Daily Inspiration Quote by Jef I. Richards

In an industry that sells attention for a living, Richards quietly flips the balance sheet: the true capital of an ad agency isn’t media buying muscle, client access, or even data. It’s the capacity to produce an idea that hasn’t already been pre-chewed by the category. Calling creativity “the rarest” is a professor’s way of puncturing the popular myth that advertising is awash in cleverness. The subtext is harsher: most of what passes for creative output is procedural, risk-managed, and optimized into sameness.

The line works because it frames creativity as scarcity, not inspiration. Scarcity is the language agencies and clients both understand. By borrowing economic logic, Richards smuggles an artistic virtue into boardroom terms: if it’s rare, you must protect it, invest in it, and stop treating it like a decorative layer applied after strategy is set. He’s also issuing a warning about systems that inadvertently extinguish the very thing they claim to value: endless revisions, committee feedback, trend-chasing, and metrics that reward the familiar.

Context matters here. Richards is speaking as an academic watching advertising professionalize, quantify, and automate itself. The more the industry becomes a machine for predictable results, the more genuinely surprising thinking becomes nonrenewable. In that tension is the intent: creativity isn’t a mood, it’s an organizational advantage. And like any advantage, it can be squandered.