average: the death strategy
Why the industrialisation of marketing is killing creativity
Average kills.
Tolerate it, succumb to it, accept it at your peril.
Just know it’s the ultimate death strategy.
And it’s never by accident.
It’s approved, signed-off, orchestrated.
Worse, it’s now the designed outcome.
Feel like it’s got harder to stand out?
Wanna know what’s to blame?
I’ll tell you: marketing.
The obsession with being seen rather than felt.
Attention over affinity. Metrics over meaning.
When distribution dictates decisions, meaning becomes optional.
It merely industrialises bad ideas.
Average thinking.
Scan the talk titles at any growth summit this year and you’ll find every conceivable angle on how to game attention, algorithm, creation and conversion.
It’s like the conversation about what deserves amplification never happened.
Maybe it didn’t.
The lunatics are running the asylum. High on their own Meta supply. And yeah, we’re hooked. Terrified our supply might run dry.
Everyone’s only interested in:
“How do I get more reach?”
“How long should a reel be?”
“What’s the best time to post?”
Not ‘why would anyone care?’
But then… money talks and you can measure marketing.
CPA. LTV. ROAS. ROI.
This underlines the logic that business (and so marketing) is an equation:
If you invest in X, you’ll get Y results.
And it’s far harder and way less logical to measure things such as:
‘Do people actually like us?’
To try to optimise ‘why us’?
Or double down on belonging.
Which is why budgets and strategy are increasingly playing safe.
The problem is, humans really aren’t very safe bets.
Take Amazon Fresh. Launched by the most data-rich company on earth with infinite budget. Explicit brand values: convenience, selection, speed.
57 UK stores. Prime locations.
All closed by late 2025.
Because they built something absolutely nobody gave a damn about.
‘Just walk out shopping’ sounded clever - but wasn’t. Finding a QR code on an app is a faff not fun or remotely helpful. Memorable only for being an inconvenience. Worse: zero personality. Not cheaper. Not premium. Not anything.
Dead.
Optimisation will only ever create convergence.
The AI powering most of this is engineered to be centre-seeking.
Nobody ever stood out by trying to look the same. The brands playing safe are the ones most at risk. Their biggest threat comes from the edges not the centre.
You can’t clone cool. Punk was dead the minute anyone outside CBGBs, The 100 Club and the SEX shop knew what it was.
Disruption is endangered. Risk is rare. Creativity feels cornered.
Our attention is being gamed for clicks by algorithms engineered to match and monetise content based on previous usage. We feed it what feeds the feed.
Every brand lands on the same oat tones, minimalist sans-serif, the same ‘clean everything’ - because the data said it converted or it just ‘looks like what works’.
And so the wheels turn.
Except for that one fundamental flaw:
AI, big data, optimisation can’t give people what they don’t yet know they want. It mines the past, scales the pattern. It can distinguish the taste of the many, not the few.
And when optimisation becomes ideology, brands become interchangeable.
Comparable only on price, convenience, noise.
Never what all brands should aspire to be:
Chosen.
That’s creative failure by design.
People aren’t robots. Yet.
Or stupid.
They still want what they’ve always wanted:
Something that makes them feel more them.
(*Not more everyone.)
A discovery of something real, rare, relevant.
For ‘people like us, who do things like this’.
The adrenalin rush of new love or like they’re home sweet home.
Not optimised within an inch of their demographic.
Asked fit Q3’s top performing aesthetic.
Or to buy into a belief that’s long been exposed.
And when that’s happening faster than ever before…
It makes less and less sense to mining the past to optimise the present.
Especially when it’s often a better indication of what people DON’T want.
Big tech made us the product so being online is no longer the pull and offline, unplugged and security is the new premium.
The formula of elevated millennial brands that took every day items like razor blades and made them aesthetically aspiration isn’t cutting it in a climate where middle earners are increasingly squeezed.
The more traditional status symbols become algorithmic media wallpaper, the less appeal they have in reality - because all status depends on it identifying our difference, not our sameness.
Marketing over meaning makes no sense in 2026. Data is meaning(less) and over-reliance on AI optimises average.
The question was never how do I get seen.
It was always why would anyone care.
Everything else is bang average.