As most of you know, I’m a pretty big fan of originality and don’t put a lot of credit in a copycat of the latest TV show, or in this case political campaign. What do you think, does something like this blend in or does it stand out as a church being relevant?

One post puts the struggle well: culturally relevant vs. creatively independent.

Here’s my thought…marketing is all about communication, so what does something like this communicate? Do you look at it, read it and say oh good, Granger is going to talk about the changes in their service structure? Do you read, oh I see Granger supports Obama? What is it communicating? If it’s just slick…well, then can we wonder why people shut the door on “church marketing”?

What do you think?

But when one of the churches we work with was coming up with a series on Samson and wanted to really show his amazing strength (1000 men with a jawbone) we ended up with a great brand inspired by “The Hulk”.

When we first went down this path, I was cautious. But through working with our designer to continually focus on what we were trying to communicate and understanding our inspiration…the results is a great example of taking inspiration and not stealing an idea.

When bringing pop culture into your marketing, please do it carefully and with originality. It is not the easiest path, but doing so will give you something great.

But Terrell made an interesting point that I hadn’t thought of:

My problem with the stealing movie themes is the complete hypocrisy of telling Hollywood (1) you are all sinners, you promote bad things, you are going to hell (although, not entirely untrue) and then saying (2) but, we like your creative, will blatantly steal it, abuse it, and don’t even think about trying to prosecute us because we “are on a mission from God” and it would look bad on CNN for you to sue us.

No wonder people think Christians are hypocrites.

So true. We shock in horror that someone would watch Desperate Housewives but then we use it as our entire series? We say “don’t be like the world” and turn around and do a cheap imitation.

Now I’m all for using pop culture, movie clips, etc. but please be original. We work with a church, a college ministry, that did a series called “The gospel according to the Simpsons”…inspired by, not copied…that was cool. Another reason that worked is because it was a one time thing. It was just a cheap spinoff, it was an inspired idea.

It’s not as easy, but it SO much more effective and above reproach. What do you think?