Difference, distinction, and three faucets nobody can tell apart.
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The setup
Put three faucets on a table. One is a Moen, one is a Delta, one is a Chinese knockoff sold on Amazon by a brand nobody has heard of. Most people cannot tell them apart, and the ones who can are already in the trade.
That is the condition most brands operate in, and most agencies are hired into. The product is at parity. The category is at parity. The brief still says differentiate.
This session took that problem apart by first insisting on a distinction most agencies use loosely: difference and distinction are not synonyms. Difference lives in the product. Distinction lives in how the brand walks, talks and shows up. One requires R&D and a roadmap. The other requires a point of view and the nerve to hold it.
Where the panel divided was on how you know you have either. Kelly Mertesdorf argues from measurement. Pat Laughlin argues from gut. Myra Nussbaum sits on the client side of the table and wants both, which turns out to be the hardest position of the three to hold.
Doug Zanger, founder and editor-in-chief of Indie Agency News, moderated with a stated house rule about packing seven questions into one, which he then honored throughout.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — Difference is in the product. Distinction is in the telling.
Doug's opening question was whether difference and distinction are the same thing used interchangeably, or two separate tracks.
Ashley's answer put difference in the product and distinction in the marketing, then added a category most agencies leave off the list entirely.
"How easily a consumer can buy you. If you're on TikTok Shop, how easy you are to find on the shelf. Those pieces, those are core product differentiators."
That is a claim with teeth. It moves shipping cost, add-to-cart friction and shelf visibility out of the operations column and into the differentiation column, which means the agency has a stake in fixing them. Most agencies treat that as somebody else's department and then wonder why the campaign underdelivered.
Kelly agreed on the split and gave distinction a working definition.
"I think of distinction as the way a brand walks and talks, and it's its personality, it's its storytelling style, its visual identity, its distinctive brand assets, its point of view."
Then she introduced the term that became the session's most portable idea, picked up from Mark Ritson on a Cannes stage the day before.
"Relative differentiation, which I hadn't heard. So think Volvo, where they differentiate with safety and probably innovate around safety, but they're not necessarily the safest machine in the world. They're not truly, absolutely differentiated. They're just relatively differentiated in the category."
Volvo is not the safest car. Volvo is the car that claimed safety and kept claiming it. That is a lower bar than "genuinely superior product" and a much higher bar than "we wrote a tagline," and it is where most viable positioning sits.
Pat's version of the distinction is the one that will survive in a hallway conversation. He warned that difference on its own is a trap.
"Difference is great. I think everybody wants to be different. But you have to be careful with difference because it can be disingenuous. Goth is different from mainstream. But then you look like all the other goths."
His conclusion: "Distinction has intent behind it."
Myra took the same framework and applied it to her own P&L, which is where it stops being theory.
"If I put three faucets in front of you, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Moen and Delta, Kohler, or even an international value brand, which is a Chinese knockoff on Amazon. So distinction is incredibly important in our category."
She was blunt about the failure mode this creates for a brand that keeps investing in product. Moen spends heavily on innovation in a category thick with table stakes, shower spray settings, handheld versus wall mount. Her assessment of where that leaves her: "You can spend a lot of time on differentiating, and then not do the distinction well."
Part Two — Gut, math, and the thing in between
The disagreement that gives this session its spine started in the introductions, when Doug asked Pat whether he would build on a flawless data stack or raw gut instinct.
Pat did not hedge.
"I love data, but I mean, gut instinct, man. It's all about the gut. I think data is a really good way to judge the past, and you can form new opinions based off of what happened in the past, but I think gut instinct is what forms new connections with culture and moves things forward."
Then the line that stuck.
"If you think about Bob Dylan, I don't think data told him to go electric."
Doug's rebuttal, delivered as an aside, is the one every strategist would have made: "He had record sales." Nobody picked it up on stage, but it is the fault line. Dylan had a data set. He had an audience. He went electric anyway, and the argument is over whether that was courage or survivorship bias with a good guitar.
Kelly's position is the opposite pole, and she does not argue it as a defense of caution. She argues it as the only way to know whether distinction did anything. Asked what a strategy team should track so a CMO can trust their positioning rather than a splashy one-off, she gave the most operational answer of the hour.
"Metrics in place for activations and kind of splashy ideas, like reach, impressions, engagement, which is measuring visibility in the moment. But you also need to be measuring memorability. So keeping track of unaided brand awareness, measuring branded search terms and lift there in the brand health tracker, measuring personality or values attributes that you're hoping to move, and evaluating in your tracker, maybe asking specifically how you're different or distinct from competitors."
The move worth stealing is the last one. Most brand health trackers measure attributes. Few of them ask the respondent directly how the brand differs from its competitors, which is the question the whole session is about.
Kelly also supplied the cautionary tale for teams that mistake a product fact for a difference anyone cares about. On Kleenex and Cottonelle, she watched launch after launch built around incremental product news.
"They were always doing product launches and drops around the latest and greatest ripples in the toilet paper. Which great, they're super excited about that. But does anybody care?"
Pat's process answer turns out to sit closer to Kelly's than his Dylan line suggests. His work starts with strategy, and distinction is what he adds on top of a difference that already exists.
"The creatives are meeting with the strategists, media leads. We're all meeting together. We have to have that core foundational thing that's differentiated already that we're building off of. Then when John and I are looking at work, it's like what feels different, what's unique, what have I never seen before? Once you have that different path, then what are the moments of distinction we can find within it?"
The QuikTrip case makes it concrete. 12 hundred convenience stores, a summer campaign, a strategy about slowing down.
"The whole strategy behind it was just to savor these slow moments of summer. So the spots were supposed to just feel very slow. It was called Savor Summer. But then, when it came to how do we produce it, we decided to shoot it on film, so that gave it distinction."
Strategy set the difference. Film stock and a licensed 1990s track supplied the distinction. That is the ratio he was asked for, expressed as a production decision rather than a percentage.
Ashley made the argument that reframes the whole gut-versus-math fight, and she made it about media rather than creative.
"Algorithms don't give a shit. They don't give a shit about your creatives. They don't give a shit about your idea, they don't care. All they are trying to do is find the most efficient answer."
The blame, in her account, does not belong to the machine.
"The problem is when your media plans or your media planners are looking at efficiency as the only answer. Algorithms will never recommend an outlier idea. And the best, just like creative ideas, the best media ideas are on paper initially outliers."
Then the line that should go on a wall somewhere.
"Media is not a math problem, it's a human problem."
That is Pat's gut argument, relocated to the discipline that was supposed to be immune to it. The creative department has permission to be instinctive. Media does not, and Ashley's point is that the permission gap is a choice somebody made, not a property of the channel.
The uncomfortable truth
An audience question near the end asked about always-on rapid production, nonstop content, over and over, versus letting a campaign breathe.
Ashley answered first, and she answered a question clients ask her constantly.
"I don't think wear-out exists. I don't think that's a thing. I think good ideas last for a long time and continue to build. That's a question I get from clients all the time: how long can this thing exist before no one sees it anymore? It's not like that. If it's good, it's good."
Then she named where the pressure comes from, and it is not from consumers.
"A lot of that is coming from the platforms. I think it's like 24 hours, Meta says your conversion will go way off. Meaning every fucking day you need a new ad."
Myra supplied the counter-example from inside a company that decided not to comply. At Mars Wrigley, she found a Byron Sharp-inspired star copy rating system built to prevent exactly that treadmill.
"They walked me through their Laws of Growth, Byron Sharp inspired star copy rating system, which is extremely complex, but they do that so that they don't just get on that constant content wheel. The bleachers ad with the Skittles pox. Guess how long that's been running? Twenty years, and it's still five star rated in their systems."
The uncomfortable part is what she said next, as the client, about the people she hires.
"I think sometimes agencies and also marketers just want to make more because we love making things. But you have to resist that urge, and figure out where else that money could be spent. Is it better SMS messaging, better CRM? Don't just think that it's an ad that's going to make things better."
Read that from the other side of the invoice. The client is saying the volume is being manufactured by the appetite of the people making it, hers included. An agency compensated on output has no incentive to say the next execution is unnecessary, and Myra is describing the moment a marketer notices.
She had already said the harder version, unprompted, about the industry as a whole.
"I hate it. I hate what this industry has become in many ways. Just this performance trash that we're pushing out there."
That is a senior client-side marketer, in a room full of agency principals, saying the product the industry sells her is trash. It went unchallenged, which is its own data point.
Ashley closed the loop with the diagnosis that stops this from being a volume argument.
"That's an execution problem, less than a total amount run problem."
Frequency did not kill the ad. Buying every pod in the game did.
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