the cost of creative fragmentation
brand growth in 2026
There is more creative in the world than ever before - and paradoxically, far less of it feels memorable.
Consumers are seeing more. Brand teams are seeing more, too. We’re exposed not just to ads, but to an endless stream of content, formats and references from other brands, creators and platforms, often all at once. A billboard now competes with the shopfront beneath it. A TV spot competes with the show it interrupts — and the second screen in your hand while it plays. On Instagram and TikTok, brand content sits directly alongside organic posts and trending formats, blurring the line between advertising and entertainment altogether.
A friend recently told me she’d spent an evening watching “what I packed in my hospital bag” videos - despite not being pregnant and not planning to be anytime soon. That’s the level of distraction brands are competing with now.
the attention economy has changed
This abundance has its upsides. Access is democratised and popular formats travel easily. Inspiration is everywhere. But it also means that sameness sets in quickly. It’s easy to replicate what’s working for other brands, easy to follow a format and easy to lose any sense of what makes your work recognisable.
Which is why creative strategy matters more than ever and shouldn’t be treated as an output.
As WGSN head of consumer forecasting Cassandra Napoli when speaking with BOF described 2026 as shaping up to be the “year of great exhaustion”. Her call for “slow advertising” reflects a wider cultural fatigue: a desire for work that feels more human, more intentional and less relentlessly optimised and also a return to offline touchpoints.
Brands, she notes, have to play both ends of the coin - entertaining audiences while also being deliberate about what they stand for. That tension is exactly why creative becomes critical again.
Video: Drink Ghia shows that entertainment-led creative doesn’t have to dilute brand clarity — its content is playful and culturally fluent, but always anchored in a recognisable visual language that stops the scroll without losing the brand.
from optimisation to indifference
For much of the last decade, growth was driven by paid social. Platforms like Meta and Google rewarded those who best understood targeting, bidding and performance mechanics. Marketing became increasingly operational, and creative adapted to fit the system: clear CTAs, fast iterations, functional messaging.
It worked - until it didn’t.
As access to the same tools levelled out, so did results. As costs rose, many brands doubled down on the same approaches, pushing increasingly similar ads in an attempt to maintain performance. The same optimisation logic applied everywhere led to a familiar outcome: different brands, increasingly indistinguishable work.
Audiences didn’t consciously reject advertising; they simply learned to scroll past it. And so the focus on creative returned — not through nostalgia, but because the system stopped working without it, and marketing teams began searching for more effective ways to acquire and retain customers.
why creative carries more weight now
When attention is filtered by both algorithms and instinct, the work that cuts through tends to feel intentional. Creative that signals care. Creative that feels considered — dare I say it — on brand.
I’ve said before that the funnel, as we know it, doesn’t at all reflect how people behave. I’ve never been a big proponent of the analogy because we simply don’t consume in neat stages (if only!) We dip in and out, notice things out of order, subconsciously absorb, make connections and return later or not at all. Designing “upper” and “lower” funnel creative in isolation increasingly misses the point.
Creative strategy can’t just apply to ads anymore. It applies to every forward-facing asset: pop-ups, emails, organic social, partnerships, packaging, retail theatre. The creative is the brand, experienced in real time.
Image credit: ZARA HOME
Consistency as strategy: Zara Home applies the same creative language across partnerships and very different categories and channels even Youtube, even their sale messaging reinforces brand recognition over novelty.
US design magazine Domino wrote “new Zara Home editorials are akin to Beyoncé album drops. They don’t look like the cold, overly styled catalogs many big-box retailers put out. Instead, each campaign falls somewhere between a dreamy escape and a cozy, lived-in home. These are no staged sets either. They’re real-life locations, ranging from a Greek island mansion to a Tuscan villa”
the cost of creative fragmentation
Creative consistency is often framed as an aesthetic choice, but in practice it’s structural. The brands that struggle here aren’t short on ideas — they’re short on alignment.
When teams work in silos, creative fragments. Each channel optimises for its own objective and each campaign competes for attention. The result is a lot of activity without accumulation.
When planning is integrated (sorry, I’m a broken record), your creative travels further. One campaign can live across multiple touchpoints. One idea can be extended, adapted and reinforced rather than replaced. Seasonal moments become chapters, not resets.
Fragmentation is expensive. It weakens recognition, slows momentum and forces brands to keep reintroducing themselves. Coherence, by contrast, compounds.
And the key to this is bringing in creative teams earlier - they aren’t at the end of the brief they are before the brief - the ideas are created in tandem.
when ideas are allowed to bloom
There’s a persistent belief that creative needs constant novelty to remain effective. In reality, most creative never gets the chance to do its job.
Recognition is built through accumulation. Meaning forms through familiarity. Trust grows through consistency. When creative is refreshed too frequently, attention may spike briefly, but memory doesn’t form.
Strong creative behaves more like an asset than an output. It works harder over time, requiring less explanation and less persuasion as audiences begin to recognise it instinctively.
Some channels demand variation. Organic social is one of them. But variation doesn’t require new ideas - it requires new expressions of the same one. Different formats and moments, returning to a consistent message rather than treating creative as one-and-done.
Across the brands my community flagged as doing this well, one thing stood out: their social feeds felt considered. A clear throughline in tone, colour and pacing made each post feel part of something larger.
As platforms like Instagram increasingly function as a shop window, that coherence matters. Social isn’t just distribution; it’s where creative worlds are reinforced. And it only works when creative direction and organic strategy are shaped together, not handed over at the end and not led by disparate teams.
Image Credit: Crown Affair Instagram feed - an example of different formats that all cohesively work together. Refy, Drink Ghia, Graza are also great examples of this.
What good creative looks like in practice
Much of what resonates creatively does so instinctively — you feel it before you can fully explain it.
I was recently introduced to the work of Jasmine Dowling, described to me simply as “everything she touches is brilliant”. What stands out is how despite working across a number of brands there’s a consistency both to her work but also a connection to the brands. Her work feels considered. And most importantly lives as part of a wider campaign.
That investment in creative care creates a particular feeling as a customer. When brands creative is thoughtful you get the sense that you might be treated well — whether or not that’s objectively true. Creative, in this way, becomes a proxy for trust.
I was also speaking recently to Huntly Gordon who pointed me towards Manors (a golf brand). What stands out isn’t a single campaign, but the cinematic world the brand inhabits. The creative feels ingrained rather than applied (I believe the team worked with the amazing Emily at Sonder and Tell - their substack The Word by Sonder & Tell is great) and the creative has a clear sense of atmosphere, pace and point of view carried across every touchpoint.
That coherence is easier when creative thinking is embedded from the outset. It’s harder to reverse-engineer once a brand is already in market. But it’s not impossible - it simply requires discipline, and a willingness to treat creative as foundational rather than decorative.
Aesop as an example
What Aesop demonstrates is that brand consistency isn’t about uniformity — it’s about coherence. Different stores, different architects, different physical constraints, yet a recognisable creative language runs through all of it. The customer doesn’t need to decode each experience from scratch. The brand feels familiar before it’s consciously recognised.
That familiarity is doing commercial work. It reduces friction. It builds trust. And it allows creative decisions — whether architectural, digital or campaign-led — to compound rather than compete. When a brand’s creative language is this clear, every new expression reinforces what came before it.
This is ultimately why creative consistency matters. Not because it looks good, but because it makes brands easier to understand, easier to remember and easier to return to — across channels, moments and markets.
Image credit: Aesop Website and adore this creative by Jasmine Dowling - mentioned later in the piece which shows how consistency is also achieved on organic social creative.
inside the creative systems that scale
Creative that travels well tends to come from systems rather than moments of inspiration. The brands doing this best have shared review processes, strong feedback opportunities, integration of planning between marketing and creative and shared strategy sessions. The best teams I’ve worked with all have a sense of ownership over the work, from those on the briefing side to the execution but most importantly the results.
Campaign ideas are stress-tested across channels early, and creative teams are also empowered to make decisions, provide suggestions, and recommendations — and are accountable for the outcomes. The process isn’t to be rigid, but very deliberate and for brands doing it best the creative is an evolution, but it never feels scattered - there’s a clear creative vision that is easily distilled when working with both internal and external teams to maintain that.
where brand strategy and creative strategy converge
Taking “big creative swings” is increasingly necessary in today’s attention economy - but only when those swings are anchored in something solid. When creative ambition outpaces brand clarity, it rarely lands - it’s confusing. When it’s aligned with a brand’s ethos, it can do extraordinary work.
This is where the distinction between brand strategy and creative strategy starts to collapse. The strongest brands aren’t treating creative as an executional layer that follows strategy. They’re using creative to define strategy - to articulate how the brand behaves, what it prioritises and what it’s prepared to repeat.
In practice, that means creative directors are being brought into the strategic conversation earlier, with clearer ownership over how the brand expresses itself over time. Not just what a campaign looks like, but how it shows up — across channels, seasons and moments.
When that alignment is in place, big creative swings don’t feel risky. They feel right.
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the creative decisions shaping 2026
As I’ve been working on 2026 strategies, one thing has become increasingly clear: creative decisions shape far more than campaign performance. They shape trust, cultural relevance and long-term growth.
As The Future Laboratory’s Rose Coffey puts it, consumers are gravitating towards brands that can clearly articulate who made something, why it exists and what values shaped it. Imperfection, humanity and authorship are becoming signals of authenticity.
Creative matters in 2025 not because it looks good, but because it’s one of the few remaining ways a brand can be recognised, remembered and trusted in an increasingly crowded world.
And that only happens when it’s treated not as disposable output - but as something worth building, protecting and repeating.
brands my creative friends are watching for creative inspiration
A running directory of brands shared by readers and peers — not because of individual campaigns, but because of how consistently and thoughtfully their creative shows up over time:
Jacquemus
Burberry
Aesop
Loewe
COS
ZARA HOMEc
Ferm Living
Glassette
Ghia
Graza
Away
Damson Madder
Manors
YETI
Summer Fridays
Crown Affair
The Go-To
Sezane
Toast
Nomasei
I’m curious - which brands stand out to you?
Absolutely loved this and you so clearly diagnosed where things are "breaking" for so many brands trying to move at the speed of culture, without a solid foundation. As a brand strategist and marketer, there are so many quotes I want to highlight and share! Thanks for taking the time to thoughtfully articulate this, Holly!
Love the idea of slow advertising. I feel like that is exactly what we need in 2026!