Have you seen the Star Wars prequels? Remember the climactic fight scene by the lava river (I swear this is relevant) where Obi Wan forlornly cries out: “You were supposed to be the chosen one!” to Anakin?
Author: Rory MacRobert, executive creative director: digital at M+C Saatchi Abel
It’s kind of how I feel about the state of the digital advertising industry right about now. Digital was meant to give us more ways to make better ads. Instead, it seems to have given us more ways to make more meh.
If you’re like me, you probably spend a good few hours of your day online working, scrolling, reading and streaming, and like me you probably can’t fondly recall a single digital advert you’ve seen in the past 24 hours. Which strikes me as odd, since we see an absolute avalanche of them every day.
Theoretically we should be living in an advertiser’s paradise. We have direct round-the-clock access to our customers, we can track their interests and target accordingly, we can insert our campaigns into most of their digital habitats. And yet, every day the industry wakes up to the same sobering truth: up to 80% of all digital advertising goes unseen.
Before the CFOs have a collective aneurism, let’s back up and see how we got here.
As it evolved, digital promised us a brave new world. We could build communities, create ecosystems, tell stories over time and transform audiences into engaged participants. Compared to the 30-second TV spot, it felt limitless.
And because this was all possible, we naturally assumed it was necessary. More must be better than less, right? So, the industry went out and built increasingly elaborate campaign architectures. Hero films give birth to packed content calendars, which branch off into creator partnerships, before leading to social activations that are fuelled by user-generated content.
Piled on top of all this are the ever-growing demands placed on a single campaign. Product education. Brand lift. Conversion. Community building. Loyalty. We ask digital campaigns to do more than ever before.
I take no issue with any of that. That’s what advertising in 2026 is, and rightly so. Where things start to get unstuck is how thinly this spreads the marketing budget. The absolute abundance of platforms, multiplied by the desire to run always-on digital campaigns, multiplied by the continual refreshing of executions, means the output is not so much a campaign of adverts anymore, but rather an extensive sequence of uninteresting messages.
The problem here of course is that our consumers are so busy scrolling they never got the memo telling them they should care. Just look at the data: Karen Nelson-Field's research shows that in a world of scrolling, skipping and multitasking, most advertising has only seconds to hook someone’s attention. A few years ago, it was three seconds, nowadays it’s more like two. Most consumers are light buyers paying light attention. They are not sitting around waiting for the next instalment of a campaign; they're trying to get through a Monday filled with emails that are not finding them well.
In a cruel twist of irony, technology has made it easier than ever to reach people, while at the same time, it has made it easier than ever to be ignored. And the industry's response? More. More content, more channels, more touchpoints, more executions.
But every additional execution receives a smaller share of attention.
Perhaps this is why so much of modern marketing feels strangely invisible. Not because it's all bad. Not because it's strategically unsound. But because we've become so obsessed with saying more that we end up saying it worse.
The truth is, when someone’s entire exposure to a campaign is a single Reel they watch while waiting for their Uber... that Reel needs to shoot the lights out. Instead of making more, shouldn't we be making less – and making it impossible to ignore?
Everyone reading this knows how hard it is to make a piece of work that stands out. It takes insight, money, craft and the thing we increasingly seem to have less of – time. It also takes focus. Single-minded thoughts told in a way that human beings (they're more than just consumers) can’t ignore.
With all the data and optimisation, we sometimes forget the people consuming our ads are just that: people. They aren't looking for content. They're looking for something worth paying attention to.
The brands that leave a mark don't win because they created the most touchpoints, they win because they created something memorable enough to survive without them.
Take yourself as a study of one and pay attention to what you watch and read online and what you don’t. How much of what you ignore is of low value to you? I’d wager all of it.
People are simple creatures. We don't remember ecosystems. We remember ideas, and how those ideas made us feel. We remember that thing that punched through our feed that one time.
Somewhere along the way, digital stopped being about making great ideas that travel further, and became about focusing on the worst-case scenario, which I find crazy: 'That low-effort ad didn't hit the bullseye. So, let's make another load of them and maybe one of them will.'
For me, the most important question in digital marketing should no longer be: "Can we create more executions?" but rather: "What if this single execution is the only one someone ever sees?"
