Some ideas are more equal than others.

The genesis of this post was the gawd-awful design my sainted but flawed Mets will be forced to wear on their uniforms this year to commemorate their new stadium. Who exactly within the Mets organization designed that abomination? (The WordArt application in PowerPoint is not the ideal program for logo design. Just sayin'.) I ask because it couldn't have been a branding or design agency. Or maybe it was a branding or graphic design firm, once again cutting its own throat by abetting the tasteless opinions within the organization.

"You'll know you've made it when you can make money from what you know and not from what you do." It's what I was told when I started consulting. But I wasn't consulting in finance or M&A. I was consulting in marketing, where often what you know and what you do are the same. We're like lawyers that way. (And that's not the only way admen are like lawyers. But I digress.)

So therein lies the rub. At the point at which all you know and all you do is generating 'the big idea', there's been a door left open by we marketers that allow clients - blinded by narcissistic perspective and biased by the skin they have in the game – to value their ideas as well, if not better than – those who have made marketing, branding, design, and advertising their profession.

The insightful quote from Bill Hewlett that 'marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department' is as valid as ever – but too often misapplied. Hewlett never meant that everyone in the organization could create effective marketing. He was suggesting that everyone in the company had a responsibility to market the organization as effectively and as often as possible, and not to remain mute as marketing bore the weight of lead generation and brand-building. And it certainly didn't mean that marketing couldn't be trusted to create those messages. The distinction is as clear as the difference between the message and the messenger.

The belief (and I'll admit that I've been guilty of spreading it in the past) that 'good ideas can come from anywhere' is abject nonsense. The client's spouse is hardly ever – nay, never ever – right. I think it was the collective of smaller agencies that have been guilty of spreading this virus and have encouraged it among clients in a short sighted effort to position themselves as far more open and accommodating than their multi-national brethren who were, a decade or more ago, hammering closed the windows opened by legitimate alternative creative resources, such as Coca-Cola's use of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) to create the now iconic polar bears campaign.

Theoretically, of course, great ideas can come from just about anywhere, just as Archimedes made a great discovery in a bathtub. Yet as a general rule, such an egalitarian valuation of ideas does significant damage to the business of branding. Yes, you can win the lottery, a rookie pitch a perfect game, or a starlet be discovered in a drugstore. But what are the odds, and is it worth those odds to marginalize an entire industry – especially our own? Just as architects don't turn their drafting tables over to the developer, or doctors their stethoscopes to the patient, neither should marketing professionals abdicate their proper roles of architects of the next great idea and healers of troubled companies. And furthermore, as I stated in my post from a couple of years ago regarding the Houston's soccer team, why, if it is so easy, is it often done so damn badly?