A man who screams at ads

Or really, I scream at marketing communications in all its sad modern forms.

Ads. Branded content. Influencer collaborations. LinkedIn videos. TikToks designed to look like they're definitely not ads. Professionally produced, energetically dead content whose greatest achievement is that nobody can really object to it.

Agency, in-house, influencer: increasingly, everyone speaks the same language. The same aesthetics. The same jokes. The same safety concerns. The same desperate attempt to look authentic.

Of course they do.

Most marketing communications are made and approved by people whose primary concern is keeping their middle-class jobs.

I'm one of them.

Everyone removes a little risk along the way, until the weird is normal, the sexual is tasteful, the funny is playful, the dangerous is bold.

Then came the authenticity trap.

Apparently the antidote is worse lighting.

Vertical video. Shaky camera. Someone relatable talking in a kitchen. As if humans can only care about people who look, live and sound like themselves.

Fuck that.

Culture is interesting precisely because it isn't you.

And look at the culture we're pushing this stuff into.

Somehow, the tinfoil hats won, aesthetically, at least. The world looks more like their fever dream every day: cartoon oligarchs, the abuse of children, workers and jobs being fed into a wood chipper, and data centres cooking the atmosphere, while the rest of us look like rats drowning in a bucket, arguing about whether the bucket even exists because every image, voice, opinion and person might be fake.

This is the culture we live in.

Make marketing communications for that culture.

Make it weird. Sexual. Ugly. Beautiful. Absurd.

Make jokes that can fail.

Show me people I don't understand.

Make something that somebody in the approval meeting fucking hates.

Not because outrage is a strategy.

Because feeling is.

AI will soon make moderately competent marketing communications infinite. It can produce polished content, badly lit content and authenticity by the tonne.

There's no shortage of competence. No shortage of content.

What's missing is taste. Strangeness. Courage.

Marketing communications don't need another new aesthetic.

They need to stop being afraid of the world they claim to be talking to.