January 14, 2026
I spent some time coming out of the holidays, reviewing some of the notable reports in the global communications industry from 2025 that I had saved for a re-read.
Stay with me here. Its going to be a long read but I promise you, well worth it.
One of the most engaging ones I read again was Jon Evans and Peter Field’s whitepaper, The Extraordinary Cost Of Dull.
It provides a sobering mathematical validation of a trend I had been seeing in the last few years in both high-pressure boardrooms of Nigerian multinationals and the creative trenches of our leading agencies.
There has been a concerning shift. We have traded the vibrant, rhythmic storytelling that once defined Nigerian advertising for a “safe,” data-obsessed pragmatism. “If it cannot be measured, it should not be approved” is the growing consensus in the rooms where decisions are being made. It was refreshing to see that it was a global trend with a study I could reference but its strength would be hard to overcome alone.
Many times, when a client briefs an agency, it comes with a request for emotional storytelling. However, what is usually finally approved is often soulless and safe, sanitized from drama or to upset anyone. This is sometimes for regulatory reasons but also just to ensure there’s no “push back” from the watching world.
The white paper report warns us that such “beige” work currently flooding our screens is an expensive liability.
The Nigerian Reality: A Shift Toward the “Dullocalypse”
The report identifies “The Four Horsemen of the Dullocalypse”—Performance, Optimisation, Averaging, and Procurement. In Nigeria, these horsemen are riding hard.
A rapid focus on performance marketing on digital platforms has led to a surge in transactional, short-termist messaging in pursuit of instant clicks, likes and shares. Long term brand building has now taken the back seat. With digital ad spend in Nigeria expected to dominate the market by 2029, the current trend is to prioritize brand recognition (fluency) over emotional impact.
For optimization and averaging to ‘work’, brands and their creative assets need to be made simpler so they can be leveraged across multiple formats, channels and touch points. They are the close cousins of performance marketing in its demand for sameness/simplicity in the pursuit of increasing reach. Something is lost when nearly every logo is being redesigned away from being bold, colourful and distinctive to the embrace of monotones and sans-serif typefaces e.g. Google, Airbnb and Revolut.
Then we have the final horseman – Procurement. By now, you should know how I feel about the good folks in this department. They are a special team who seem to delight in the crushing of creative ambition to meet their objectives. I’m not ignorant, these teams are there to ensure that clients spend their budgets optimally. The challenge is when their power becomes so outsized that grand ideas get dumbed down to appease their goals and not pushed against to enable landmark work get done.
The result of all 4 horsemen being let loose in a campaign context? We start paying a “tedium tax.” The report reveals that neutral, “dull” ads require a staggering amount of extra media investment/spend to match the effectiveness of emotionally engaging campaigns.
You basically must spend more on a dull ad for it to be as effective as an ad that’s very emotionally engaging.
For a market like Nigeria, where inflation hit an all-time high of 34.6% in 2025 and marketing budgets are under extreme pressure, this waste is unsustainable.
Do you recall seeing an ad so emotionally engaging you just had to share it? That brand is probably spending less than other brands in its category based on just how far their work can go on the strength of its engagement factor alone.
I recently had a chat with an agency head about a brand they managed whose creative storytelling approach was so effective, it had compounded consumer love and trust over time and was thus spending 2 times less than its category leader on media. The brand had the most effective media spend in it’s category! You would think when the agency presented this insight to the client they would get an increase on their retainer. LOL
They got a pat on the back and got told to carry on with the same fees indefinitely, sigh. Story for another day.
Why “Neutrality” is Killing Growth
The report’s most striking finding is that Neutrality—the absence of emotion—is the most common response to advertising, ruling 52% of UK and 47% of US TV ad reactions. In a sector like banking for instance, brand positioning recall is as low as 20%—a clear symptom of the “neutrality rule”.
Why? Banks often copy each other’s visual styles and “sensible” emotional/aspirational tones, leading to a homogenization where no brand stands out. To achieve the same recall as a creative ad in that sector, a dull banking ad would need to spend a “staggering” amount of extra media naira to force its way into the consumer’s memory.
When we bore our audience, we don’t just lose their attention; we lose their memory.
As ads get duller, positive emotions like happiness and surprise fall away, yet negative reactions stay steady. You cannot bore your way out of a negative reputation; you only succeed in becoming forgettable.
The Creative Imperative: Showmanship as Strategy
To defeat dullness, Evans and Morgan propose the “Anti-Dull Dial,” urging brands to embrace drama, storytelling, and distinctiveness. For marketers, this means returning to “right-brain” elements.
Our left brain is supposedly more narrowly focused and goal-oriented, it responds to elements like abstracted body parts and actions, text onscreen, and regular rhythms in music. The right-brain is ideally more contextually aware, responding to relationships between people, and to the place and time they’re in.
Engaging storytelling, vivid and memorable characters, comedic dialogue/scenarios are some of those elements that appeal to our right brains apparently and make ads more effective. These are some of the elements I’m taking out of the report and will try to work on this year.
- Vivid Characters & Animals: Leveraging the “showmanship” that cuts through noise. The fact that very few brands use brand mascots in Nigerian advertising speaks to the embrace of “safe” over venturing to bold territory. We are more inclined to use an influencer/celebrity than use or create brand mascots.
As this Ipsos study (picture below) that sought to review the relative effectiveness of different brand codes shows, brand characters are more effective in brand building than using influencers/celebrities. Figuring out why that is, may show that influencers have a diluted resonance as they tend to promote several brands simultaneously. I dunno, that’s my untested theory.
- Cultural Resonance: we need to move beyond generic AI-generated content that saves cost, to investments in telling stories full of authentic humanity. I was quite shocked over the holidays to be watching TV and saw a TVC from a relatively big brand that clearly used AI generated video elements. But that wasn’t the problem. The real problem was how robotic and flat the output was. I seriously wondered how it had gotten approved. It was a cost- cutters wet dream I reckon. We need to do better. Our advertising needs to have soul brought back into it, something that looks and speaks to authenticity in idea, emotion and execution.
- Humor & Surprise: Using these as “kryptonite” against the “Age of Average” is non negotiable. Sometimes we forget as an industry (client and agencies), that no one wakes up in the morning looking to see an ad. But they are looking to laugh, to smile and have great conversation starters they can share with their friends. Maybe we need to remember this and build these elements into more of our ads in 2026. Just maybe.
As AI increasingly makes it easier and cheaper to produce average work, the “Cost of Dull” will only rise. Our survival as an industry depends on our willingness to be interesting again. We must stop chasing the false efficiency of information-heavy ads and start investing in the emotional showmanship that drives long-term business success.
Source: Idiare Atimomo, Marketing and Communications Thought Leader
