Jun 2026 · 6 min read

When did ads stop taking risks?

Advertising lost its edge the moment it traded creative risk for digital optimisation. Since that shift around 2006, the industry has tried to buy its way out. It isn't working.

By the numbers

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Historically, advertising competed on the strength of its craft. The ambition for major campaigns was to build a world worth buying into, leaning heavily on creative execution. The standout work of that era reflected this—whether it was claymation idents, cinematic commercials or a chocolate brand launching a hit around a gorilla playing the drums. The operating assumption was that audiences wanted to be rewarded for their attention, favoring nuance over a direct pitch.

Some of that work

What people say watching it today

What the data actually shows

The decline isn't just a nagging feeling. It's right there in the numbers.

Orlando Wood's analysis for the IPA tracked the creative characteristics of advertising from 2000 to the present. Around 2006, something fundamental shifted. The work started getting measurably flatter, more literal, and a lot less funny.

There are two ways to look at what caused this squeeze, and they both play a part.

The industry's response was to compensate with media spend. If the creative couldn't carry the weight, more paid reach would. That logic flipped the traditional budget split. Most brands now dump the majority of their cash into short-term performance and activation, even though three decades of IPA data consistently recommends the exact inverse.

The IPA's effectiveness database covers three decades of campaigns. In it, emotional, brand-building work is almost twice as likely as rational messaging to produce a major increase in profit, and that gap holds across the whole dataset [1]. What has changed is how little budget we now give it.

Timeline of the Decline

How context collapsed

The old media landscape forced us to use judgement. If you bought a spot in an MTV commercial break, you knew roughly who was watching and what headspace they were in. You had to make a call based on feeling. That context gave creative work room to be genuinely odd, because backing a strange idea was a human judgement call, not a metric.

The digital feed doesn't work like an old TV block. The exact same ad goes to someone half-asleep on a bus, someone between meetings, or mid-scroll on a dopamine bender. Because every single interaction can now be tracked, work gets designed to perform on a dashboard. It becomes safe, readable in under two seconds, and aimed at a viewer assumed to be completely distracted.

The trade-off was supposed to be worth it: tighter measurement, lower risk, and more predictable returns. Instead, the work became less interesting and audiences responded accordingly. Ad attention fell by 31% between 2022 and 2025, dropping from an already historic low.

An analytical culture has been "reducing what was once a dazzling art form to dreary science."

Orlando Wood — Lemon / IPA · 2019

Finding our way back

The real loss to the industry is the discipline of world-building. The most enduring campaigns did more than deliver a clear message; they constructed distinct worlds that audiences actively wanted to inhabit. Restoring this standard requires putting modern optimisation tools and metrics back in their proper place, using them to validate the work rather than substituting them for human judgement.

The optimisation tools we use today aren't going away, but the questions we ask of them have to change. Brand that run entirely on short-term activation are doing it at the expense of long-term equity.

Balancing that tension is exactly what I do. I help brands build the creative platforms and the long-term strategy that equity is actually built on, ensuring metrics are used to validate the work rather than substitute for the judgement that makes it great. If you're looking to rebalance that split, let's talk.

This essay also lives at olliehall.co