
Sometimes you need to look at what everyone else is doing, then do something different.
Here’s a fun example. In the early 2000s the owner of a powerkite shop hired me to do an advert in a kitesurf magazine. I looked through a copy of the magazine. Everything in it was blue. Blue water, blue graphics, blue ads. So I made an orange ad. It got noticed. Within a few months the magazine was full of orange and red ads, and I had to think of something different to make my client stand out. Christine gave me the idea of posing him naked and seductive, the way one expects to see women sexualised in an ad. It got really noticed! That’s how it goes with creativity.
Jules Buckley took Florence’s Kiss With A Fist and turned it into a country epic.
Grow slowly
Jeff