Digital marketing sucks

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Funnel. This op-ed represents personal insights drawn from the author's professional experience.

Most digital marketing is garbage. 

Not because the targeting is broken or the algorithms are dumb. In fact, those are arguably better than ever. The problem is the creative, the ads themselves. They’re shallow, interchangeable and uninspired. 

And if you follow the breadcrumbs, it all leads back to three cultural shifts: the 2007 Writer’s Guild of America strike, the laziness of social media and (of course) generative artificial intelligence. 

How so? I’m glad you asked. 

Strike! You’re out!

The Writer’s Guild of America is a labor union representing writers who work in film, television, radio and online media. In fact, it’s actually two unions, but that’s another story. What you need to know right now is that, in 2007, the union went on strike for 100 days as it sought to negotiate increased residual payment rates for DVD sales and publishing of their works across other forms of new and emerging media. 

Without these writers, networks faced a content shortage (which meant declining viewership and less ad revenue). Their solution at first was to air re-runs, but that quickly got stale. To fill the void, they turned to something that could be made quicker, cheaper and without union writers: reality TV. 

The genre exploded with titles like Man vs. Food, The Millionaire Matchmaker and Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Audiences loved the programs as it offered something new. Studios loved the profitability. 

And while audiences gobbled up the content, I think we can all agree that reality TV is the fast food equivalent of entertainment. It causes a sort of sugar high, has no lasting value and is strangely addictive.

These programs also appealed to a primal part of the human psyche.

I see you

Voyeurism. We love peeking behind the curtain or watching how people live. It’s why Big Brother and The Kardashians drew so many eyeballs. They exploit this instinctual desire to watch others unfiltered.

And reality TV didn’t just thrive, it rewired audience expectations. Suddenly, we weren’t just watching stories. We were watching unscripted lives like our own. And social media (which began emerging around the same time) copied this exact formula: raw, real and endlessly watchable.

Just think of what gets the most reach across platforms today. It could be someone in their bedroom doing a makeup tutorial. It’s a man-on-the-street interview with drunk 20-somethings. It’s videos about Christmas decorating that are shot exclusively in POV style. 

Social media adopted reality TV’s voyeurism playbook to become a content engine – albeit a hollow one. 

Not so social media

For all the kids out there, social media actually used to be social. I would know. This aging millennial joined the world’s most popular platform when it was still called The Facebook and you needed a .edu email address to sign up. 

You used the platforms to connect with friends and post about whatever you were doing at the moment. It was like AOL Instant Messenger (ask your parents) on a grander and more public scale. It was about posting pictures of your weekend escapades and going public with your new relationship. 

These days, however, platforms are much more oriented to the media element. Whether it’s TikTok, Instagram and (to a lesser extent) LinkedIn, platforms aim to keep you glued to their infinite scroll so that they can sell content slots to creators and advertisers. Take a moment right now to flick through Instagram. You might notice that a surprising quantity of the content is actually paid placement. 

Not to say native advertising is bad. It works, but there’s a catch. The platforms reward conformity. They encourage creators and advertisers to mimic whatever is trending right now. But those creators and advertisers soon find themselves stuck on a wheel of chasing clicks and reach like desperate high schoolers seeking social status. 

As a result, everything begins to look homogeneous. Once you see one mildly interesting short-form video, you can expect to see it imitated by every other person and brand on the platform. And one week later, it’s already old and deprioritized. 

The crux of the issue is that platforms need to keep their users in the endless scroll.  This leads to more time spent on the platform, which leads to more ad revenue. 

But what happens when people start creating less? After all, anecdotal evidence shows that more and more users are interacting passively with the platforms. In other words, they are looking at the content but not actually contributing with their own posts and material. 

This causes concern for the platforms. Without any organic content from their broad userbases, the platforms just become full of ads and content from the same shrinking set of publishers. More sameness. Plus, people can only make so much content in a day, right? 

Well…

The chatbot has entered the chat

Enter generative artificial intelligence. With the advent of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, MidJourney and countless more, businesses big and small can drastically speed up the production of content including ads. 

Give the tool a detailed brief in the prompt, and you are instantly delivered multiple options that can be deployed at record speeds. There are just a couple problems though. 

1. These models are simply remixers. They have scraped the public internet for content, analyzed it and figured out how certain dynamics of our languages can be slotted together in ways that might seem like original thought. But, again, it’s just more of the same sameness. AI is (so far) structurally incapable of producing something truly original. 
2. Iteration is a nightmare. Let’s imagine you want to create a cat’s portrait for your ad creative. You create a highly detailed brief that is fed into a generative AI tool, and it spits back a couple different options. Now, imagine two of those images could work (the other options are just a mess), but you want to refine them a bit further to make it just right. 

Good luck.

Any adjustments often cause the model to create noticeably different subject matters. That cat will almost certainly have a new pattern to their fur. Or, in the case of humans, the face or hands will often change in undesirable ways. 

3. The general quality of the content AI creates is just not very good. Granted, large language models might give a freshman English major a run for their money, but its flaws and repetitive style are obvious to any professional writer. It’s just filler. 

The big problem? But business leaders are fine with filler – if it’s cheap. 

It’s not great, but so what? 

Many creatives in the advertising industry are rightfully worried about how much of their jobs AI will automate. While this is cause for some concern, I often have the viewpoint that we all need to rethink our core skillsets. These models are just tools like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word. After all, AI probably won’t take your job, but someone who can use AI certainly will. 

The bigger impact AI will have on our industry is the shifting sense of what’s good enough to publish. You might not see it yet, yourself, but it’s being communicated across all-hands meetings and boardrooms everywhere. Business leaders undoubtedly see AI as a means of reducing headcount costs while maintaining or increasing output (this is the formula for operating efficiency). The hard numbers of less-cost-more-stuff is operational cat nip. 

In fact, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke recently told hiring managers that any request for a new headcount will be rejected unless they can prove the job cannot be done with AI.  

But what about the quality of the output? Especially in marketing. Even if the quality of the message and brand experience suffers, many executives will likely consider AI-produced content as “good enough.” This is a serious problem for anyone with creative integrity, and nobody is talking about it. 

Lowering the bar

At the same time, platforms like Meta have recently been suggesting that advertisers create and test three to five new creatives every week. The rationale is that, as more attention has flooded digital platforms since the pandemic, the rate of ad fatigue is at an all time high. 

But with the ongoing decline of the active user base and shift toward passive consumption, this sounds to me like Meta is outsourcing its business models to advertisers and creators. They need millions of hours of fresh mediocre content every day just to keep users hanging around. As such, they claim their models require tons of new creative to be effective. 

Call me skeptical. 

This puts a huge amount of stress on marketing teams to generate alternate takes on the ad creative, new calls to action, new word choice in the body copy, different images, different logo placements, different colors and more. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to the evaporation of a cohesive brand as marketers look to change anything they can to feed the insatiable appetite of the algorithm in hopes of adding incremental growth 

This dynamic is only going to get worse, too. Mark Zuckerberg spoke recently about how Meta wants to take full responsibility for producing the advertising creative that is published across its platform. 

Aside from the obvious issue that Facebook will always claim credit for your sales via the data, you mean to tell me that Facebook (within a UI so awful it’s almost as bad as Amazon’s) should be trusted to make compelling and provocative ad creatives that inspire a need to buy? 

Hard pass. 

Now, some people will claim that this is great for small businesses who can’t afford a world-class agency nor do they have a team of marketing experts. In reality though, this is going to result in an unending flood of mediocre or ugly ads. (And I’m not even counting the content farms who are just waiting to unleash their slop of ads.) 

More conformity. Who wants that?

A call to creative arms

But we don’t have to comply. We don’t have to serve the algorithm. We don’t have to lower our standards.

Instead, we need a revolution. We need to raise our standards and push for provocative stories. We need to demand diversification in the media mix so we are not dependent on algorithms. We need to inspire.

I’m not saying we should bring back the style of the Mad Men era. It was way too toxic and slow. However, we can take inspiration from the days that we held audiences captive; a time when we could take breaths in our messaging and build to a punch line. 

Those opportunities still exist. And don’t let your executive parrot the idea that we’ve lost our attention span. We still binge watch our favorite shows. We still cry at the movies. We still get chills from a well-cut ad. 

We don’t need more content. We need better stories. 

So roll up your sleeves, fire up your imagination and tell that algorithm to shove it. Because if we don’t protect the soul of our work, no one else will.

It’s story time.