How to Control What You Can’t Control

In 2024, TD Bank rolled out a program allowing investors to buy fractions of large company stocks. Brands like Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, Google, Starbucks. 

Brilliant idea. Drinks all around.

Except there was a problem. You’re not allowed to just slap another company’s trademarked logo on your advertising.

Good thing our pals at Ogilvy found a loophole.

You can’t just use another company’s brand name. But you can buy street-level billboards adjacent to places where the name already exists, cut a small square window out of each one, framing the forbidden logo behind it, and invite people to “own a piece of it.” 

Just like that, problem solved. The brand they couldn’t legally show became the thing everyone was looking at. 

Most of us spend far too much of our time trying to move the immovable. The market won’t shift. The culture won’t budge. The board won’t approve it. So we push harder on the thing itself. It pushes back.

The TD bank move was a different kind of intelligence. 

There’s a reason Macs, iPhones, and iPads are spaced out on sleek counters in futuristic glass boxes in Apple Stores… 

It’s not theater; it’s engineering perception. 

The seduction comes just as much from the context as the product. 

We can’t always control a brand, an idea, a reality… but we can have just as much influence by controlling the space around it.

As the Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”