This is a continuation of Inner Circle Issue 119: Is There A Creativity Crisis? Quick recap for those of you that are new (or didn’t read last issue):

Specifically, no.

There are people in the world who are CRAZY creative. I think Sarah Sherman of SNL is crazy creative, the author Hernan Diaz is amazing (Trust is an amazing book) & Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad & Pluribus) is a creative story teller.

But in marketing? Yes

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I might be overstating it a bit…BUT…there have never been more minutes spent on screens than 2025. There has never been more content available to somebody online than ever before.

Via awisee, screentime increased by 2.5% YoY (2024 to 2025). We all have richer digital footprints, more targeting data & ad clickthrough rates haven’t kept pace with the growth of impressions. If CTR’s aren’t increasing faster than the rate of visibility, then the creative is to blame…because targeting in UNDENIABLY better.

Display ads have stayed a touch over 0.4% for about a decade. Search CTRs have held reasonably steady, but CTRs are down in roughly 50% of the categories tracked by Wordstream. And this statistic just floored me - in 2024, The Drum showed data that “award winning campaigns” outperformed “average campaigns” by 12:1, in 2010, whereas today, “award winning campaigns” perform just about the same as every other campaign.

Better data collection means better targeting. Better targeting should generate more clicks (well targeted ad + right person ought to result in a click). But via Growth Jockey, 61% of consumers avoid brands that show them the same ad again and again. Unravel Research shares my concern that in our quest for efficiency (one ad that can be repurposed to any and every channel), we have rushed headlong into paint by numbers ads.

It isn’t an accident that this ad construct is right about 113% of the time. Marketers have studied how people ingest information and shaped ads to match. But the digital age became a giant copy machine, so all ads started to converge into something that basically looked the same.

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A few weeks ago, I did a search in Apollo.io and pulled up 100 agencies in the US between $5mm-$50mm in revenue. I threw out anybody I actually knew…and then sent my crafty little AI agent out into the world to find out what these agencies had to say about themselves…here are the patterns that I saw:

Disclaimer - this wasn’t scientific. There was no segmentation, there was no control group or anything - so this data might be squishy. BUT the salient point here is that this kind of homogenization EXISTS. It wasn’t hard to find.

And we’ve trained ourselves to live inside a very narrow lane of expression that means that we mostly sound alike to our market. We, the creative rebels of the business world, have MBA’d, CPA’d and SOP’d ourselves into an undistinguishable blob of jargony metrics and uninspired GTM phraseology. Sometimes, I think it is stunning that any decent marketer buys anything from an agency.

As an industry, I feel as if we are all some variant of these stock photos that come up when you do an image search for “marketer”.

I spent years running agencies and anything out of the box feels like a mistake, or a risk, especially when you are under $5mm in revenue. It can be pretty scary there.

But take a minute and think about the things that you know about:

There’s a thousand things that you preach to your clients every day. You push them. You tell them that growth is on the other side of the comfort zone. You tell them that the competition is fierce and “creative is the new targeting”.

Not in the “optimize the shit out of the ad campaign” kind of advice, but in the “YOLO” & “I gotta be me…” kind of way. Stretch & grow and at least specifically, end the creativity crisis.

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