Why The Next Great Ad May Not Look Like An Ad

A picture frame lying flat on the floor while the image it once held stands upright beside it

Advertising still recognises itself most easily in a shape it invented: a film, a duration, a logo at the end. The next great ad may have none of those things, and the industry has no settled way to judge it.

This is not the argument that the thirty-second film is dead. It is not. It is the observation that the category of things a brand can make has widened faster than the category of things the industry knows how to evaluate.

What the next great ad might be instead

A tool people use. A change to a product that becomes the story. A comment reply that gets screenshotted for a week. A piece of packaging. A decision the company took that nobody was asked to publicise.

None of these fit a portfolio page cleanly, and several of them cannot be shown at all without explaining the context they lived in. That is an evaluation problem rather than an effectiveness problem, but the two get confused constantly, because the people deciding what is good are looking at case films.

Why the format keeps winning anyway

Because the whole system is calibrated to it. Awards categories, agency show reels, pitch documents and junior portfolios all assume a recognisable unit of advertising. Work that does not produce one is harder to enter, harder to credit and harder to hire on the strength of.

So the incentive runs the wrong way. A team that solves a brand problem without making anything that looks like an ad has done the job and produced nothing the industry can easily reward them for.

Advertising is very good at judging advertising. It is much less sure what to do with work that solved the problem without becoming one.

What this means for a creative career

The skill that appreciates is the ability to argue for an unfamiliar shape, in a room built to approve familiar ones. That is a persuasion problem before it is a creative one.

The people who will look most valuable in five years are not the ones who abandoned the film. They are the ones who can still make it, and can also tell when the brief in front of them is not asking for one, and say so early enough for it to matter.