"This is Uber for X" has probably rescued a thousand bad pitch meetings. Everyone gets a rough picture. A familiar campaign reference can do the same for a creative team. Ten minutes of explanation disappear.
Fine. Use the shortcut. Then put it away.
The borrowed idea comes with borrowed assumptions
An analogy can reveal a pattern you had not noticed. It may suggest how people discover a product, how a marketplace might work, or what emotional territory a campaign could own. That is enough to begin.
It is not enough to build. The original pattern came from a particular customer, cost structure, market, and moment. Copy the visible shape and you also copy assumptions that may have no business travelling with it.
Copying a bird's shape is not the same as understanding lift.
Now ask the dull questions
Who is the customer here? What do they do today? Why would they change? Who pays, and what has to be true for the economics to survive? Which constraint cannot be hand-waved away?
These questions feel slow after the thrill of a neat comparison. They are also where the idea becomes yours. If the answers are weak, a famous reference will not rescue it.
Do not spend the meeting defending the metaphor
I have seen discussions drift into whether the comparison is fair, whether every example matches, or whether one exception disproves the whole thing. At that point nobody is talking about the customer anymore.
I still use analogies because they are fast and memorable. I just give them a smaller job. They can suggest a direction. The mechanics have to earn it.