In this op-ed, Ryan Ferguson, managing director of Snap Inc. ANZ, explores why modern advertising is drifting into an “age of average”, where efficiency, automation and performance pressures are unintentionally eroding creative distinctiveness.
It’s never been so challenging to work inside an agency. Agencies are the engine rooms of the industry, but the job description has become more complex in recent years. Today’s planners and buyers are juggling fragmented audiences, new channels, shrinking resources, AI pressures, and clients demanding both scale and precision.
In this environment, the easiest response is often the most practical: reuse creative, standardise formats, and optimise what worked last quarter. But easiest doesn’t mean best, and doing the same thing over and over again, expecting better results, is the definition of insanity.
Increasingly, that’s exactly what I’m seeing.
Alex Murrell calls it the “The Age of Average” – a cultural phenomenon where products, spaces, and faces start to look the same. Supporting data by Jökull Sólberg revealed ownership of monochromatic cars jumped from 40 per cent in 1996, to 80 per cent twenty years later.
Across industries, data-driven decision making, globalised inspiration and risk aversion has created what Murrell described as a “sea of sameness.” And you can see it everywhere – from the overuse of “Bondi” in beauty brand names, to the sea of blue and black across streaming platforms, to the rise of clean, non-descript sans-serif branding that makes entire categories feel interchangeable.
Advertising is not immune. You can scroll any feed and the patterns are obvious. Campaigns are designed to work everywhere rather than somewhere specific. Creative is developed to be platform-agnostic rather than platform-native. Assets are scaled across formats rather than crafted for context. The result is work that is efficient, but forgettable.
Which raises the question: in an industry built on creativity, why is creativity dwindling?
Firstly, the system rewards it.
When over 70 per cent of digital ad spend flows into a very small handful of platforms, agencies are incentivised to design for the lowest common denominator. Campaigns are built to feed algorithms, and algorithms reward what is already working.
The result is a feedback loop: what performs gets scaled, copied and recycled. It delivers short-term results, but over time effectiveness plateaus because nothing stands out – eroding the very thing that makes advertising work in the first place: creativity.
Layer in a decade of performance-driven marketing. Measurement has improved, but it’s also trained our industry to prioritise immediate returns over long-term distinctiveness. What drives results today becomes the template for tomorrow, and repeated enough, it becomes a pattern.
Then there’s the feed – saturated, scroll-heavy and filled filling with AI slop. Audiences – particularly Gen Z – can spot it instantly. And whilst the barrier to content creation has dropped, so has the bar for quality.
In an environment where trust is everything, inauthenticity doesn’t just get ignored – it drives disengagement.
Ultimately, this isn’t the failure of agencies, it’s the reality in which they’re operating. And so, if sameness is being engineered into the system, then creativity must be engineered back in.
Diversifying channels gives agencies more creative platforms and formats to work with, and more ways to stand out. And it’s not just a creative benefit.
Research from Nielsen’s Annual Marketing Report shows that brands executing a multi-channel strategy achieve significantly stronger returns, whilst StackAdapt’s research found half of advertisers leveraging a multi-channel mix saw improved ROI.
For agencies under pressure to deliver results, diversification isn’t experimentation – it’s another lever for return.
At the same time, the way people communicate has shifted – particularly among Gen Z. The first truly digitally native cohort, shaped by cancel culture and virality, they’re more selective about what they post publicly, and now connect in more intimate digital spaces. 1:1 communication is increasingly central to how we communicate.
On Snapchat, around 75 per cent of time spent is in Chat and calling – as many of us shift away from the scroll.
For agencies, that changes the role of advertising. It’s less about broadcasting at scale and more about participating in how people already communicate. Formats like Sponsored Snaps – paid visual messages direct to Chat – show how brands can do this in ways that feel native.
Ultimately, creative effectiveness is less about scale alone, and more about context. Work that aligns to a platform is far more likely to resonate.
None of this means abandoning performance or efficiency – both absolutely matter. But when the industry optimises for select metrics, we risk producing campaigns that technically work but culturally disappear.
Advertising has always been an industry built on creativity. Agencies are at their best when they give themselves permission to test, learn and challenge the default playbook. And the brands that stand out tomorrow won’t be the ones that mastered the sea of sameness. They’ll be the ones brave enough to swim against it.
Written by Ryan Ferguson, managing director, Snap Inc ANZ.
