Sachin Mendonca, Chief Strategy Officer, YouExperienceAdvertising didn’t lose its imagination. We sacrificed it at the altar of placement and prayed that the numbers would forgive it. Our industry optimised. With spreadsheets, frameworks, benchmarks, and best practices. We convinced ourselves that efficiency was progress and scale was sophistication. We refined and systemised the craft until everything worked beautifully, except the part that actually matters. Creativity.
What followed was not an accident. It was a redistribution of power. The centre of gravity shifted from what the work made people feel towards where it would appear.
Creativity became something to be managed rather than practised. It is no coincidence that optimisation found its most vocal supporters among those who think of creativity as inconvenient and, if we are being brutally honest, slightly beyond their reach.
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Creativity, we were assured, was still welcome. Provided it behaved itself, fit into the format, and respected the data.
For the better part of a decade, we have been told that distribution is king and attention can be bought. And with that, the job quietly moved from captivating people to reaching them repeatedly, in the hope that something might eventually stick. A spectacular misreading of how persuasion works.
An industry that once obsessed over persuasion has been congratulating itself for presence.
Somehow, we have grown comfortable declaring success when a video auto-plays for two seconds in the corner of a screen. A brand appearing everywhere is now mistaken for a brand being effective. The question of whether anyone cared has become oddly secondary.
Audiences, meanwhile, have evolved into highly efficient judges, juries, and executioners. They scroll without mercy, skip instinctively, and owe brands nothing. They are brutally decisive.
“Do the creative work, habibi, and people will give you their time.”
Then came AI, and with it, a moment of accidental honesty.
Almost overnight, one of the industry’s favourite hiding places disappeared. When anyone can create content quickly, cheaply, and at scale, “good enough” is radically boring. Competence is abundant.
AI did not make creativity less important. It exposed how little of it was there to begin with. Check in with your clients who are eager to write us off in favor of a prompt.
It should surprise no one that clients are questioning creative budgets. They have not seen measurable value from what we have been putting into the world. When creativity is treated as interchangeable, it becomes indistinguishable from waste. Cutting it feels entirely rational.
But here’s the thing with AI. It accelerates output, not judgment. It produces endless options without ever choosing one worth standing behind. We even have a name for the result. AI slop. Content that is technically fine and emotionally hollow. Not because a machine made it, but because it obviously has no soul.
The metrics that matter now are embarrassingly human. Did they stop? Did they stay? Did they feel anything?
For years, media-led thinking trained clients to believe that creativity was optional. Something to be added once the important decisions have already been made. Yet the work we remember never won because it was perfectly targeted. It won because it was impossible to ignore. Because it surprised us. Because it annoyed someone. Because it made us feel uncomfortable.
Ideas have always mattered more than placement. A thousand years ago, a hundred years ago, and now more than ever. Storytelling has always been the engine, not the paint job. And we dismantled it in the name of efficiency.
Here is the irony. The same data used to justify this retreat tells us something else entirely. People will happily watch three-hour podcasts, binge entire seasons in a weekend, and disappear down algorithmic rabbit holes at two in the morning. Never before have audiences been so generous with their time, so deliberately.
Do the creative work, habibi, and people will give you their time.
The good news is that there is nowhere else to go. We are not entering a new age of advertising. We are circling back to an old one. A return to storytelling. When content is everywhere, creativity becomes the only meaningful differentiation left.
Clients who will win will be the ones with the courage to take risks. To back ideas that cannot be optimised into safety.
This shift will happen. The only question is whether the industry leads it or has it imposed upon them. The responsibility sits squarely with us. Our job is to remind clients, relentlessly, that creativity is not a line item. It is the variable that makes media worth buying at all.
We should be deeply disturbed by the notion that attention can be worn down rather than earned. Because in a world where anyone can make content, treating creativity as optional is an act of professional negligence.
We did not lose creativity. We engineered it out. And if we do not put it back deliberately, we will be optimised out just as neatly. If there is one sentence worth taking away, it is this: effectiveness begins before placement, not after it.
By Sachin Mendonca, Chief Strategy Officer, YouExperience
