Or Why Every Brand Trying to Zig Ends Up in the Same Moodboard.
This is not an article.
It’s a borderline pretentious discourse
disguised as cultural exorcism.
Let us begin, as all self-proclaimed
brave campaigns do, with a manifesto:
What was the last ad that shook you?
Not entertained you.
Not impressed you.
Shook you.
Really shook you.
Hard to name one.
Because the boldest, bravest, most different things
don’t happen in adland.
They happen in life.
A parent dies.
You have a baby and lose yourself.
You’re fired.
You’re cheated on.
You slip into poverty.
You sit on a 2am bus after a shift with no end.
You nurse a parent who no longer knows your name.
You collapse. No one claps.
These are the things that rip you open.
Not an ad.
No matter how hard it tries.
Advertising was never meant to compete with that.
It was meant to perform.
To build salience.
Create memory.
Move units.
That’s why the aesthetic of bold, brave and different isn’t a reality.
It’s a performance.
Once, we had gorillas playing drums.
Horses riding the sea.
Yellow puppets selling jeans.
Meerkat puppets.
But…
Apple’s puppets?
Virgin’s riding animals??
AI gorillas with selfies sticks???!
That’s how boldness becomes an aesthetic:
A repeatable palette of ideas, jokes and styles.
Bravery turned into choreography.
Different turned into the same Different.
If your brand looks like it might have opinions, it gets applauded.
Even if the opinion is just: “We see you.”
(The legal team sees you too.)
Innovation moved elsewhere.
Into the font.
The illusion of edge.
The gravel added to the VO.
What remains isn’t a campaign.
It’s a cultural dress rehearsal.
This isn’t creativity.
It’s creative cosplay.
Brands aren’t taking risks.
They’re too scared to be ugly.
Too polished to be real.
And the industry knows it.
It’s full of exhausted insiders
who know exactly what gets approved.
People who had their genuinely brave ideas killed often enough
to learn a safer kind of different.
So they pitch what clients buy.
What juries nod at.
What gets 59 LinkedIn likes by Monday.
(Hey, I know this isn’t your case. I’m just projecting my own shit
onto the world. Bear with me… or don’t. All good, either way.)
We systematized creativity.
Optimized it.
Built a loop that feeds itself better than it feeds us.
Together, this turns boldness into an illusion.
Everyone’s playing the game.
Even the rebels.
Especially the rebels.
The result?
Predictable edginess.
Prefab provocation.
Safe danger.
Manufactured chaos.
Like the kind I’m recreating here.
And no. AI didn’t kill creativity.
It just held up the mirror:
We’ve been machines for years.
Our visual grammar is so templated, so echo-chambered,
that a machine can now recreate an entire
2025 Cannes pitch deck in seconds.
And this changes nothing.
The industry will keep prompting what worked.
Clients will approve what they’ve seen.
The aesthetics of boldness, bravery and difference
will be absorbed, flattened and mass-produced.
AI just lowered the cost of pretending.
But don’t blame the machine.
Blame the hunger.
The scarcity mindset behind all this yelling.
The belief that if we don’t cry louder, we won’t be fed.
Because that’s the real aesthetic of boldness.
Not edge.
Fear.
We perform boldness because we fear invisibility.
We perform bravery because we fear irrelevance.
We perform difference because we fear replacement.
What do scared people do?
They scream.
We are professionalized crying.
Brands yelling louder, hoping someone, anyone, looks their way.
Let’s continue this dissertation:
(yes, I don’t really know what I’m doing and I’m slightly ashamed).
So, many brands aren’t just scared.
They don’t even know who they are.
So they outsource personality to aesthetics and call it identity.
They borrow codes.
Pay agencies to find a “tone.”
And most products don’t matter.
Sugared water.
Edible foam.
Energy drinks in a world already exhausted.
We’re asked to sell things with
no intrinsic difference from the thing beside them.
So we paint them.
Wrap them.
Choreograph them into meaning.
Advertising doesn’t sell products anymore.
It sells excuses for their existence.
That’s what makes the Average Adman.
Not a person.
A process.
He’s the inevitable byproduct of
the aesthetic of the Bold, Brave and Different.
He saw the broken mirror too late.
Mid-career.
Already trapped in the circus.
So he stays.
And performs.
And this article?
It’s part of the show too.
Just another baby crying —
hoping mum looks this way.
— The Average Adman
Adjunct Professor of Scented Puppetry
Dean of the Faculty of Crying Louder Than the Other Baby
Guest Lecturer at the School of Algorithmic Repetition
