Ask Skip: Did the industry optimize creativity out of advertising?

Did the industry optimize creativity out of advertising?

– Director of Corporate Strategy

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “optimize creativity out of advertising.”

There’s still great work out there. Funny work. Strange work. Emotional work. Every now and then, a brand makes something people actively choose to watch instead of treating it like an unavoidable tax on the way to the content.

So no, creativity hasn’t disappeared.

But I think I know what you’re really asking: did the industry build a system where the safest, most measurable, most easily defended work keeps beating the most original work?

Yes. Absolutely.

Advertising built an operating model that treats creativity like an input to be managed, tested, localized, modularized, legalized, optimized, and eventually sanded down until nobody in the room has to explain why they took a risk.

That’s probably the problem you’re trying to get at.

Data, measurement, and accountability aren’t the villains. Advertising needed all three. Nobody’s pining for the days when a media plan got waved through because a guy in a blazer said affluent people liked golf.

The trouble started when work that was easy to measure began beating work that was hard to forget. That’s when the industry stopped treating memorability as the point and started treating it as a nice-to-have.

And once that happened, the process got very good at removing the parts of an idea that might make someone uncomfortable, amused, surprised, confused, or interested enough to remember it.

The Funnel Took Over the Building

Performance marketing forced advertisers to care whether money worked. That was overdue. It made waste harder to hide. It made media buying more accountable. It gave marketers a clearer view of what happened after an ad ran, which is generally preferable to nodding thoughtfully at a reach report and pretending everyone in the room understands brand lift.

The problem came when performance logic escaped the lower funnel and took over the whole building.

Now every piece of work has to justify itself immediately. Did it drive a click? Did it convert? Did it create a measurable action during the attribution window someone assigned to it? Did it do so at a cost that makes the spreadsheet smile?

Those are perfectly legitimate questions for a promotion, a search ad, a retargeting campaign, or a product launch built around immediate demand.

They’re terrible questions to use as the sole test for everything.

Brand building doesn’t happen on command. Trust doesn’t show up neatly in a seven-day attribution window. Cultural relevance doesn’t arrive pre-labeled in a dashboard. The most valuable work often creates effects that are harder to isolate but easy to recognize later.

People remember it.

They quote it.

They recognize the brand faster next time.

They’re more likely to give that brand permission to exist in their lives without feeling like they’re being hunted through an app.

That matters. It just doesn’t fit cleanly into a slide titled “Incremental Revenue Impact.”

The Brief Became a Risk Register

A lot of advertising doesn’t start with an idea anymore. It starts with constraints.

The brand has to appear in the first two seconds. The message has to work without sound. The asset has to be modular. It needs a vertical version, a horizontal version, a six-second version, a fifteen-second version, a CTV version, a creator version, a retailer version, a social cutdown, and probably a localization plan for markets nobody thought about until the approval meeting.

It has to be safe for every audience, every platform, every retailer, every internal stakeholder, every legal team, and every person who might someday leave a comment underneath it.

By the time the work clears every review layer, its edges have usually been sanded down. It can be resized, localized, and approved for every platform, but it no longer gives anyone much reason to feel anything.

Brands keep asking why their advertising is forgettable while treating the process of making it like a procurement exercise. They want breakthrough work, but they insist on sanding down every sharp edge before it leaves the building.

Then they wonder why the audience scrolls past.

Because audiences can smell when nobody involved in the work was allowed to care.

The modern advertising machine is very good at identifying risk. It can tell you whether something is too specific, too niche, too irreverent, too unfamiliar, too emotional, too expensive, too hard to localize, or too likely to make somebody on the approval chain uncomfortable.

What it’s worse at recognizing is that those might be the exact reasons an idea has a chance of mattering.

The best advertising has always had a little danger in it. Not scandal. Not stupidity. Danger.

The danger of being memorable.

The danger of having a point of view.

The danger of making someone feel something besides mildly informed.

Advertising Mistook Precision for Meaning

Modern media buying can tell you an incredible amount about who saw an ad. Age. Geography. Purchase history. Viewing behavior. Device. Household signals. Audience segments. Shopping patterns. Intent signals. Retargeting eligibility. A small army of data points built to reassure the buyer that the ad found the right person.

Great.

But media precision doesn’t automatically create creative precision.

Knowing exactly who you reached doesn’t mean you gave them a reason to give a shit.

That’s where the industry gets confused. It assumes the targeting did the difficult work. It assumes relevance can be manufactured through audience data alone. It assumes that once a message lands in front of the right person, it’s already halfway to being effective.

Sometimes it is.

Most of the time, it still has to be good.

A mediocre ad shown to the perfect audience is still a mediocre ad. It just has better reporting.

The industry has built a massive system for optimizing delivery, frequency, reach, conversion paths, audience overlap, and attribution. It has spent far less energy protecting the conditions that produce memorable creative in the first place.

That imbalance is why so much advertising feels technically competent and emotionally dead.

Creators Exposed the Gap

This is part of why creator advertising keeps taking budget.

Not because every creator is brilliant. Plenty are just reading a discount code from a kitchen with good lighting.

But the good ones still have something traditional advertising has spent years trying to process out of itself: a recognizable voice.

They have rhythm. They have instincts. They understand what their audience will tolerate, what they’ll laugh at, what they’ll ignore, and when a brand integration will feel like it belongs rather than something that got bolted on after a legal review.

That’s valuable because it’s hard to fake.

Traditional advertising often treats trust as a media metric. Creators understand it as the asset it actually is. They know that if they ruin the relationship with their audience, the whole business gets weaker. Their audience doesn’t care whether the integration checked every box on the brand’s messaging framework. They care whether it feels natural, useful, funny, surprising, or at minimum not insulting.

Meanwhile, too many brands are putting work through enough review layers to ensure nobody can be blamed for it later. The result is advertising designed to survive internal approval rather than earn any real attention from the people it’s meant to reach.

AI Will Make Average Cheaper

AI is about to make this problem worse.

Not because AI can’t help creative teams. It can. It can remove a lot of repetitive work around versioning, resizing, tagging, formatting, localization, data cleanup, rough cuts, asset management, and the thousand annoying tasks that turn a good idea into administrative sludge.

That’s useful. More than useful. It’s overdue.

The danger is that AI gives mediocre organizations a faster and cheaper way to produce more mediocre work.

More variants. More assets. More tests. More product demos. More “creator-style” ads created by people who’ve never had a real audience. More copy that sounds technically fine and emotionally vacant. More content designed to satisfy platform demands rather than give a human being a reason to stop scrolling.

The machine will be very busy.

Nobody will remember any of it.

That’s the risk. AI won’t replace the best creative work. It’ll make the average version of everything cheaper to produce, easier to distribute, and much harder to escape.

The companies that get this right will use AI to remove the repetitive work around creativity, not to replace the taste inside it.

Let the machine handle versioning.

Keep humans in charge of the point of view.

Let it help organize the assets.

Keep humans in charge of the joke.

Let it speed up the workflow.

Keep humans in charge of deciding whether the idea is worth making in the first place.

Somebody Still Has to Own Taste

The deeper issue is that nobody wants to be wrong.

Great advertising requires someone to make a decision that can’t be fully defended in advance. It means choosing the thing that might fail. The thing that might confuse one segment. The thing that may not have an immediate benchmark. The thing that makes the legal team sigh. The thing where the media plan can’t promise success before the creative idea even exists.

That’s terrifying in a corporate environment.

Optimization is seductive because it gives everyone a procedural shield. Nobody has to say, “I think this is great.” They can say, “The data supported it.” Nobody has to own the taste. They can own the process.

That’s safer.

It’s also how you get six thousand ads that are perfectly optimized for nobody remembering them.

The industry doesn’t need less data. It needs adults who can use data without surrendering every creative instinct to it.

Data should inform creative work. It shouldn’t flatten it.

Testing should sharpen an idea. It shouldn’t become a substitute for having one.

Measurement should tell you whether something worked. It shouldn’t become a reason to avoid making anything that can’t be fully explained before it runs.

Skip Says

Advertising didn’t optimize creativity out of the business. It optimized courage out of the process.

The industry got better at targeting audiences, measuring outcomes, testing formats, and defending spend. Those are useful improvements. But it also started treating anything hard to quantify as optional, including originality, emotional impact, cultural relevance, and actual human taste.

The result is an ad economy full of work that’s efficient, measurable, brand-safe, and instantly forgettable.

The best advertisers won’t abandon data.

They’ll stop letting data make every creative decision.

Because the job isn’t to make advertising easier to defend in a meeting.

It’s to make it hard to ignore.

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