There is a scene that anyone who works in advertising or marketing knows all too well. An idea moves through strategy, creative, design, account management, marketing, leadership, legal, and probably one extra meeting no one quite remembers the purpose of. A word gets changed, then changed back. The logo moves three millimeters. Someone questions whether the color feels “premium” enough. A photograph gets replaced because it is “not aspirational enough.” Someone asks for something more disruptive. Two meetings later, someone else asks for something safer. Eventually, once everyone in the room feels reasonably comfortable, we publish.
The problem is that no one outside the room was waiting.
While we were perfecting the work, the conversation kept moving. People bought things, searched for answers, commented, laughed, changed their minds, discovered another brand, or simply got on with their lives. And that exposes one of the most uncomfortable contradictions in our industry: we can produce something impeccably finished and still make something profoundly irrelevant.
That is why I have been thinking for some time that one of the biggest mindset shifts marketing needs has very little to do with artificial intelligence, emerging formats, new platforms, or more technology. It has to do with something far more basic: we need to stop making creativity for creatives, advertising for advertisers, and marketing for marketers.
Not because craft no longer matters. It matters enormously. Not because strategy should become less rigorous. Quite the opposite. The problem begins when we confuse excellence with internal perfection, because internal perfection does not necessarily create external relevance.
A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Marketing examined when and how advertising creativity works and reached an important conclusion: creativity is not simply a matter of originality. It performs better when originality is paired with appropriateness — when the idea is relevant to the person, the context, and the problem it is trying to solve.
That is worth sitting with for a moment.
An idea does not become good simply because we decide it is good.
Advertising creativity does not exist in a museum. It has an audience, a context, a need, and a job to do. It can provoke emotion, make a brand memorable, change behavior, simplify a decision, spark conversation, or drive sales. But if the main thing it proves is how creative the people behind it are, then we are probably solving the wrong problem.
We Fell in Love With Aspiration and Forgot About Tuesday
At Cannes Lions 2026, during a talk by Marcel Marcondes, Global CMO of AB InBev, one idea stayed with me because of how closely it connects to this tension. Marcondes leads global marketing for a company that has repeatedly placed creativity at the heart of business growth, and what I took away from that conversation was both simple and uncomfortable: for years, we have been obsessed with building aspirational brands and, somewhere along the way, we have often forgotten about the lives people actually live.
We design for an idealized version of the consumer. A perfectly segmented human being who lives inside a presentation, has a beautifully articulated cultural tension, moves neatly through our funnel, and apparently has far more free time than any real person I know.
But life happens somewhere else.
Most people are trying to make it to the end of the month, organize their children, save time, decide what to eat, find a product quickly, understand a bill, get to a meeting, switch off for five minutes, feel understood, or simply make the day a little less complicated.
And that is where I see a fundamental difference between making advertising about life and making creativity for life.
For decades, much of advertising language was built around an improved version of the future: the perfect home, the perfect family, the perfect body, the perfect trip, the perfectly set table where, suspiciously, no one ever spills anything.
Aspiration worked, and it will continue to work. Brands also live in the territory of desire, and declaring aspiration dead would be absurd. But aspiration and everyday relevance should not be opposites. A brand can make us want something tomorrow while still proving that it understands something about our lives today.
That “today” matters more than ever.
Kantar’s Media Reactions 2025 study, for example, found that point-of-sale advertising ranked highly among consumers because of qualities that sound far less glamorous than many of the things we debate in meeting rooms: it felt trustworthy, relevant, and useful at the moment people needed it.
Perhaps that captures one of the most interesting tensions in modern marketing: while we remain obsessed with making brands look extraordinary, people often just need them to be extraordinarily useful.
That does not mean every piece of creativity should become a service. It does not mean every campaign must solve a social problem or invent an app. It means remembering that the most powerful creativity often begins by understanding something true about someone’s life.
Do we solve something? Save them time? Help them decide? Make them laugh at the right moment? Give them information they actually need? Understand the context they are living in? Make something slightly easier than it was yesterday?
Perhaps we have spent too much time asking how we want people to see a brand and not enough time asking what that person needs from the brand today.
That, to me, is one of the biggest opportunities in our profession. Not abandoning aspiration, but reconnecting it with real life. Because the creativity that genuinely creates impact is the creativity that enters people’s everyday lives and manages to solve, simplify, entertain, represent, or transform something tangible.
When that happens, the impact stops being merely communicational. Creativity starts creating value for a person and, precisely because of that, it can create value for the business.
That should be one of our standards: creativity that makes an impact in people’s lives and, by doing so, makes an impact on the business.
Sometimes Imperfect Communicates Better
There is another belief worth challenging: that the more polished something looks, the better it will necessarily perform.
Not always.
Google has documented creator-marketing cases in which more personal, informal, platform-native executions outperformed content built around more traditional production codes. One Urban Decay case on YouTube, for example, showed that creator-led, more natural product demonstrations contributed to lifts in both purchase intent and branded search.
The conclusion is not that everything should now look amateur.
That would simply turn another strategic observation into an aesthetic formula.
The deeper point is this: every environment has its own language, and when a brand imposes its own idea of perfection on that language, it can end up feeling more artificial, not more premium.
Nielsen has made a similar point in its work on media fragmentation: effectiveness increasingly depends on adapting content to the native experience of each platform and to the mindset people are in when they encounter it.
That should change some of the questions we ask.
Instead of only asking, “Is this polished enough?” we should also ask, “Does this feel like it belongs here?”
Because a piece of work can have extraordinary art direction and still feel completely alien to the environment in which it appears. It can be beautifully photographed and provoke absolutely nothing. It can survive twenty rounds of approval and still lose to a phone-shot video from someone who simply understood better what people wanted to see at that moment.
Craft remains essential. But craft should amplify the power of an idea, not disguise the absence of one.
The Problem Is Not Perfection. It Is Perfecting the Wrong Thing.
It would be easy to interpret all of this as an argument for “just make something and put it out quickly.”
It is not.
Speed without judgment also produces garbage. And with artificial intelligence, we are about to become better than ever at producing garbage at industrial scale, perfectly rendered, translated into twenty languages, and probably delivered in 4K.
The debate should not be perfection versus mediocrity.
It should be about where we choose to place our obsession with excellence.
I would rather have a strategy that is obsessively rigorous about understanding the problem and flexible enough in execution than a shallow strategy hidden behind immaculate production.
I would rather see an imperfectly executed idea provoke a real conversation than watch a perfectly lit film provoke nothing but praise from inside the industry.
I would rather arrive on time with something relevant than arrive flawlessly once culture has already moved on.
And above all, I would rather be wrong while genuinely trying to understand how someone lives than be right according to every convention we have invented inside marketing.
Because this may be our biggest professional distortion: we spend so much time talking to one another that we start believing people speak the way we do.
They do not.
People do not talk about “communication territories.” They do not wake up thinking about “brand love.” They do not evaluate whether a campaign has enough storytelling. No one standing in a supermarket complains that a promotion lacks a sufficiently robust omnichannel ecosystem.
People live.
They have bills to pay, children to get to school, too little time, too many tabs open, desires, insecurities, exhaustion, humor, anxiety, friends, problems, ambitions, and contradictions.
Our job is to find a meaningful place inside all of that.
Not outside it.
Perfection Has Another Cost: Being Late
One of the most dangerous assumptions in our industry is that delaying an idea always makes it better.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it kills it.
A culturally relevant idea has a shelf life. Conversations move. Behaviors change. Memes expire. Context can shift in days — sometimes hours.
Yet many organizations still operate as if the world were waiting for their approval process.
Culture moves in real time. Brands move in rounds: first presentation, feedback, second presentation, consolidated feedback, final version, legal, last adjustments, one more review, publication.
By then, sometimes we are arriving at the party while people are already stacking the chairs.
Technology, and especially artificial intelligence, gives us an enormous opportunity to change that logic. Not simply because it allows us to produce faster, but because it allows us to test, learn, adapt, and iterate faster.
But taking advantage of that requires a different operating mindset.
We need to move from create–approve–publish to understand–create–launch–learn–improve.
Launching no longer means finishing.
It means beginning to learn.
And that is where the obsessive pursuit of perfection starts to feel contradictory, because we are trying to close something that, by nature, should remain capable of evolving.
Creating for People Is Harder Than Creating for Ourselves
There is an interesting paradox here.
Advertising for advertising people can actually be relatively comfortable because we know the codes. We know what looks intelligent, which cultural reference will impress the room, which kind of photography feels sophisticated, which execution will play well in a presentation, and even what kind of case might look good on an awards board.
Creating for real people is much harder.
Because people are inconsistent. They do not read our briefs. They do not respect our segments. They do not follow funnels. They do not always say what they do or do what they say. They can love one brand and buy another. They can share something they would never purchase. And they can ignore in less than a second the idea we spent three months perfecting.
The answer, then, cannot be less creativity.
It has to be more creativity in service of something.
The Journal of Marketing research becomes especially relevant here: originality and appropriateness work together. Creativity does not win simply because it surprises. It wins when that surprise means something to someone.
That is a far more demanding definition of creativity.
Being different is relatively easy.
Being different and relevant is hard.
Being different, relevant, distinctive to the brand, and capable of producing a business result is harder still.
That should be the standard.
Not perfection.
Precision.
Maybe We Need to Publish a Little Earlier
There is something healthy about an idea that can still breathe, a brand that does not need to control every conversation, a piece of content that retains some human imperfection, and a strategy that can change when new signals emerge.
A brand is not built exclusively through large aspirational moments. It is also built through the accumulation of small, useful ones: an answer, a solution, an experience, a recommendation, a piece of content that appears exactly when someone needs it, or an idea that proves it understands something about real life.
That does not mean turning everything into performance marketing or sacrificing long-term brand building for immediate results. Brands still need memory, symbols, emotion, differentiation, and meaning.
But the long term is also built in the present.
And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable part of the old idea that perfection is the enemy of good.
Because often the problem is not that we are perfecting too much.
It is who we are perfecting for.
The creative director. The CMO. The client. The committee. The festival. The case study. LinkedIn.
Until everyone is satisfied except the only person who truly mattered: the one on the other side of the screen.
Maybe the change our industry needs is not to lower our standards.
Maybe it is to raise them.
But measure them differently.
Less obsession with how perfect the campaign became and more with how deeply it understood people.
Less creativity for creatives. Less advertising for advertisers. Less marketing for marketers.
And far more work designed for the person who will never know how long we debated the kerning, how many rounds the script went through, who won the argument over the key visual, or how much the photography cost.
A person who will simply decide, within seconds, whether what we made deserves a place in their life.
And by then, it will not be enough to have made something good.
We had better have arrived on time.
