The most expensive ad in your client’s account isn’t the one that flopped.
It’s the one nobody felt anything about.
Creative effectiveness — the measurable contribution creative quality makes to commercial outcomes — is the closest thing this industry has to free money. And most accounts are leaving it on the table, then papering over the gap with media budget.
There’s now a price tag on that. It’s not small.
What is creative effectiveness?
Creative effectiveness is the degree to which the creative work itself — not the media plan, not the targeting, not the offer — drives commercial results like sales, market share and pricing power. It is typically measured by linking pre-testing scores (emotional response, branding, distinctiveness) to in-market outcomes. The consistent finding across the IPA, WARC and System1 databases: creative quality is one of the largest controllable multipliers of advertising ROI.
Translation: the work either multiplies your media money or quietly taxes it.
Everyone optimised the feeling out
Somewhere in the last decade, ads stopped trying to be interesting and started trying to be correct.
Correct format. Correct hook structure. Correct number of product mentions in the first three seconds. Every box ticked, every checklist obeyed, every ounce of surprise sanded off in the name of best practice.
The result is an industry-wide flatline. System1’s ad-testing database shows the most common emotional response to advertising today is neutrality. Nothing. The cardiac monitor of the entire industry, beeping politely.
Peter Field, Jon Evans and Adam Morgan put a number on the flatline in The Extraordinary Cost of Dull (System1 and eatbigfish, first presented at Cannes 2024): 50% of ads tested are less engaging than watching cows grazing in a field.
Actual cows. Actual grass. Beating half the industry’s output.
What does dull actually cost?
Here’s where it stops being funny.
- Dull ads need 2x the media spend of interesting ads to achieve a very large business impact, and 2.6x to hit the same very large market share growth (The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, Peter Field, System1, eatbigfish)
- Interesting ads generate 6.1x more share growth than dull, rational ones (same study)
- Field’s analysis of the IPA database, reported by Mi3 in September 2024, prices the gap at roughly seven points of extra share of voice — millions in media spend per campaign — just to compensate for being boring
- System1 and WARC’s How Creativity Boosts ROI (2024) matched System1 Star ratings against WARC’s ROI database and found ROI rises with creative quality, with Star ratings predicting long-term share-of-market growth
Read that 2.6x again. That’s not a rounding error. That’s the media budget doubling because the creative was beige.
And the attention environment is making the tax steeper every year. Neurons’ State of Advertising 2025 report puts average mobile ad viewing at 2.2 seconds, down 35% from 3.4 seconds in 2018, with fewer than 1 in 10 impressions receiving any human attention at all.
Dull work in a 2.2-second world isn’t a style choice. It’s a write-off.
Why does everyone keep buying dull?
Because dull feels safe, and safe is what gets approved. No one ever got fired for shipping the inoffensive ad. They just quietly paid 2.6x for it.
Because the testing regime rewards it. Ask people what they remember and they’ll recite the product demo. Ask their nervous system and it was asleep. Recall metrics flatter dull work; emotional response exposes it.
Because the cost never shows up as a line item. Media overspend is invisible when it’s spread across a year of “solid” CPAs. The dull tax gets paid in instalments, so nobody sees the invoice.
Meanwhile the platforms your clients’ money runs on are entertainment venues. Per We Are Social and Meltwater’s Digital global report (cited in Small W•rld’s Entertain or Die 3.0), 80% of TikTok users, 65% of Instagram users and 55% of Facebook users are there to be entertained.
Running dull ads in those feeds is turning up to an open mic night and reading out a spec sheet.
How do you buy interesting instead?
The Monday-morning version, for people who run accounts and creative pipelines:
First, test for feeling, not recall. If your pre-flight check doesn’t measure emotional response — System1-style Star ratings, or even a crude smile-count on a five-person panel — you’re selecting for the very dullness you’re paying to escape. Binet and Field established the long-term primacy of emotional over rational work years ago; the Cost of Dull work prices it.
Second, brief for entertainment, not communication. The strategy can be rational. The expression can’t be. One entertainment-first concept in every batch, minimum — the one that makes the room slightly nervous. That nervousness is the signal, not the risk.
Third, build a fluent device. WARC’s standout case in the ROI work is Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot — a recurring character whose creative scores and ROI climbed together over eight years. Distinctive recurring assets compound. New-every-time advertising starts from zero, every time.
Fourth, stop letting the media plan subsidise the creative. Next time a campaign underdelivers, interrogate the work before the audience settings. The data says the work is the bigger lever — and the cheaper fix.
The industry has spent ten years optimising delivery and treating the ad itself as a constant. The IPA, WARC, System1 and Neurons datasets all point the same way: the ad was the variable all along.
Dull is a decision. So is the invoice.
If you’d rather pay for media than for boredom, Thrive builds creative systems that test for feeling — book a growth call at thrive-agency.co.
FAQ
What is the “cost of dull”? The Extraordinary Cost of Dull is research by Peter Field, Jon Evans (System1) and Adam Morgan (eatbigfish) showing dull ads require roughly 2x–2.6x more media spend than emotionally interesting ads to achieve the same business impact, based on IPA effectiveness data matched with System1 ad-testing scores.
Does creative quality really affect ROI more than media? System1 and WARC’s 2024 analysis found advertising ROI rises consistently with creative quality scores, and System1 Star ratings predict long-term market share growth. Creative quality is generally considered the largest controllable multiplier of ad effectiveness after brand size.
How do I measure whether my ads are dull? Test emotional response before launch — System1’s Test Your Ad, Neurons’ attention prediction, or any method that measures feeling rather than message recall. An ad that scores neutral on emotion is dull by definition, regardless of how well it communicates.
Are entertaining ads risky for performance? The evidence points the other way: interesting ads produced 6.1x more share growth in the Cost of Dull dataset, and platforms where users seek entertainment (80% of TikTok users, per We Are Social) reward entertaining work with cheaper distribution.
