We pay to watch films. We want to understand the story and relate to the characters. Ads, by contrast, are watched unwillingly—not only with an abject lack of interest, but with significant motivation to ignore the message.
There are two Cannes festivals: one for film, and one for advertising. The industry would do well to remember that.
So when the industry refers to ads as “films,” it’s a marketing misnomer of grand proportions: not just inappropriate but directionally false. And it’s far from the only one.
Ad breaks: These are not breaks for ads—they are breaks from them. The TV industry’s own behavioral data shows more than half of in-room viewers disengage entirely during commercial breaks. Yet media buyers price reach against an exposure that, for the majority of impressions, never actually happens. We value a room with two adults in it more highly than with one, even though the research shows a lone viewer is more than twice as likely to watch the ads.
Storytelling: Most modern advertising is structurally incapable of telling a story. A 6-second bumper has a logo and a prayer. Calling that “storytelling” is creative cowardice dressed up as craft.
Activation: Whether it’s a tent at SXSW, a sampling stall in Westfield, or a TikTok stunt, most don’t move consumers. First, “activation” lets a team confuse doing a thing with achieving a thing. Second, it eats brand budget to the tune of six figures of media money being spent on canapés and an Instagram influencer.
Engagement: The metric of choice for the strategically lost. A Like is not engagement. A comment is not engagement. A share, in most cases, is not engagement. In essence “engagement” does not actually mean engagement. The misnomer has redirected an entire generation of marketing investment toward the 0.5% of category buyers who interact with brand content—usually because their hand slipped—while the 99.5% who actually drive sales go un-served.
Brand loyalty: The oldest lie in marketing. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent 40 years demonstrating that loyalty—in the sense of exclusive, committed, repeat purchase—is fictional. Category buying is a polygamous, stochastic, wobbly thing driven by mental and physical availability, not anthropomorphic devotion.
Brand love: The phrase implies an emotional bond between human and brand that no behavioral dataset has ever supported at any meaningful scale. Yes, we all have one or two brands we actually love. But the other 2,984 in our current repertoire don’t make our heart skip even a little beat. The job isn’t to be cherished—it’s to come to mind at the moment of purchase. Less romantic. Far more profitable.
