There’s a fine line between consistency and conformity.

Most marketers cross it without even realizing.

Kicking off season 3 of the Paid Media Lab (with a bang), we sat down with Lewis Kemp, founder of Lightbulb Media and co-founder of The University of Creative Idiots, to talk about why most brand guidelines are useless - and how marketers can reclaim their creative freedom without burning the whole thing down.

Known for his unfiltered takes on LinkedIn (and a knack for coining terms like “gimpfluencer”), Lewis embodies one simple truth: 

“Before you have a brand, you need a business. And before you have a business, you need sales.”

…And that’s exactly the kind of straightforward advice you’ll get in this episode. No fluff, no performative bs - something your marketing efforts should aspire to. 

Watch the full episode with Lewis Kemp here, or keep reading for the written highlights and key takeaways.

The myth of the brand guideline

Most marketers treat brand guidelines like sacred scripture.

Color palettes, tone of voice, logo placement, and visual grids are followed as if breaking them would curse performance forever.

Lewis doesn’t see it that way. He opened the episode with a line that landed hard:

“Brand guidelines are great - if you actually have a brand.”

For him, too many businesses confuse having a set of rules with having an identity. A real brand isn’t built inside a design deck. It’s built through consistent results, emotional connection, and customer trust.

“Before you have a brand, you need a business. And before you have a business, you need to be making sales.”

That idea framed the rest of the conversation. Brand guidelines can help once you’re established, but in the early stages they often act like handcuffs. They restrict testing and creative variation, which are exactly what new brands need to grow.

Lewis put it plainly:

“Nobody gives a f**k whether your brand is purple, has square or curved fonts, or whether your logo takes up 50% of the ad. They’re sat in their underpants scrolling Instagram looking for something to entertain them.”

People on social media scroll for dopamine, not design perfection. They engage with whatever stops their thumb, whether that’s humor, surprise, or emotion. Strict adherence to guidelines rarely achieves that.

Lewis believes this overemphasis on branding turns marketers into decorators. Campaigns end up polished, safe, and forgettable. When teams obsess over whether a visual matches the brand book, they lose sight of what actually drives performance: clarity, curiosity, and emotional impact.

“Your logo doesn’t need to take up half the ad. Your customer doesn’t care how pretty it looks. They care whether it solves a problem or makes them laugh.”

Brand guidelines should support creativity, not suppress it. They are reference points, not rules of survival. And for growing businesses, breaking them might be the only way to find what truly works.

What a brand really is

Lewis drew a clean line between what businesses say they are and what people believe they are.

“Brand guidelines are what you tell people that you are. Your actual brand is what people are saying about you when you’re not in the room.”

That definition rings true - a brand isn’t a logo, tagline, or visual system. It’s the reputation that forms in the minds of others. It’s built from lived experience, not internal preference.

Lewis pointed out that most small businesses mistake consistency for credibility. They fixate on fonts and tone while ignoring the fact that no one even knows they exist. You can’t protect a brand if it hasn’t been built yet.

He described the gap between self-image and reality. Many teams think they’re maintaining a strong identity when they reject creative ideas for being “off brand.” In truth, they’re blocking their own visibility.

People can’t care about you until they know who you are. And they won’t know who you are until you reach them with something memorable. Lewis’s view is that creative decisions should focus on attention and connection first, refinement later.

He often sees this problem with small businesses that act like global ones. They apply the same creative caution as corporations, yet they don’t have the market share or awareness that justifies it. For a startup or mid-market brand, rigid identity rules can easily suffocate growth.

Lewis summed it up in one line:

“You have to give people what they want, not what you want them to want.”

The most valuable brands earn attention by being relevant and human. Their identity is a byproduct of how they make people feel, not how neatly they follow a brand book.

When ego kills performance

Lewis sees ego as one of the biggest barriers to growth in paid media. Many marketers build campaigns around personal taste or internal preference instead of data. The result is creative that flatters the brand but fails to convert.

He shared a recent story about a lifestyle client that had hit a performance plateau. Everything they produced was polished, high-end, and “on brand.” The campaigns looked good but weren’t driving sales. Lewis’s team pushed to test new concepts that were raw, unfiltered, and a little rough around the edges.

The change worked.

“Within the first four weeks, CPA dropped by 50% and ROAS doubled,” he said. The new ads didn’t look perfect, but they resonated. They felt real. The audience responded immediately.

The numbers forced a mindset shift inside the business. Once the data spoke, the debate ended.

“I run ads all the time that I don’t personally like. They work, and that’s our job - to make you money.”

He explained that too many teams get attached to creative they find aesthetically pleasing. They forget that they aren’t the audience. Ads should appeal to the customer’s instincts, not the marketer’s ego.

Lewis’s team treats creative testing as a science. Every ad is an experiment. Some will fail, but enough of them succeed to uncover patterns that scale. When brand guidelines or internal opinions override that process, performance stalls.

For him, the role of a paid media marketer isn’t to protect an idea or aesthetic. It’s to chase outcomes. Data, not preference, decides what stays live.

That approach frees teams to take creative risks without fear of judgement. If the ad works, keep it. If it doesn’t, replace it. 

Nothing is personal. Nothing is sacred.

When pushing boundaries pays off

Lewis’s agency, Lightbulb Media, has built its reputation by testing creative ideas that most brands wouldn’t dare to approve. He believes that the best-performing ads are often the ones that make people uncomfortable first. Safe creative blends in. Bold creative gets remembered.

He told the story of a campaign that proves the point. The team worked on a project for a lifestyle client whose content had always been clean and corporate. Lewis and his co-founder, Dan Kelsall, decided to push the limits. 

One of the ads featured a nun having an orgasm while talking about procrastination as a sin. Another used Alex Hormozi’s likeness in a message about action over theory.

Both campaigns were immediately flagged. Eight out of ten ads were banned within two weeks. One even triggered a cease and desist letter from Alex Hormozi’s team. But before the bans rolled in, the results were undeniable. Engagement spiked. Conversions followed.

“You know what? It got attention. That’s the point.”

The controversy didn’t damage the client. It helped them stand out in a crowded feed where everyone looks and sounds the same. Attention is the currency of digital advertising, and polarising creative earns it faster than anything else.

Lewis and Dan developed a smart way to make bolder concepts easier to sell to cautious clients. When pitching ideas, they present three versions: one deliberately bad, one extreme, and one that lands in the middle. The “middle” version is the one they actually want to run.

He explained how this framing works:

“If you give them something really shit and something really extreme, they’ll always pick the one in between. If you just show them the good one, it looks too risky.”

This simple psychological anchor helps clients feel in control while still approving stronger creative. It’s one way to keep progress moving when internal resistance threatens to slow things down.

Lewis doesn’t push boundaries for shock value alone. The goal is to make people stop scrolling, even for a moment. Once you have their attention, everything else - message, offer, call to action - has a chance to land.

How to outsmart the brand police

Every marketer has dealt with them. The people who block creative ideas because something “doesn’t feel on brand.” Lewis calls them the brand police. Their intentions are good, but their obsession with consistency often kills experimentation before it starts.

Lewis’s advice is to meet them with logic, not friction. Data is the ultimate decider, but you need a strategy to reach that stage. He shared a few techniques his team uses to get bold ideas approved and tested.

The first step is to make decision-makers hear their own reasoning out loud:

“When you make people say things back to you, they often realise how stupid it sounds. Asking direct questions like 'What do you think will happen if we keep doing what’s already failed?’ helps reset the conversation.”

Next, he uses a method he calls anchoring expectations. When presenting ideas, he shows three creative routes: one weak, one extreme, and one balanced. 

The balanced version is the real goal. “If you give people reference points, they’ll almost always choose the middle one,” he said. It creates psychological comfort and opens the door for stronger creative to go live.

Finally, he pushes for side-by-side testing:

“Let the data decide. You have your opinion because you like blue. We have ours because we’ve run tens of thousands of ads and can see what works.”

When results come in, the conversation ends quickly. Lewis described one case where a client insisted on keeping their old creative despite poor returns. His team ran their own version alongside it. The client’s ads spent £80,000 and made nothing. The new ads spent £1,000 and returned £80,000. The numbers ended the debate.

Lewis’s tone stayed calm but firm throughout this part of the discussion. He wasn’t advocating for chaos or arrogance. His message was simple: the role of paid media is to drive results. Creative opinions don’t matter if the data proves otherwise.

That mindset builds trust over time. Once a client sees that bold creative works, they stop clinging to the brand book. They start asking for more ideas. The brand police become allies, not obstacles.

Creative variety at scale

Lewis credits most of his clients’ growth to one thing: creative variety. Consistency may please a brand manager, but variety keeps performance alive. Ads fatigue fast. The only way to stay ahead is to keep feeding platforms with new, diverse creative.

His team approaches this with a modular system. Every video or static ad is broken down into three parts: the hook, the meat, and the call to action. Each part can be swapped, remixed, and rebuilt to create dozens of combinations without starting from scratch.

“The hooks are the most important. You could have the best video in the world five seconds in, but if no one watches those first five seconds, it doesn’t matter.”

Hooks are the first impression. They decide whether someone scrolls past or stays to hear the message. Once attention is secured, the meat delivers the value or story, and the CTA closes the loop. By changing hooks and CTAs while keeping the core message consistent, Lewis’s team multiplies their creative output with minimal extra effort.

He illustrated how efficient this can be. Two base videos can become hundreds of unique variants by mixing 20 different hooks and five CTAs. Each version can test a different emotion, problem, or angle. Over time, the data reveals which combinations drive the strongest response.

This process is systematic, not chaotic. Every test feeds the next round of creative: 

“You’re not guessing. You’re collecting evidence.”

Lewis’s team tracks metrics like thumb-stop rate, watch time, and conversion to understand which elements hold attention and which fall flat. 

If most viewers drop off before the message lands, they rework the intro. If engagement spikes at a certain phrase or reaction, they build new hooks around that theme.

It’s an ongoing cycle of iteration. The goal isn’t to find one perfect ad. It’s to build a repeatable process that constantly generates fresh ideas and learns from real data.

Lewis described it as the closest thing to creative science. The art comes first, but structure keeps it scalable. Once brands see how much faster they can learn this way, they rarely go back to rigid campaign planning.

Channel-specific plays

Lewis broke down how this mindset of creative variety applies across platforms. Each channel rewards a different kind of thinking, but the principle stays the same: volume and variation win.

Meta & TikTok:

On Meta and TikTok, attention is everything. People aren’t looking for products; they’re looking for distraction. That means emotion, humour, and speed matter more than polish. Lewis explained that most brands overthink production value when they should focus on rhythm and relevance. A video shot on a phone can outperform a high-budget production if it feels authentic and hooks the viewer fast.

YouTube: 

On YouTube, the first five seconds decide everything. If the opening doesn’t grab attention, the rest of the creative never gets seen. 

“It’s ruthless. You have to win those first seconds, or the video is dead.”

 He recommended testing multiple hook variations using the same core footage, tracking watch time and retention to see which approach keeps viewers engaged longest.

Google Search Ads:

When it comes to search, Lewis said creativity still matters, even within tight constraints. Character limits force simplicity, but tone and positioning can make a huge difference. 

“If every accountant’s ad says ‘Qualified ACA near me,’ say something human. Whatever everyone else is doing, don’t do that.”

This approach helps smaller brands punch above their weight. Large companies have layers of sign-off and legal approval that slow down experimentation. Smaller teams can test, learn, and adapt within days.

“That’s your unfair advantage. You can move faster and take more risks.”

Every platform rewards clarity, courage, and consistency of testing. For Lewis, that’s what separates growth-focused marketers from brand custodians.

When brand guidelines DO matter

Lewis recognised that as a business grows, some guardrails become useful. 

The key is knowing where to apply them:

“For me, I’d still keep things on-brand in the right places. Your website, your emails, your organic pages - they should all look and feel consistent. But leave the ads alone.”

In his view, ads serve a different purpose. They’re magnets that pull people in, not brochures that explain everything. Once a person clicks through, the website and follow-up comms can reinforce the brand identity. That’s where guidelines earn their keep.

He also acknowledged that as businesses scale, stakeholders increase. There are legal risks, brand reputation concerns, and larger audiences to consider. In those cases, guidelines provide a safety net. But even then, he warned against letting them stifle experimentation.

“The spotlight effect is real. People think the world is watching, but it’s not. You get hit with 10,000 pieces of content a day. Nobody’s thinking about your brand, Terry.”

In other words: keep your house in order, but let your ads live in the real world.

Ego, empathy, and selling to humans

The discussion closed with Lewis returning to the idea of empathy. Great marketing starts with understanding what people care about. Not what you want them to care about, but what actually makes them stop and think.

He reminded listeners that marketers often overestimate their own importance. The customer doesn’t wake up thinking about your product, and they don’t remember your brand guidelines. They care about their own lives, frustrations, and desires.

That’s why his approach focuses on simplicity and emotion. Every ad should answer one question for the viewer: What’s in it for me?

Lewis described customers as "selfish little bags of flesh coming on there going, can you make my life better?” 

The line was delivered with humor, but the point was serious. Marketing that ignores human nature will always fall flat.

He encourages marketers to keep their ego out of the process. The ads aren’t about them, their preferences, or their internal politics. They’re about the person on the other side of the screen.

When marketers start creating for real people instead of brand committees, results improve immediately. The creative feels more natural. The messaging hits harder. The numbers prove it.

Final thoughts & key takeaways

Lewis ended with a message that summed up the entire episode:

Forget the obsession with how things look. Focus on how they work.

Brand guidelines might protect consistency, but they rarely create growth. The job of a paid media marketer is to drive results, not to worship a color palette.

His closing line captured the spirit of the conversation: 

“Burn the PDF, ignore the hex codes, and start making ads that make people give a damn.”

We wanted to extend a huge thank you to Lewis Kemp for joining The Paid Media Lab and sharing his sharp, honest insights.

Follow Lewis on LinkedIn to see his latest campaigns and unfiltered thoughts on marketing.

Check out Lightbulb Media to see his team’s work in action.

And if you want to rediscover your creative edge, it’s absolutely worth joining The University of Creative Idiots.

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