Open your phone. Go to Instagram or LinkedIn. Start scrolling.
Count the posts.
One. Two. Three. Ad. One. Two. Three. Four. Ad.
Today, roughly one in five posts in your feed is a paid placement. The digital space is no longer a cocktail party; it is a shouting match in a crowded room.
And here is the reality check: Audiences aren’t stupid.
They have developed a “natural adblock.” Their thumbs are trained to identify and bypass mediocrity in milliseconds. We have conditioned users to ignore us because, for the most part, we have given them nothing worth stopping for.
I see this in strategy sessions with local brands turning over 5M, and I see it in the boardrooms of JSE-listed conglomerates. The mistake is identical, only the number of zeros changes.
There is a belief that if performance is dipping, you just need to turn the spend tap.
But if your creative doesn’t stop people from scrolling, increasing your budget doesn’t fix the problem. It just scales the waste.
You are effectively paying a premium to annoy more people, faster.
Marketing does drive business growth – but not in isolation.
If you treat your marketing team (or agency) as the department that just produces “pretty designs” or “makes things pop,” you are actively choosing to miss the real impact.
The brands that actually win – whether they are fighting for local market share or reporting to shareholders – integrate marketing across the entire business.
We don’t do this for vanity metrics. We do it to move the bottom line.
I hear this excuse constantly. “We sell insurance.” “We sell logistics.” “We sell industrial piping.”
Yes, your product might be boring. That is a fact of life. But your marketing shouldn’t be.
“Boring” is a choice. It is a creative cop-out.
Your goal is to entertain; to educate. To build a connection that goes beyond a feature list. If you are still recycling slightly tweaked ad variations from 2021 because “they worked back then,” you are already behind.
This thinking doesn’t just shape campaigns; it shapes how we build teams.
We don’t need more button-pushers who can navigate an ad manager. We need critical thinkers who understand that marketing is the intersection of psychology, finance, and art.
Stop blaming the algorithm. Stop blaming the platform. Look at the creative. Look at the strategy.
If it feels “safe” to you, I imagine it feels lazy to them.
