Here’s what Einstein said: sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute, but sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like a hour. He was explaining relativity. I’m gonna use this observation toward advertising.

Like so: Witnessing one good ad is worth a million bucks; witnessing a million so-so ads may not even be worth one dollar.

One compelling message exposed once will get loose and it will rain down upon an unsuspecting audience who (because it was compelling to begin with) will act on it. This is how Daniel Tosh and Ray William Johnson–two Internet-geared pranksters who’ve been getting passed around the office scuttlebutt–seeded their careers. This is also how wars are won. It’s not for nothing that a chunk of ads for the same thing is called a campaign.

This isn’t to go against the unimpeachable logic that repetition matters for recall. It is merely to point out that a plan is more important than planning.

Time mercifully only moves in one direction. Fortune favors the bold. And 99.9% of advertising is thoroughly disposable. When you add those three factors together, you get a license to say whatever the hell you want, because three months later, no one will even try to remember it.

And if they do remember, what you created most likely wasn’t even advertising.

It was the spirit of the time.