“Today’s Advertising Is Failing” and “Rarely Leaves a Lasting Impression”

In some ways, today’s advertising is failing. It’s rare for everyday consumers to encounter the kind of emotionally resonant, meticulously crafted work that wins accolades at advertising awards. In reality, most of the ads we come across in daily life can hardly be called ‘storytelling’.

Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube, Meta, and TikTok are flooded with an overwhelming volume of content created by consumers and creators themselves. Much of this content is not only highly engaging, often effortlessly capturing viewers’ attention, but also impressively high in quality. On top of that, AI-generated content, optimised at lightning speed to match our interests, is now saturating our feeds.

Amidst all this, we see the rise of what is often referred to as ‘performance marketing’. In this space, we’re inundated with highly optimised or commoditised short-term creative that, while sometimes perceived as noise, rarely leaves a lasting impression or presence in consumers’ minds.

What I believe we should be pursuing are ideas that possess timeless relevance – ideas that can serve as platforms connecting brands and consumers over the long term. These ideas are like a fire that can be reignited again and again through new inspiration and campaign contexts articulated in each execution.

We need ideas to go beyond fleeting trends and become part of the culture – something consumers can enjoy and engage with over time.

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Creative Provocation and Enduring Frameworks

It’s now more important than ever to build distinctiveness, salience, and unique brand assets that allow a brand to be instantly recalled in the minds of consumers. In Japan today, I believe this is why there’s renewed attention on enhancing a brand’s mental availability and category entry points.

To achieve this, brands need to take action, to ‘engineer’ moments that surprise or amuse people through advertising wit and humour, making the brand more easily recalled and replayed in their minds. I feel this kind of creative provocation is essential in today’s landscape.

As the business and brand environment become increasingly complex, even agencies themselves find it difficult to pinpoint the best possible creative solutions. It’s becoming harder to identify reliable evidence or replicable approaches that can serve as a foundation for success.

As a result, custom-made responses for each project have become the norm, leading to a loss of productivity, efficiency, and speed to react. Ultimately, agencies end up consumed by immediate tasks like production and project management, leaving little room to address the fundamental and strategic growth challenges of the brand or client.

In an age where trends peak faster than ever, content is consumed in an instant, and everything simply flows past people’s eyes, I believe the importance of brand thinking has never been greater.

In a world increasingly marked by uncertainty and division, people’s interests and attention are becoming more and more fragmented. In such times, brands that can deliver a consistent message and experience have the potential to transcend being mere objects of consumption, they can become part of culture. By doing so, they can take root more deeply in people’s lives and expand the possibilities for building long-term relationships.

What we need is to develop ideas that serve as enduring frameworks for brands – platforms that can be leveraged over the long-term. By 'framework', I don’t mean a simple playbook or a replicable template. I’m referring to a robust, foundational idea that serves as a platform, a source of continuity, that meaningfully connects the brand with consumers over time.

By building campaigns and initiatives around this core idea, we can ensure both efficiency and speed, while also achieving long-term consistency. This approach supports a healthy revenue stream for agencies and enables small, agile teams to respond quickly and effectively. Moreover, by continuously reinterpreting and reconstructing the idea in response to new contexts, such as cultural arenas, seasonal moments, or societal changes, we can keep the idea fresh and relevant.

This ongoing effort to keep the brand ‘warm' is what ultimately forms the unshakable foundation for building long-term partnerships with clients.

Ideally, everyone in an agency should be a thinker, a shaper, and a sharpener. It’s essential that we all engage in deep, sometimes even zen-like inquiry, challenging one another, expressing our human emotions and everyday inspirations, and channelling them into the work.

Creating advertising and creative work is, at its core, a deeply human endeavour. The discomforts, joys, and emotional nuances we experience as everyday people are exactly what fuel great ideas.