If You Annoy No One, You Remain Invisible

“What’s your problem?” The line was created in 1998 and turned a cult beer from Hamburg into a national brand. Self-deprecating, sharp, unmistakable. Astra as the voice of nonconformists was not merely a campaign idea. It shaped the brand itself.

Torben Hansen, who pushed the campaign through against all resistance when he was Bavaria’s marketing director and later went on to lead PUK himself, raises a question in his commentary that I cannot stop thinking about: Can brand ideas like this still emerge today? His understated answer: “Many can do real-time advertising. Very few can create brand ideas that build value over decades.”

The diagnosis is not new. In 2019, Orlando Wood systematically described the phenomenon in Lemon: advertising that has become flatter, more abstract and less effective. “Sea of Sameness” is one of the terms that has circulated ever since. I call it “beige”: advertising that does everything right and still achieves nothing.

The name changes. The problem remains. Too much advertising is polished, compliant and interchangeable. The exact opposite of “What’s your problem?”

Liane Siebenhaar has put numbers behind it, analysing almost 1,500 Effie cases from the past thirty years. What she found contradicts much of what our industry preaches every day.

Gold-winning cases use negative emotions, anger, outrage, pain and shame, more than twice as often as the average submission: 18 per cent compared with eight. “Brands that stage vulnerability almost never win Gold. Gold cases channel anger into action. Vulnerability says, ‘We’re only human too.’” It sounds likeable, but it has no impact.

A second finding: 36 per cent of Gold cases use simplicity as a guiding principle, compared with 27 per cent of all submissions. “The insight was one sentence. The strategy fit on one page. The idea could be explained in ten seconds.”

Cases that deliberately polarise or use self-deprecation, such as Reutlingen, BVG and Paulaner, perform disproportionately well. Liane puts it succinctly: “Taking a position makes you vulnerable to attack, but it also makes you memorable.” Negative emotion is only one of several successful approaches: “Anger works because it creates a relationship between equals. Understatement works because self-deprecation builds trust. Polarisation works because a clear stance creates belonging. Simplicity works because genuine clarity shows respect. It is not about becoming louder. It is about becoming more real.” Her conclusion: “Effectiveness does not emerge where everything is right. It emerges where someone was willing to take a risk.”

She published the full analysis in her Horizont column.

In the last issue, I recommended Paul Feldwick’s Why Does the Pedlar Sing?, a reminder that good advertising is allowed to be popular, entertaining and famous. Liane’s findings are the other side of the same insight: The data is there. The industry knows it.

So why is there so much beige? “Most campaigns do not die because of a bad idea,” Liane writes. “They die in the attempt to avoid upsetting anyone.”

This is not a quality problem. It has structural causes. Every brief has too many stakeholders. Every creative idea goes through too many rounds. Every approval meeting filters out whatever might cause friction. This is not the result of bad intentions, but of the logic of the approval process: Anyone involved in deciding on a campaign wants to avoid making a mistake. Beige does not make mistakes.

AI is accelerating this significantly. Everyone works with the same models, the same prompts and the same reference aesthetics. The result is fast, inexpensive and correct, and it creates its own uniformity: a sea of sameness.

“If we all have the same mindset and the same visual understanding,” says Franziska Gregor of Serviceplan Culture in an interview for What’s Next, Agencies?, “what is left to distinguish one agency’s creative work or strategy from another in the eyes of the client?”

What models produce is the condensed average of every text and image that has ever existed. The average of a genre is its cliché. “AI will not create culture,” Franziska says.

But the problem runs deeper than the tools. At Heimat, Franziska experienced an agency that did not merely tolerate personality, but celebrated it: people who were different, outspoken and individual. She believes that principle is missing from the industry today. Everyone wants it, but no one is rebuilding it.

For Franziska, this is a leadership issue: “We have to be able to handle people having strong opinions, being a little uncomfortable at times and standing their ground.” What agencies cannot tolerate internally, they cannot represent externally. When hiring is optimised for consensus, consensus is what you produce. And consensus looks beige.

For agencies, this has an uncomfortable consequence. The answer is not more tools or more processes. The question is whether the organisation is set up to create friction in the first place. Liane puts it directly to clients: “Your problem is not the budget. Your problem is that you do not want to hurt anyone.”

Whatever is missing in impact is bought back with media spend. You do not have enough money to make boring advertising. Beige is the most expensive thing you can afford.