“We know what it takes to be a Tiger.”
“In business people are good together.”
“Hello.”
Walk through any international airport terminal and you’re surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of advertising that says absolutely nothing. Enormous backlit panels, immaculate photography, slogans that could apply to any company in any industry in any decade. Christian Digby-Firth, who spent years as a creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, called airport advertising “the breeding grounds for some of the most fatuous copy lines in the business.” He singled out Vodafone’s “Make the most of now”—which he translated as: “Please use your mobile phone to do all sorts of things that are pointless to you but profitable to us, and do them now because we don’t make anything on your boring old voice calls.”
Somebody approved those ads. Somebody signed a purchase order. Somebody looked at the creative, felt a swell of pride, and said yes, that represents us.
And that’s the real problem. Not that bad advertising exists—but that almost nobody involved in making it can tell whether it will actually sell anything.
The vanity trap has two doors
It’s tempting to blame the agencies. And they deserve some of it—we’ll get to that. But the business owner opens the first door into the vanity trap.
You’ve seen it happen. A business owner commissions advertising, and what they really want—underneath the brief about awareness and conversions—is to feel a certain way about their company. They want the glossy spread. The cinematic brand film. The clever tagline that makes them sound like Apple.
The work that impresses their peers at the industry dinner. Advertising that makes them feel good about their business. The customer never enters the equation.
Drayton Bird, who ran creative departments at Ogilvy & Mather and has spent 60-odd years in direct response, saw this pattern relentlessly. When he audited the websites of his own subscribers—people who actively read marketing advice—he found the overwhelming majority built their sites around “About Us” pages stuffed with inward-looking boasts. “We are the leading…” “Our innovative approach…” “We are committed to excellence…” Language designed to make the company feel impressive, not to answer the only question the customer actually has: What’s in it for me?
This isn’t a minor formatting issue. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of who the advertising is for.
Fairfax Cone, one of the founders of Foote, Cone & Belding, had a devastatingly simple test. When he saw bad copy, he’d ask the writer one question: “Would you say that to someone you know?”
If you wouldn’t look a friend in the eye and say “We are committed to delivering best-in-class solutions”—don’t inflict it on a stranger.
The billion-dollar pig
The second door into the vanity trap? The agency holds it wide open. And sometimes the scale of the waste is staggering.
Barclays Bank once ran a television campaign featuring Samuel L. Jackson walking through the English countryside accompanied by a pig. Production values were cinematic. The budget ran into millions. Bird tested it—not with focus groups, but with a live audience of 1,500 salespeople. He asked a simple question: would this persuade a single person to switch their bank account to Barclays?
The room said no. Most thought it would do nothing. Some thought it would actively lose customers.
Then he asked a class of marketing students. Not one could even understand what the ad was trying to say. And here’s the detail that makes it sting: the most profitable customers for any bank are middle-aged or older. The ad wasn’t even aimed at the people who had money to deposit.
Bird’s suspicion was blunt. He imagined the people who created and approved the campaign “just fancied the idea of meeting and working with” Samuel L. Jackson. “Or maybe they just liked pigs.”
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a pattern. The Advertising Standards Authority once ran a poster on the London Underground that read: “We’re here to make advertising better. Not to make better advertising. (Sorry.)” Bird called it what it was—”creative masturbation, produced entirely to please the writer, with no discernible purpose whatever.”
A charity called Centrepoint, which helps homeless young people, spent its donors’ money on a “clever” ad that relied on irony most readers would take literally. Money that should have gone to kids on the streets was burned to satisfy a copywriter’s ego.
When Bird ran a creative department and writers pitched this kind of work, he’d say something “of a helpful but mildly critical nature—like, ‘This is total bollocks.'” The writers would protest: “But let us explain.”
His response ended every argument: “Owing to a number of financial and logistical problems, we can’t send you round to every single prospect to explain the brilliance of your ideas.”
The proof is worse than you think
Here’s where it gets genuinely alarming. You might assume the industry’s top award ceremonies—Cannes Lions, the Effies—function as a reliable filter. That the campaigns recognised as the world’s best creative are the campaigns that sell best. Decades of data from the IPA Effectiveness Databank used to support that assumption. Creatively awarded campaigns once delivered up to 11 times the return on investment of non-awarded work.
That multiplier has collapsed.
Peter Field’s landmark 2019 analysis of nearly 600 case studies spanning 24 years found that creatively awarded campaigns had become no more commercially effective than standard, non-awarded work. The advantage had evaporated entirely. Cannes’ highest-decorated work was achieving statistical parity with average advertising.
It gets worse at the top. System1, an independent firm that measures real consumer emotional response to ads, tested Cannes Grand Prix winners against ordinary TV commercials. The results were damning. In 2019, six of the Film Lions winners scored the absolute minimum 1-Star rating—zero predicted potential for long-term growth. By 2021, the entire Cannes Film category averaged just 2.1 Stars, making the “world’s greatest advertisements” marginally less effective than a randomly selected television commercial.
Read that again. A random ad pulled from a database outperformed the industry’s most celebrated work.
The reason is a psychological gap between the jury and the customer. Award juries—composed of sophisticated, media-saturated industry professionals—have become desensitised to the emotional appeals that actually move ordinary people. They reward avant-garde technique, provocative norm-violation, and “purpose-led” campaigns about saving rainforests or fighting systemic injustice. Noble causes. Terrible selling.
Mark Ritson, the marketing professor, suggests what he calls the “white light of truth” test: open your fridge and count how many items you purchased because of the brand’s social purpose. The answer, for almost everyone, is zero.
"But what about Apple?"
Now. You’re probably thinking: this is all well and good, but Apple’s advertising is creative AND it sells. Nike’s advertising is creative AND it sells. Isn’t this just an argument for ugly, low-rent direct response ads?
Fair objection. And it’s worth sitting with for a moment, because this is where most people get the distinction wrong.
The argument isn’t creativity versus selling. It’s creativity for the creator versus creativity for the customer.
David Ogilvy’s mentor Raymond Rubicam put it precisely: a good advertisement should sell and be an excellent piece of work—in that order. The problem starts when the order flips. When the work becomes about the writer’s cleverness, the director’s reel, the client’s ego, or the jury’s appetite for novelty—and the customer becomes an afterthought.
Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign—which took the 2025 Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes after running for ten years—is a perfect case study in the difference. It didn’t win because it was edgy or provocative or purpose-driven. It won because it contributed to the iPhone becoming the best-selling smartphone on the planet. Creativity in total service of a commercial outcome, sustained over a decade.
That’s the distinction. And the data on what makes creativity actually work commercially is now extraordinarily precise.
The 2025 Creative Dividend research—a massive study of 1,250 campaigns representing $140 billion in market share and 200,000 consumer responses—identified three conditions that must be present simultaneously for creative advertising to generate profit. Miss any one of them and the multiplier dies.
First: the work must generate genuine emotion. Not “edgy” emotion that impresses a jury. Real human feeling—humour, joy, empathy, surprise—that bypasses the brain’s cognitive filters. Without emotion, the ad joins the 54% of all advertising that scores the minimum effectiveness rating. It becomes invisible.
Second: the audience must instantly recognise the brand. Emotion without brand recognition is, as Ritson puts it, “a love letter with no signature.” The research identifies a target of seven distinct brand codes—colours, shapes, mascots, sonic cues—embedded in each ad. If you make someone laugh but they can’t remember who made them laugh, you’ve entertained them for free.
Third: you must leave it running. Campaigns sustained for over three years deliver 7.5 times the incremental profit of campaigns pulled before six months. The industry’s addiction to novelty—killing campaigns that are “working but boring us”—truncates the compounding effect that generates real returns.
When all three conditions are met, the compounding effect can return up to 21 times the initial investment. When they’re not, you’re burning money—whether the ad is glossy or ugly.
The expensive alternative to vanity
If vanity advertising is a trap, there’s an equally expensive trap on the other side: boring advertising.
A 2024 study called The Extraordinary Cost of Dull quantified the financial penalty precisely. “Neutrality”—the complete absence of emotional response—has become the single most common consumer reaction to advertising. And dull ads don’t just underperform. They cost dramatically more to achieve the same results.
To match the market share growth of emotionally engaging advertising, dull ads require 2.6 times the media budget. To match the same profit growth, they require double the spend. In other words, boring advertising functions as a tax on every dollar you put into marketing. You can serve a dull ad to a perfectly targeted audience with flawless programmatic precision—and all you’ve done is deliver a failure with better aim.
The escape route isn’t “more creative” in the award-jury sense. And it isn’t “safer” in the corporate risk-avoidance sense. It’s asking the right question before anything gets made.
One question that changes everything
So here’s the diagnostic. Before you approve any piece of advertising—a TV spot, a social campaign, a landing page, a poster—ask Fairfax Cone’s question:
Would you say that to someone you know?
Not “does this represent our brand values.” Not “is this on strategy.” Not “will this win an award.” Not even “do I like it.”
Would you walk up to a friend—a real person with real problems who is genuinely busy—and say these words to their face?
If the answer is no, the work has failed before a single customer sees it. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the photography is. It doesn’t matter how much the production cost. It doesn’t matter that the CEO thinks it makes the company look prestigious.
The Australian research that David Ogilvy shared back in 1985—research most designers still haven’t encountered—proved something painfully obvious: when researchers showed people ads and asked what product was being advertised, the audience consistently assumed the picture related to the subject. Show a woman in a bubble bath and people think soap, even if you’re selling cognac. Show an abstract geometric pattern for Intel and nobody thinks about processors. Illustrations directly related to the message perform 32% better than average. Ads that don’t show the product or the core idea perform 27% worse than average.
Relevance beats ingenuity. Every time. In every test. Across every decade of data.
Back to the airport
Next time you walk through an airport terminal, look at those enormous, glossy panels differently. Count how many answer the question “What’s in it for me?” Count how many would make sense if you covered the logo. Count how many you could attribute to the correct company without the branding.
Most of them could be selling anything. Or nothing.
That’s not a creative failure. It’s an evaluation failure. Somebody in the room—the agency, the client, the marketing director, the CEO—should have asked Cone’s question and didn’t. Somebody was so busy feeling proud of the advertising that they forgot to check whether it would sell.
The data says that question is worth, conservatively, a 21x difference in commercial return.
The airport ads will keep running. The question is whether yours will look like them.
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