Info

Posts from the ads Category

Choose another category?

Every December, the advertising industry reenacts its own version of the Nativity: wise men bearing moodboards, shepherds herding focus groups, and a miraculous birth of a Christmas advert that must, at all costs, look expensive.

This year, two babies arrived. One was swaddled in emotional warmth and human craft. The other appeared to have been delivered by a drunk photocopier.

According to FT The public loved both.

Let us begin with Coca-Cola. For the second consecutive year, they generated their Christmas campaign using artificial intelligence. The ad contains continuity errors worthy of a hallucinating cinematographer. The wheels on the truck appear and vanish. Animals morph between art styles like Pokémon evolving out of boredom. The whole thing looks like a mashup of a Christmas fever dream and a GPU having a nervous breakdown. I hated it!

Critics hated it. The internet howled. The profession clutched its pearls.

Consumers, however, reacted as they always do to Coca-Cola at Christmas. They felt nostalgic. They felt warm. They felt thirsty.

John Lewis, by contrast, crafted a lovely, touching father and son story. Proper actors. Careful storytelling. A script written by someone who drinks tea slowly and wears jumpers. Critics swooned. Commentators debated masculinity and modern fatherhood.

Consumers liked it roughly as much as the AI chaos.

If this does not make you slightly uneasy as a creative professional, check your pulse.

The uncomfortable truth is that, for large parts of the population, Christmas advertising is not a creative competition. It is a memory activation ritual. You are not creating meaning so much as triggering it.

This helps explain the most sacrilegious finding of all. When tested at scale, the AI Coca-Cola ad achieved maximum scores for short and long-term commercial effectiveness. Not high. Not excellent. Maximum.

In other words, the glitchy one did the job just as well as the beautifully made one.

This leads us to a few observations that the industry will, quite understandably, discuss only in hushed tones.

First: effectiveness has quietly divorced itself from craftsmanship. Not entirely, but enough that the relationship looks like a polite open marriage. For many brands, emotional association matters more than cinematic perfection.

Second: AI will not replace creativity, but it may replace indifference to inconsistencies. People do not sit at home with clipboards noting frame-to-frame truck design. They are simply asking themselves, however subconsciously, “Does this make me feel something familiar?”

Third: nostalgia is becoming unfairly powerful. Coca-Cola has a seasonal monopoly that AI can exploit with minimal risk. A warm feeling is already baked into the memory. The AI is simply pressing the button. Smaller brands cannot play this game. Their nostalgia cupboard is empty.

So the question is not whether AI will replace creatives. The question is whether the economic incentives now favor AI for everything except the small number of genuinely original ideas humans must still generate.

The craft will matter, but only when originality matters. For seasonal advertising with decades of emotional equity, originality is not the goal. Memory is.

This is not a creative armageddon. It is more like the invention of the calculator. Those who insisted on long division as a personality trait lost out. Those who used calculators to solve more interesting problems progressed.

AI will not kill creativity. It may, however, kill laziness disguised as craftsmanship.

This should be good news. If routine content creation becomes a commodity, human intelligence can be redeployed where it is irreplaceable: original ideas, fresh provocations, and counterintuitive leaps that machines cannot yet take.

In other words, the future will belong to the people who understand what creativity is for. Not those who believe it is a decorative art movement, but those who see it as a problem-solving tool for irrational humans.

If an imperfect AI Coca-Cola advert can outperform a perfectly made one, the message is clear.

We were never in the business of perfection.
We were in the business of persuasion.
The machines have merely reminded us.

@raysrabbithole

Corporate America is waging war… I think this ad was the declaration …#discover #politics #influencer #fyp #foryoupage

♬ original sound – Raygina George

It’s Time! (To Remind the Poor to Shop, Apparently)

Ah, November. The leaves fall, the bills pile up, and Mariah Carey emerges from her cryogenic chamber to sell us self-love…this time, in partnership with Sephora. “It’s Time!” For what, exactly? Apparently, for late-stage capitalism to hit a new low, soundtracked by a jingle we can’t escape even in the checkout queue.

This year’s “festive” blockbuster stars a luxury-drenched Mariah sparring with a unionising elf, exhausted from Christmas labour. His wish? “Elf therapy.” Because, of course, nothing heals burnout faster than monetising it, with a side of Luminous Glow highlighter. In the gospel of beauty marketing, trauma is temporary, shimmer is forever.

Sephora’s Instagram sleight of hand, perfectly timed for an era of record inflation and wage stagnation, achieves the impossible: it’s both aspirational and tone-deaf. “Treat yourself,” the campaign urges, as audiences juggle whether to treat their family to heat or dinner this December. Mariah’s not here to liberate anyone from the grind she’s here to remind us we’re only a purchase away from happiness, if we splurge hard enough.

The real miracle of It’s Time! isn’t the production value or the elf’s labour rights negotiationit’s the collective amnesia it assumes: that anyone can forget retail therapy is what created this mess. The only truly relatable scene? The elf threatening to sell everything just to survive the holidays ….a story most of us could tell without the glitter.

Social media tore through the campaign like wrapping paper in a clearance bin: “Classist.” “Out of touch.” “No bells, no cheer, all branding.” When your best defence is “At least we didn’t use AI,” you’ve already lost the plot….and the original song—about wanting love, not luxury..has never sounded more like a hostage soundtrack for sponsored despair.

Meanwhile, Mariah and Sephora play the world’s tiniest violin…probably available, gold-plated, exclusively at Sephora.com. Because who needs accountability when you’ve got influencers, elf therapy, and a hundred million views to monetise?

So yes, Mariah…it’s time. Time to remember that for most people, the true miracle would be brands not weaponising “self-care” as an answer to poverty. Or, at the very least, next year, let the elves unionise on camera. Who knows? Revolution might just go viral.

For most of its history, advertising thrived on context.

Marlboro could posture as rugged freedom in the pages of Life.

Coca-Cola could sell happiness in the glow of a family television. Brands borrowed gravitas from the stage they performed on.

That stage has collapsed.

Open any feed, and the juxtapositions border on derangement. A luxury perfume ad sits next to footage from kids dyeing a war zone. A “get ready with me” makeup tutorial plays before a video of protesters clashing with police. A parody song about eugenics algorithms trends, while a new snack food launches in the same scroll. Luxury and suffering. Irony and sincerity. Progress and regression. All jostling for the same square of glass.

This is not culture. It is collision.

Algorithms, of course, insist they are solving the problem. They offer “personalization”. But what they actually know are the following: They know when you are restless, when you pause for three seconds on a video, when you hover over a product before abandoning it. They know your pulse. What they do not know is your soul. Why you can’t sleep, why you feel sad, why you are crying.

Prediction is not the same as understanding.

Machines are superb at exploiting moments of weakness—2am insomnia, doomscroll fatigue, payday jitters. Yet they cannot tell you why people yearn, what they aspire to, or what makes life meaningful. The industry has mistaken behavioural prediction for intimacy, and in doing so, has surrendered its one true advantage: the ability to craft enduring meaning.

This is advertising’s awkward dilemma. Do brands add more shards to the pile, fighting for a microsecond of fractured attention? Or do they resist the gravity of the feed and try to create coherence instead?

The uncomfortable truth is that advertising has become a contributor to the breakdown. By chasing “relevance” at all costs, brands pour gasoline on the chaos. Every campaign becomes another dissonant signal fighting for scraps of cognition.

Yet the opportunity is hiding in plain sight. In an environment where everything is noise, coherence becomes radical. In a feed where every signal contradicts the next, a brand that offers consistency, clarity, or even a moment of calm stands out far more than one that shouts louder.

Yesterday’s diagnosis was economic: loyalty is no longer earned, it is rented, renewed only as long as the offer makes sense. Today’s diagnosis is cultural: meaning itself has fragmented.

The future of advertising will not be won by algorithms alone, nor by nostalgia for heritage brands. It will be won by those who can do what machines cannot: give people a story that makes sense of the chaos.

The algorithm may know your pulse, but only humans can write your soul. The question for brands is brutally simple: do you want to feed the collapse—or carve coherence out of it?

Covering the latest campaigns, news and trends, along with industry interviews, events and case studies.

WARC’s The Future of Programmatic 2025 is a meticulously composed document. The charts are polished. The language is neutral. The predictions are framed as progress.

But read it closely and a deeper truth emerges:
It’s not a report. It’s an autopsy.
What’s dying is unpredictability. Creativity. Humanity.
And we’re all expected to applaud as the corpse is carried off, sanitized and smiling.

We Are Optimizing Ourselves Into Irrelevance

Every year, programmatic becomes more “efficient.” More “targeted.” More “brand safe.”
And with each incremental improvement, something irreplaceable is lost.

We’ve mistaken precision for persuasion.
We’ve traded emotional impact for mechanical relevance.
We’ve built a system that serves the spreadsheet, not the soul.

74% of European impressions now come through curated deals.
Which sounds like order. Until you realize it means the wildness is gone.
No chaos. No accidents. No friction. No magic.

We didn’t refine advertising. We tamed it. And in doing so, we made it forgettable.

Curation Is Not a Strategy. It’s a Symptom.

Let’s stop pretending curation is innovation. It’s not.
It’s fear management. It’s an escape hatch from a system that got too messy.
We created an open marketplace—then panicked when it did what open things do: surprise us.

So we closed it.

We built private marketplaces, multi-publisher deals, curated “quality” impressions.
And we congratulated ourselves for regaining control.
But in truth, we just shrank the canvas. The reach is cleaner, sure. But the resonance is gone.

Personalization Has Become a Prison

We’re shown what the machine thinks we want—again and again—until novelty disappears.
We call it relevance, but what it really is… is confinement.
When every ad is customized to our past behavior, we stop growing. We stop discovering.
We become static reflections of data points.

We aren’t advertising to humans anymore. We’re advertising to ghosts of their former selves.

AI Isn’t Making Ads Safer. It’s Making Them Invisible.

The report praises AI for enhancing brand safety.
But here’s the problem no one wants to name: AI doesn’t understand context.
It understands keywords, sentiment scores, and statistical tone.
So entire stories, entire voices, entire truths are algorithmically scrubbed out—because the machine can’t read between the lines.

It’s not safety. It’s sanitization.
It’s censorship with a dashboard.

We’re not avoiding risk. We’re avoiding reality.

Out-of-Home Might Be Our Last Chance

Digital out-of-home is the only space left that still feels human.
It’s dynamic, unpredictable, environmental. It responds to mood, weather, location.
It doesn’t follow you. It meets you.

It’s flawed. It’s physical. It’s not entirely measurable.
And because of that—it still has soul.

It reminds us that real advertising doesn’t beg for clicks.
It stops you mid-step.
It lingers in your head hours later, uninvited.

The Real Threat Isn’t Bad Ads. It’s Forgettable Ones.

We keep polishing the system, but forget why the system existed in the first place.
Advertising isn’t a math problem.
It’s a cultural force. A punchline. A provocation. A seduction. A story.
And we’ve allowed it to become… efficient.

That should terrify us.

Because efficient ads don’t change minds.
Efficient ads don’t start movements.
Efficient ads don’t get remembered.

Only real ones do.
Messy. Emotional. Imperfect.
Human.

In Case You Skimmed, Read This:

  • Curation isn’t strategy. It’s shrinkage.
  • AI brand safety is quiet censorship.
  • Personalization killed surprise.
  • The future of programmatic isn’t what’s next—it’s what’s left.

We didn’t lose the plot. We wrote it out of the story. Stay Curious

There’s a scene in every horror film where the radio keeps playing cheerful music long after the massacre has begun. That’s Greek advertising in 2025.

The consumer confidence index is at –47.6. 5, a decline from -42.7 points in May 2025.,That’s not a dip. That’s not even a recession. That’s a psychological evacuation. People haven’t just stopped spending—they’ve stopped believing. Yet here we are, still peddling dopamine-rich campaigns, summer sales, and plastic optimism with tiktok influencers like it’s 2005.

It’s as if brands believe that if they pump enough enthusiasm into a room full of dread, the mood will shift.
It won’t. You’re not lifting spirits—you’re gaslighting them.

The Data is Screaming. The Ads Are Whistling.

To put it bluntly:
– Greece has one of the worst confidence scores in Europe (worse than Ireland, worse than the UK, which is impressive in itself).
– Inflation fatigue, political distrust, and existential drift are thick in the air.
– Yet your average Greek campaign looks like it was written for Ibiza and Mykonos

This is emotional mismatch at scale. And in advertising, tone-deafness is expensive.

Why It’s Not Working Anymore

Let me be brutally “British” for a moment:
Most advertising works not because it persuades, but because it resonates with the unspoken.
But what’s being unspoken now?

  • “I don’t trust institutions.”
  • “I’m tired of pretending things are normal.”
  • “Hope feels like a scam.”

And yet, we’re still pushing 20% off Nike shoes and Bluetooth speakers like the national mood is “beach rave.”

Three Delusions Driving This Disconnect

  1. The Affluence Illusion
    Brands still act like everyone has disposable income. In reality, most people are disposing of illusions.
  2. The Global Copy-Paste Complex
    Local agencies borrow Western campaign tropes, forgetting Greece has different ghosts—older, sharper, and far less forgiving.
  3. The Positivity Trap
    Adland still believes that happy sells. But in dark times, truth sells better—especially when it’s spoken softly.

What Good Brands Do When Confidence Collapses

They don’t shout. They anchor.

They say:
“We’re still here.”
“We’ll keep your costs down.”
“We won’t pretend this is easy.”
And then, they deliver.

They don’t sell status. They sell stability.
Not hype. Help.

In a market like this, consistency is charisma.

Advertising Isn’t Broken. It’s Just in the Wrong Room.

Imagine walking into a hospital waiting room and trying to sell dancing shoes.
That’s what a lot of campaigns feel like now.

Greece doesn’t need to be cheered up. It needs to be understood.
And that starts with creative work that listens before it speaks not with idiotic tiktoks

The next great Greek campaign won’t be the most viral.
It will be the most accurate.

It will say:

“We see you.
We know what this moment feels like.
We’ll meet you there.”

Until then, we’re just selling confetti in a war zone.

Dyke’s Beard Elixer, 1882

Page 1 of 133
1 2 3 … 133