It is well known that if we don't learn from our mistakes, we are bound to repeat them.

And though I try hard to be professional about all of this, I went into a research presentation on the effectiveness of a long running campaign with some trepidation. As the Creative Director, I take it all more personally than I should. Besides, I don't want to attract attention to myself because I dropped the meat in the dirt.

The study was to test our multimedia campaign among a statistically significant sample in the geography in which the advertising runs -- and to evaluate it against competitive advertising. Among all the qualitative research we do, this was done by quants -- this was for real. We would have the measurement data to understand what we could do better and what we had done well -- across a variety of attributes and dimensions.

I was both relieved and proud that our campaign outperformed all the national advertisers competing against our client -- by an order of magnitude. And truthfully, I did learn some lessons about how we can improve upon the recent performance. But what I didn't expect was that I learned a surprising number of those lessons about what to do, and what not to do, based on data of how poorly those competitive campaigns performed.

In this instance, if we don't make the effort to learn from our competitors' mistakes, we run the risk of committing them before we have the opportunity of repeating them.