Advertising’s beige decade and the return of storytelling
This week I had the chance to present at our own intent.ly Live! event, and the theme I kept hitting replay on was what I can only describe as the beige decade. Ten years where advertising slowly measured itself into blandness. Campaigns got safer than Rory McIlroy with a nine iron (EURRRROPE). Clean, polished, polite… and utterly forgettable.
Beige became the default. Not because marketers suddenly lost their spark, but because every idea now has to survive an assault course of metrics before anyone dares to sign it off. Will it shift brand intent by 2.3 per cent in Bristol? Does it align with the brand health tracker? Will the dashboard smile politely at it? By the time a campaign clears those hurdles, the life has been ironed out. What’s left is something that looks lovely on a PowerPoint slide but has all the charisma of a cancelled train at Swindon.
At intent.ly Live! I reminded everyone of the ads that did burn themselves into memory… and not one of them would make it past today’s measurement mafia. Smash robots. Peter Kay’s John Smith’s “Ave it.” Drumming Gorrillas and Cadbury’s eyebrows. None of them ticked the sensible boxes. All of them were gloriously ridiculous. And that’s exactly why they lasted. You can still hear the robots cackling. You can still shout “Ave it!” on a Sunday league pitch and get a laugh. You can still raise your eyebrows in the mirror and look like an idiot. That’s culture. Beige doesn’t get a look in.
Now here’s the twist. Storytelling isn’t dead. It’s been buffering on 1% for a decade, and Gen Z are finally hitting refresh for us. This is a generation raised on scroll speed. If your ad is beige, it’s gone before the logo even appears. They demand personality. They demand story. They’ll forgive clunky, they’ll forgive cringe, but they won’t forgive beige. What they love is when a brand has clearly tried.
Look at the brands thriving through them. Duolingo with its deranged TikTok owl. Ryanair with the sassiest social team since airlines learned how to tweet. Even Jet2 Holidays somehow going viral because people started taking the mick and then couldn’t stop watching. None of this is beige. It’s loud. It’s weird. It’s alive. And brands stepping into the Gen Z era have to accept they won’t control the whole narrative. It will live (and mutate) in consumer hands. Brands must accept loss of narrative control but gain cultural participation.
And that was my point on stage. Measurement still has its place (of course it does) but it should become more of the backstage crew, not the headline act. The star is the story. Always has been, always will be. When measurement hogs the spotlight, we get the beige decade. When we put story first, culture does the measurement for us.
So maybe Gen Z are the ones saving us from ourselves. Maybe they’re forcing us back into bold storytelling because they simply won’t tolerate corporate wallpaper and ‘salesmanship’. Maybe, just maybe, that’s exactly what we need.
Beige is out. Colour is in. Or the ‘Reawakening Era’ – as I like to call it!
Chris ‘Ceej’ Johnson is CMO at intent.ly. With over 15 years’ experience in digital, affiliate and performance marketing, he has a passion for all things consumer behaviour and innovative advertising.
