Nobody wants to make an ad anymore.
We want to make content. Branded content. Entertainment. A conversation. A moment. Something organic. Basically, anything that doesn’t look like the thing we’re actually making. And somewhere along the way, advertising became a dirty word.
We started worrying that people would skip our ads, so we stopped calling them ads. We started making them look like reels, memes, documentaries, social experiments, creator videos and occasionally, videos that look like they were shot by someone’s cousin on a Tuesday afternoon.
But the irony is that some of the most memorable advertising never tried to hide what it was. Think Budweiser’s Wassup, Van Damme’s Epic Split for Volvo Trucks, or Old Spice’s ‘The Man your Man could Smell Like’. Those weren’t pretending to be something else. They were unmistakably ads.
And people watched them anyway. Because people don’t necessarily hate advertising. They hate being bored.
A great idea doesn’t need a disguise. It can arrive wearing a 30-second commercial, a six-second bumper, a billboard or a meme. The format can change. The feed can change. The audience can change. But the basic contract remains the same – give me a reason to care.
Maybe we’ve become so obsessed with making advertising feel native that we’ve forgotten advertising’s greatest advantage – it gets to interrupt. And an interruption isn’t necessarily annoying. Not when it is clever. Not when it makes you laugh. Not when it surprises you. Or makes you feel like its old friend. Not when it gives you something worth talking about.
So perhaps the future of advertising isn’t about making ads look less like ads.
Perhaps it’s about making ads worth looking at. Because you can disguise an ordinary idea as content. But you can’t disguise an ordinary idea as a great one. And maybe that’s the only disguise advertising never needed.