How to Find Creative Marketing Ideas in Your Own Brand

A government transit agency just out-marketed brands with 100x its budget.

All it took was one joke they didn't chicken out of.

LA Metro runs the buses and trains across Los Angeles.
They recently launched a major line extension, years in the making, and buried inside it was the best marketing move I've seen in a while.

That move showed up on a t-shirt, one I bought from them last week.
It says "Ride the D."

Underneath, there's an actual letter D, the same one from the D Line.

LA Metro knew exactly what they were doing.

Section 1 of the D Line Extension opened this year.

3 new stations, years of construction, billions of dollars,
And a subway line that will cut commute times across the city for decades to come (we hope).

On paper, that's the kind of update that gets buried in a press release nobody reads.

Instead, somebody on that team looked at "Ride the D Line" and thought, ok, we're doing this.

Merch, a tagline, and social posts that leaned all the way into the joke instead of avoiding it.

And now I'm writing a post about a subway extension on LinkedIn, which is not a sentence I expected to type this year 🤣

That's the part worth paying attention to.

A lot of brands treat their category as an excuse to be boring.
Transit, insurance, banking, SaaS, doesn't matter.

"It's just not that kind of industry" gets used as a reason to play it safe.

Except the audience doesn't care what industry you're in.
They care whether the thing in front of them is worth a second look.

A government transit agency found the joke sitting right there in their own branding and had the nerve to use it.

That's not luck.

Someone signed off on that.
And decided the risk of a groan-worthy pun was worth people stopping to read a story about subway infrastructure at all.

Every brand has a version of this sitting in their own name, product, or category.

Too many never go looking for it, or they find it and get talked out of it before it reaches final approval.

The brands that find it and ship it anyway are the ones people remember.

Everyone else blends into the same category everyone already scrolls past.

So here's the real question for your own brand:
If the joke is sitting right there, are you brave enough to use it?

♻️ Repost this for the marketer on your team who keeps getting told to tone it down.
And follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more on creative risk and growth in retail, beauty, and fashion.