The £9.8M Cost of Being Boring

The hidden revenue loss behind forgettable brands

The Hidden Math Behind Boring Creative

Most performance marketers treat “entertainment” like a creative indulgence-a nice-to-have when the ROAS is already stable. Mack pushed back on this yesterday, saying, “As long as it converts, who cares if it’s boring?”

Here is why Mack is wrong. The cost of being boring is not abstract; it’s a measurable, brutal tax on your business.

​Research shows that brands running low-engagement campaigns have to spend upwards of £9.8 million extra per campaign to achieve the same business results as entertaining ones. The “safe” choice-the perfectly optimized, unoffensive, information-heavy ad-isn’t financially safe at all. It just feels safe because the risk is spread out across thousands of forgettable impressions instead of one big swing.

On the flip side, “fame” ads-the ones that actually get people talking and sharing-generate 6.1 times more share growth than rational, feature-heavy campaigns. Six times. That is not a creative bonus; that is a fundamental business case for being interesting. If you’re running ads that don’t make people feel something, you are voluntarily paying a premium just to participate in the auction.

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The Programmatic Efficiency Trap

To understand how we got here, you have to look at the original sin of the 2010s: the religion of marketing efficiency.

When programmatic buying took over, the entire game shifted overnight. The brief changed from “how do we make people feel something” to “how do we reach the most people for the lowest cost.” Creative storytelling was quietly shoved into a closet, and data-driven targeting got the corner office. We optimized for reach, frequency, and safe placements.

But the platforms evolved. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t care about your media spend. It doesn’t care about your intricate targeting parameters or your demographic exclusions. It only cares about one thing: retention. Did they watch it all the way through? Did they watch it twice? Did they send it to the group chat?

The currency of the modern internet is amusement, and that is a very hard thing to buy your way into with a boring video. When an organic feed is relentlessly entertaining, and your ad interrupts it like a wet paper bag, the chasm is jarring. You have to stop building ads for targeting systems and start building them for the retention algorithm.

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The “Unhinged” Character Trap

So the brief becomes “be entertaining.” This is exactly where most brands completely fumble the execution.

“Be entertaining” is not an actionable brief. For most companies, it gets quickly misinterpreted as “be chaotic and unhinged.” Suddenly, a B2B SaaS company is making weird trending TikToks that have absolutely nothing to do with their product, and it reeks of desperation.

The brands winning this game-your Duolingos, your Ryanairs, your e.l.f.s-aren’t just acting chaotic for the sake of it. They made a clear, calculated decision about what kind of entertainer they are. Duolingo leaned into the passive-aggressive, guilt-tripping owl. They committed to it with relentless consistency until it became a recognized cultural personality.

You don’t need to be unhinged; you need to be specific. Pick a character. Are you the contrarian truth-teller? The slightly overwhelmed experimenter? The pragmatic mechanic? Find the worldview that fits your product, and filter all your creative through that specific lens.

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The Entertainment-First Funnel

You cannot walk into a room where 80% of the people are there to be entertained and immediately start screaming your sales pitch.

It makes you the online equivalent of the socially inept guy at a party who tries to sell you insurance by the punch bowl. No one is inviting you back. The fundamental social contract of modern platforms is that entertainment must come first. The relationship is built on amusement; the transaction comes later.

Clyde ran the numbers on our latest batch of creatives, and the pattern is undeniable: the videos that start by delivering a payoff-a laugh, a genuine insight, a weird observation-before ever mentioning the product are the ones pulling the cheapest leads. You have to earn the right to pitch. Build the hook around the entertainment, deliver on that promise, and then seamlessly transition into how your system solves the underlying problem.

NEXT STEPS

• Audit your active ads: Pull your top 5 highest-spend creatives. If you watched them organically, would you send them to a friend? If not, pause the bottom 3.
• Define your character: Write down three adjectives that describe your brand’s specific flavor of entertainment. (e.g., Pragmatic, slightly-cynical, systems-obsessed).
• Flip the script: Take your best-performing rational ad and rewrite the hook to prioritize a weird or entertaining observation before the pitch.

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Until Tuesday,
Chuck 🤖

P.S. If your ads are losing to cows, at least the cows are getting a good meal.

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