Digital killed creative. So, where to from here?

Digital advertising sucks. Real bad.

And not in a “meh, it could be better” way. I mean in a soul-crushing, creativity-flattening, brain-melting way. For an industry with billions pumping through its greasy little pipes, how is it that we still haven’t cracked the code of the digital ad?

In the last 25 years, we’ve watched TV become prestige. Our phones became smarter than us. Rockets can land backwards now. You can buy a flatscreen the size of a small car for under $400. Even British Airways - British Airways! - has managed to cobble together a semi-functional app on a good day.

Meanwhile, digital ads are still stalking us around the internet with that one tote bag we clicked on three weeks ago.

Still interrupting our feeds with janky animations, bad copy, and that haunted look of “made in five minutes by a chatbot with no soul” for no better than an adult website. It’s grim out here, y’all.

WE USED TO BE A REAL COUNTRY. WE USED TO BE AN INDUSTRY OF BIG IDEAS.

Lest we forget. Advertising used to be art. And still is, sometimes. Mad, beautiful, high-concept art with just enough ego and chaos to change culture. Whole teams agonised over headlines. Print ads made people cry. TV spots became Super Bowl events. Even banner ads once had a little spark in them.

Now? Now we get “Wanna improve your ROI?” in Arial Bold over a blue rectangle. I’m sick to my stomach.

Digital advertising was supposed to be the future. The data! The targeting! The interactivity! But somewhere along the way, we stopped creating ideas and started creating impressions. We traded storytelling for CPMs. Big swings for A/B tests. Emotion for click-through rates.

The result is a bland, bloated, joyless ecosystem of stuff no one asked for and no one remembers. How the hell did we get here?

Efficiency is the villain.

Somewhere, someone decided that if a machine can place the ad, write the copy, design the asset, and optimise it in real-time, then we might as well let it. Faster, cheaper, more scalable. I feel like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar screaming through the universe into the bookshelf at his past self. DON’T DO IT. GO BACK.

Because what we’ve scaled is mediocrity. We’re drowning in sameness. There’s no taste. No wit. No friction. Just endless beige rectangles asking us to “discover now” or “sign up today.” A sea of auto-generated landfill designed to do the job of advertising, without any of the point of advertising. You know, persuasion. Charm. Relevance. Delight. Craft.

But wait! There’s more (mediocrity)!

Let’s not ignore the irony here. No one even sees these freaking ads. Banner blindness is at an all-time high. Social feeds are so saturated, we scroll through them on autopilot. The average human brain has become a certified professional at ignoring digital advertising.

And yet brands keep spending. Because the dashboards look good. Because someone, somewhere, said the ROAS was technically “positive.”

If you actually listen to people (not just pixels), they’ll tell you digital ads are forgettable, annoying, and rarely worth their screen space. We don’t trust them. We actively avoid them. That’s not a channel problem. That’s a creative problem.

So then, what’s the fix?

It's not TECH. It's taste.

We need fewer lazy programmatic placements and more actual storytelling. Fewer ChatGPT scripts and more creative conviction. Fewer “That’ll do” assets and more “We actually believe in this” campaigns.

We’ve forgotten that attention is earned, not captured. That people don’t owe us their click. And that the best ads aren’t the ones that follow us - they’re the ones we talk about.

So MAYBE, just maybe – it’s time to stop optimising for conversion’s sake and creating for culture again.

-Sophie, Writer