Why does advertising feel less creative than it used to?

A Nike ad recently sparked an interesting debate online. The concept is extremely simple. You see a close-up of someone running. From the framing, it looks like they’re on a treadmill. The camera slowly zooms out and reveals that they’re actually running on the rotating drum of a cement truck.

The idea was praised as an example of a simple creative principle: familiar, but unexpected.

Running shoes are familiar. A treadmill is familiar. Running on a cement truck? Unexpected.

And it works as a framework. But the reaction to the ad was arguably more interesting than the ad itself. While some people praised its simplicity and creativity, others had a very different reaction:

Is this really where the bar for creative advertising is now? It raises a bigger question.

Why does so much advertising and marketing today feel…safe? And if it does, what happened?

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Were ads actually more creative in the past?

It’s easy to romanticize old advertising.

We remember the brilliant campaigns. We don’t remember the thousands of completely forgettable ads that ran alongside them. So no, every ad in the 90s or 2000s wasn't a creative masterpiece. But some of the campaigns we still remember years later had something that's harder to find in a lot of marketing today: a proper idea.

Take Snickers’ “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.”

The concept was simple: when you're hungry, you stop acting like yourself. In the famous Betty White commercial, a group of guys are playing football. Except one of them is Betty White, getting tackled and complaining about how he's being treated. Someone gives her a Snickers, she takes a bite, and suddenly she's back to being the guy she was supposed to be.

“You’re not you when you’re hungry.”

Funny, easy to understand and, importantly, the product is the reason the story works.

That single idea was strong enough to become a campaign that could be repeated with different celebrities, situations and jokes without losing the connection to Snickers. That's the difference between simply getting attention and having a creative advertising idea.

So: What has changed about the environment in which advertising gets made? Because quite a lot has.

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Why does modern advertising feel so safe?

The obvious explanation would be that people simply aren't as creative anymore. But that's probably the least interesting answer. Creative people still exist. Great ideas still exist. Great campaigns still get made. The system around them, however, has changed dramatically.

1. Everything needs to be measurable

Modern marketers have access to an extraordinary amount of data. We can measure impressions, clicks, watch time, conversions, CAC, ROAS, retention and almost every step in between. That's obviously a good thing. But there's a strange side effect.

When almost everything can be measured, there's pressure to choose things that can also be predicted.

We know a certain format performs. We know a certain hook gets clicks. So why risk doing something completely different? Optimization naturally looks backwards. It asks:

What has worked before?

Creativity often asks the opposite:

What haven't people seen before?

Good marketing needs both. But when certainty becomes the priority, creativity can easily lose.

2. Original ideas get approved to death

Ask people working in advertising why some campaigns become boring and you'll often hear a version of the same story. The original idea wasn't boring. Then came the feedback:

• Make the product clearer. 
• Move the logo forward.
• Can we make the joke less risky?
• Will everyone understand this?
• Can we show the benefit sooner?
• Legal doesn't like that.
• Management isn't convinced.
• Can we make it more like that campaign our competitor did?

None of those requests necessarily sounds unreasonable on its own. An unusual idea can go through ten perfectly reasonable decisions and emerge as something completely forgettable.

The goal gradually changes from:

“Could this be great?”

to:

“Can everyone approve this?”

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3. Brands need an absurd amount of content now

Advertising also used to operate in a very different media environment. Today a brand might need content for LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, newsletters, its blog, paid social and whatever platform gets added next.

And it needs new content constantly. That's a lot of ideas.

Marketing teams haven't necessarily received proportionally bigger budgets or more time to produce all of it. So instead of creating a handful of major campaigns, marketers are feeding an always-on content machine. That changes the work.

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Best practices might be making everything look the same

There's another culprit worth talking about: best practices.

Open almost any marketing platform and you'll find advice like:

• Hook people in the first 3 seconds.
• Use this video structure.
• Keep the headline this long.
• Put your CTA here.
• Use this post format.
• Publish this many times per week.
• Make it native.
• Show a face.
• Add subtitles.
• Start with a question.

None of this advice is necessarily wrong. Most best practices exist because somebody tested them and discovered that they work.

The problem starts when everyone learns the same rules. Suddenly your LinkedIn feed has 50 people starting posts the same way. TikTok videos use the same editing patterns. Landing pages have the same structure.

Eventually, best practice becomes average practice. And average is difficult to notice.

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Then AI arrived

AI makes this even more interesting because the cost of creating content is dropping dramatically. One idea can become a blog article, LinkedIn post, Instagram caption, newsletter, video script and ten additional variations far faster than before.

That's incredibly useful.

It's also what we're building Whaaat AI around. Different AI agents can handle different parts of the marketing workflow, work from the same context and turn one idea into content for different channels.

But easier execution doesn't automatically mean better ideas. In fact, it makes the distinction even more important.

Generating more content isn't the same as generating better content.

AI can help research an idea. It can challenge it, brainstorm alternatives, turn it into different formats. It can help you execute something that previously would have taken hours.

But producing 30 perfectly formatted posts around an uninteresting idea still leaves you with an uninteresting idea.

For years, the difficult part of content marketing was producing enough content. Increasingly, the difficult part will be producing something worth paying attention to.

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Familiar + unexpected is actually a useful rule

Which brings us back to the Nike ad. The principle behind it isn't bad at all.

Familiar + unexpected is one of the simplest ways to think about creative ideas. Start with something your audience immediately understands. Then break the pattern.

Snickers did exactly that.

A group of guys playing football? Familiar. Betty White suddenly being one of the players? Unexpected. But there's an important difference. The unexpected part communicated the entire idea: You're not yourself when you're hungry.

The surprise served the idea, and the idea served the product. That's where “unexpected” becomes more than a visual trick.

A creative idea can make someone laugh. It can reveal something about the product. It can create curiosity. It can make someone recognize themselves. It can make the brand easier to remember.

The cement-truck ad creates its surprise through a visual reveal. Whether that's enough to make it a brilliant ad is subjective.

But the discussion around it highlights something useful:

Surprise gets attention. Meaning makes the surprise matter.

The best creative ideas usually have both.

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Maybe boring marketing is actually good news

There's another way to look at all of this. If marketing really is becoming more predictable, more optimized and more templated, that's not necessarily bad news for you.

It might be an opportunity.

Especially if you're a smaller brand. Big companies often have layers of approval, strict brand guidelines, legal teams, shareholders, established expectations and a lot to lose.

Small teams can have something much more valuable: permission to be weird.

You can have an idea in the morning and publish it in the afternoon. You can make fun of yourself. You can have an actual opinion. You can try a format nobody has proven yet.

And when everyone else is optimizing toward the same middle, being slightly unexpected suddenly goes a long way. You don't necessarily need a multimillion-euro creative budget. You need something to say.

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How do you make your marketing less boring?

Before publishing your next piece of content, there are a few questions worth asking.

Could this have come from any of our competitors?

Remove your logo and company name. Could another company publish exactly the same thing? If yes, the idea needs more of you.

Your experience. Your opinion. Your data. Your customers. Your sense of humour. 

Did we start with an idea or a format?

“We need a LinkedIn post” isn't an idea. Neither is: “We should make a Reel.”

Those are containers.

Start with what you actually want somebody to think, feel, understand or talk about. Choose the format afterwards.

What's familiar, and what's unexpected?

Give people enough familiarity to immediately understand what they're looking at. Then find the thing that breaks the pattern. That doesn't need to be outrageous. Sometimes one unexpected observation is enough.

Are we killing the idea before testing it?

Not everything needs to be predictable.

If your first question about every creative idea is whether you have data proving that it will work, you'll mostly end up repeating things that you already have.

Sometimes the test is the data. Publish it. See what happens. Learn.

Does it make you feel anything?

Not every marketing asset needs to make someone cry or laugh out loud. But there should ideally be some reaction.

• Curiosity.
• Surprise.
• Desire.
• Disagreement.

Even a simple: “Huh. I hadn't thought about it like that.”

That's already more powerful than another piece of content somebody scrolls past without consciously noticing.

Are you using AI to execute the idea or replace having one?

This may become one of the most important creative questions of the AI era. AI is extraordinarily good at removing execution bottlenecks.

Use it.

Research faster. Brainstorm more directions. Challenge your assumptions. Create variations. Repurpose good ideas. Adapt them for different platforms. Get the tedious work out of the way.

That's exactly where AI can give marketers more room to be creative. But don't confuse the ability to generate something with having something worth generating.

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Creativity might matter more now, not less

We're entering a strange period in marketing. It's becoming easier than ever to make things.

The amount of content competing for our attention will almost certainly continue to increase. But our attention isn't increasing with it. And that changes what becomes valuable.

The competitive advantage isn't simply being able to create more. Soon, almost everyone will be able to do that. The advantage is having an idea someone actually notices.

So perhaps the interesting question is:

“What are we going to do now that creating the boring stuff has become incredibly easy?”

Because if the creative bar really is as low as people say, there has rarely been a better time to raise it.