David Schiff, Partner and Creative Director at Standard Practice, walked into the Boulder County Fair demolition derby thinking it would be a fun Sunday afternoon with amateur drivers bumping cars around. What he found instead were flatbed trucks hauling Mad Max vehicles driven by people who do this every weekend. “I realized I’d made a terrible mistake,” Schiff says.
But there was no turning back. Standard Practice had already wrapped a 1992 Oldsmobile Cutlass with their clients’ logos, named the vehicle Traffic Driver, and committed to proving a point about their agency model: agencies are vehicles for brands, and the only question is how far they’re willing to go.
When “creating impact” stops being a metaphor
Standard Practice doesn’t claim to have a proprietary methodology or magic framework. “We do advertising,” Schiff explains. “That’s hard enough.” But when thinking about how to explain their approach, they kept coming back to the word “impact”—a term so overused in advertising it barely means anything anymore.
So they got literal. “Calling advertising impactful, that’s the metaphor,” Schiff says. “We just got real.” Agencies represent their clients the way competition vehicles represent their sponsors. And if the goal is impact, well, demolition derbies deliver that in the most visceral way possible.
The pre-impact conversation
Before destroying their clients’ logos in front of thousands of people, Standard Practice had to actually talk to those clients. The pitch was straightforward: we’re doing this thing, your logo will be on the car, it’s going to get smashed to pieces, and that’s the whole point.
Every single client said yes. “They were like, this is great,” Schiff recalls. “I think they appreciated that we were willing to literally put ourselves—and their brand—in harm’s way to make a point about commitment.”
The agency spent $500 on the car and won $250 back. Net cost of proving a point: $250 and one mild concussion.
The “don’t be that guy” principle
Standard Practice has an internal rule they call “don’t be that guy.” You know the person—the one who responds to every idea by explaining why it won’t work, listing all the obstacles, showing off their intelligence by killing momentum.
“They’re usually not even saying someone already did that,” Schiff notes. “What they’re doing is demonstrating how smart they are by showing you all the ways they can kill your idea.” It’s driven by being conservative and safe, and it poisons creative development.
The counter-principle: if an idea seems impossible, that’s probably a good sign. Use all that creative energy figuring out how to make it possible instead of proving it can’t be done.
What AI told him versus what humans knew
Schiff used Perplexity to research derby driving strategy. The AI’s advice: drive clockwise with the driver’s side on the outside berm for safety. Simple, clear, protective.
When he arrived at the fairgrounds, he asked the veteran drivers for their one piece of advice. An older driver pulled him aside: “Drive counterclockwise with the driver side on the inside.”
The reason? It’s illegal to target the driver’s door, so keeping it on the inside protects you from getting pushed onto the berm and eliminated in 30 seconds. “The AI was fucking with me,” Schiff laughs. But the humans knew the game.
On his last collision, Schiff’s head bounced off the door post hard enough to leave him mildly concussed. “There’s almost no difference perceptibly between me with full mental acuity and me concussed,” he deadpans. “I’m just not that bright.”
What CMOs should demand
If Schiff were a CMO, he’d ask agencies for the same thing every CMO asks for: work that outshines the budget. But here’s the difference—he’d give the agency latitude to actually achieve it.
“You bring back work to the CMO who asked for that, and they’re like, well, we could never do these ideas,” Schiff says. “Those are the only ideas that are going to do what you asked us to do.”
The ask shouldn’t be for safe work that maximizes spend. It should be for disruptive work that transcends budget. But that requires CMOs willing to go on the journey with their agencies, taking the risk together.
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