The Elephant In the Boardroom

Why everyone hates advertising and why you should too. At least until it's better.

Photo Courtesy of Shutterstock /SomYuZu

It’s the tortured groans when a cringeworthy ad proudly struts on during halftime. It’s the clenched jaw when a YouTube pre-roll slices the delicate temperament of your dopamine-drip scrolling.

To hate advertising isn’t unheard of; it slithers into every crack of open space and brief pause. Gone is the martini-soaked bravado of Madison Ave, and with it, the respect and admiration for advertising. The dot-com age brought on tremendous opportunities for creative work, but the immediate spike in media placements condensed advertising into the greedy efficiency game. And now, with the mass employment of data and AI, it's difficult to be optimistic.

To be clear, I’m not a traditionalist shaking his fist at technology. I’m not against the use of AI in creative work, nor do I hate the thought of data-driven ads.

But in a world that is plagued with ethical data concerns as brands, shepherded by ‘future-forward’ agencies, scalpel deeper into the tangible tissue of our personal lives, we need to be more sensitive and realistic about our humanity.

I’ve bounced around the ad circus a bit, working in-house, at small agencies, and big ones, and I can’t help but feel that creativity is being pushed out in lieu of ‘safer’ options.

We’re seeing this across the board with massive mergers like Omnicom and IPG, the ballooning of boutique AI agencies, and the increasing reliance on data over ingenuity. A majority of brands would rather play it safe with creative work that is backed by rigorous data than take a chance on building a new creative outlier that can stand on its own.

On paper, it makes sense. Why wouldn’t a brand strive to use more data and examples? How could more insight harm anything? And quite honestly, data helps brands quite a bit. But an overreliance on data creates the illusion of safety, which grows taller and taller on its wobbly foundation until it crumbles. 

Let’s take an example. 

A soaring tech agency, Accenture Song, took on a rebrand challenge from a heritage luxury car brand, Jaguar. With their immense data-mining tools, predictive models, and global research infrastructure, Accenture Song drew out a comprehensive rebrand strategy that was, on paper, too big to fail. They had the sentiment analyses, the cultural heat maps, the psychographic clusters– every measurable input that should’ve guaranteed a hit. And surprisingly, the rebrand flopped.

Photo courtesy of Business Insider, Jaguar

Across the industry, performance obsessions and existential desperation are steering the ship. Every brief is bent around KPIs, every idea filtered through predictive modelling, every campaign tested into oblivion. But here’s the paradox: these so-called “safe” ads hurt brands more than risky ones ever could. They make brands blur into each other, become forgettable, and interchangeable. They crumble the very integrity that brands spend decades building. The hunt for efficiency, and the promise of endless optimization, is weighing down advertising’s ability to do the one thing it’s supposed to do: move people. Push product all you want, but if you’re sacrificing brand equity for short-term ROI, you’re burning the house to stay warm. 

But it’s not exactly just the brand’s fault either. When agencies parse data about habits, micro-expressions, and instincts into sanitized insights, brands can’t help but fall for the mirage. After all, it’s their long-awaited white picket fence of security in a world of sensitive audiences. It would be stupid to decline rationality. 

So if you shouldn’t blindly follow data…how do you replicate creative success?

You can’t. There’s no silver bullet. Nor is there a pill or a one-fits-all type strategy. It’s just a probability game. Creativity is a muscle to be exercised for any brand, and when we exercise it consistently, we increase the probability of success. Data is just data. Nothing more, nothing less. It can point and hint all it wants, but simply mining more data will never replace the need for human interpretation and execution. We need to have more trust in our instincts and a greater propensity to fail forward.

People love storytelling. People love funny shit, cool shit, weird shit, and everything with a voice. And if you try to tell a story that’s true to who you are, people will notice. And if they still furrow their eyebrows when your ad interrupts their game, so be it. Because at least it’ll be for the right reasons. 

-Ahaan Vaknalli-