Entertain or die: how brands forgot what the internet was for

I have a distinct memory of watching a brand account post a TikTok so aggressively, painfully boring that the comment section had turned on it like a pack of feral dogs.

Not because it was offensive or because it said anything wrong.

But because it was dull as f*cccck.

Someone had spent money on that, and signed off on it… and then it entered the world with all the cultural resonance of a wet paper bag.

That's kind of where we are.

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Tracksuit recently dropped a report called "Entertain or Die," which sounds so dramatic.

But it’s really not when you read the headline stat doing the rounds from Peter Field and System1: 50% of ads are currently less engaging than watching cows graze in a field.

A literal 30-second clip of a cow chewing grass. More compelling than half of what brands are putting money behind.

If that doesn't make you want to lie down on the floor for a minute, I don't know what will.

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We did this to ourselves, kind of.

To understand how we ended up here, you have to go back to the early 2010s, when "efficiency" became the dominant religion of marketing.

Programmatic buying arrived. And suddenly, the whole game shifted from "how do we make people feel something" to "how do we reach the most people for the lowest CPM." Creative storytelling got quietly demoted. And data-driven targeting got the big shiny corner office.

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Ads were engineered to not offend rather than to actually connect, which is a very different brief, and it produces very different work.

The thing is, while brands were perfecting the science of reaching people, the internet was busy perfecting the art of holding them.

TikTok's algorithm doesn't care about your media spend or your targeting parameters. It cares about whether someone watched your video all the way through, whether they watched it twice, whether they sent it to their group chat at 11pm.

The metric is retention, the currency is amusement, and it turns out those are very hard things to buy your way into.

So you ended up with this widening gap where a user's organic feed is genuinely, relentlessly entertaining. And then an ad interrupts it and it's like someone turned off all the lights. The chasm isn't subtle at all. It’s like, the entire experience now.

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The cost of being boring is not abstract.

But dull advertising is not just a creative problem—it's a freaking expensive one.

Research shows that brands running low-engagement campaigns have to spend significantly more on media to achieve the same business results as entertaining ones. We're talking upwards of £9.8 million extra per campaign. The "safe" choice is, financially, not safe at all. It just feels safe because the risk is spread across a thousand small forgettable moments rather than one big swingable one.

And the flip side of that is equally compelling.

Peter Field's analysis of the IPA database found that "fame" ads, the ones that get people actually talking, generate 6.1 times more share growth than rational, information-heavy campaigns. Six times, dude. From making something people want to share with each other.

Don’t be mistaken, that's not a creative indulgence, babes. It’s a business case.

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So, what does "entertaining" actually mean for a brand?

This is where it gets interesting, and also where a lot of brands fumble it, because "be entertaining" is not an actionable brief. Obviously. It gets interpreted as "be unhinged," and suddenly every brand account is doing a bit that doesn't suit them and it reeks of desperation and tomfoolery.

The brands doing this well, your Duolingos, your Ryanairs, your e.l.f.s, aren't simply “being chaotic” for no good reason.

They've made a clear decision about what kind of entertainer they are. And they commit to it with a consistency that eventually feels like a personality. Duolingo leaned into the passive-aggressive guilt-trip owl and ran with it until it became a cultural reference point because it’s a whole character with a worldview.

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The other thing worth noting is that on platforms where 80% of people are there specifically to be entertained, you cannot walk in the front door with a sales pitch.

It doesn't work and it makes you look like someone who doesn't understand the room. Like at all. It makes you the online equivalent of socially inept and no one is inviting you to any parties after that.

Entertainment has to come first.

The relationship gets built there. The transaction, if it comes, comes after. That's just the basic social contract of the platform.

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None of this is actually that complicated.

Which makes it sort of funny that we're here.

The internet told brands exactly what it wanted. It demonstrated, loudly and repeatedly, what it found interesting and what it scrolled past without a second thought. And for about a decade, a significant chunk of the industry looked at that information and decided the answer was more retargeting.

The cow-grazing stat is funny to me, in the bleak way things are funny when they're also a little bit (or a lot) true. But it's also a useful data point. It tells you exactly how far the gap has gotten and how much room there is to do literally anything interesting and stand out.

The bar, genuinely, has never been lower.

That's either a damning indictment or a wide open door, depending on how you want to look at it.

-Sophie Randell, Writer