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There is a Carlsberg advert in which a man walks into a bank. "How much do you need?" asks the bank manager. "Fifty thousand," says the man. "Here’s seventy-five," says the bank manager, "and pay it back when you can." Somewhere in Britain, a father watching this laughed so hard he rewound the recorded VHS to watch it again, while a five-year-old sat beside him on the carpet, too young to know what a bank manager was, old enough to know that something on the television had just made his father laugh. Most people over thirty carry a version of this memory. An advert they can still recite, attached to a person they watched it with. The advert entered the house uninvited, asked for nothing, made someone laugh, and then lived in a family's memory for thirty years.
Name one advert from the last five years that has done the same thing.
Take your time. Most people draw a blank. The blank has a cause, and it begins with a question asked more than a century ago.
John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia department store magnate, is credited with the most famous lament in the history of commerce: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."
The line became the industry's founding wound. Advertising was a business that could never prove itself. A company would pour money into posters and print, and later television, and sales would rise, and nobody could say with certainty which advert had done what. For a hundred years, the dream of advertising's clients was to find the wasted half and cut it.
George Orwell was harsher still. In 1936, he dismissed the entire trade as "the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket": noise, made by commerce, to summon animals to feed. Between the client's lament and the writer's contempt sat an industry with everything to prove.
While the clients dreamed of efficiency, the people making the adverts built something extraordinary inside the inefficiency. In 1949, a copywriter named Bill Bernbach founded Doyle Dane Bernbach on Madison Avenue. Advertising at the time was salesmanship: list the features, state the price, repeat the claim. Bernbach made the copywriter and the art director equal partners and put the creative team, rather than the account man, in charge of the work. His campaign for Volkswagen, "Think Small," placed a tiny car in an ocean of white space in a country that sold chrome and size, and it is still taught on every advertising course on earth.
But the deeper logic of the creative revolution Bernbach had started is rarely stated. A broadcast advert could not aim. It interrupted everyone: the loyal customer, the rival's customer, the teetotaller, the child. Because it intruded on millions of people who would never buy the product, it owed all of them something in return. A laugh. A spectacle. Ninety seconds of beauty. The creativity was the rent the advert paid for your attention. It existed because of the waste, as a form of compensation for it.
What that obligation produced, at its peak, was art. In 1999, Jonathan Glazer directed a sixty-second film for Guinness in which a Polynesian surfer waits on a beach for the wave of his life, and when it comes, white horses surge out of the breaking water and gallop alongside him. It was shot in Hawaii over nine days, drawn from Walter Crane's 1893 painting Neptune's Horses and a passage of Moby Dick, scored to Leftfield's "Phat Planet," and it showed no product until the final frame. The campaign cost £6 million. It has been voted the greatest advertisement ever made by Channel 4, The Sunday Times, The Independent, and The Gist.
Stella Artois spent twenty-five years making dozens of films under one line, "Reassuringly Expensive": lavish pastiches of French cinema, in French, without subtitles, on budgets that demonstrated the slogan better than any claim could. These were cultural events funded by beer companies. They were quoted in playgrounds and pubs by people who never bought a pint of either. By the arithmetic of any modern dashboard, that reach was waste. The waste was where the culture lived.
The purest proof arrived in 2007. Cadbury was in crisis after a salmonella contamination that cost £20 million in recalls and a £1 million fine. Sales were falling, and trust was falling faster. The marketing director, Phil Rumbol, hired Fallon London with a brief that would not survive a single meeting today: make people feel good about the brand again. No product demonstration. No conversion target. No KPI beyond the feeling. What Fallon proposed was a gorilla, sitting at a drum kit, playing the fill from Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight." Before it aired, no data on earth could have justified it. There was no precedent to model, no comparable to cite, no spreadsheet on which a primate drummer could be shown to move chocolate.
Rumbol believed in it anyway and spent four months fighting his own company for permission to put it on air. The client spent millions on conviction alone. Sales rose 9%. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes. "In the Air Tonight" re-entered the charts nearly thirty years after its release, and Phil Collins sent Rumbol a letter of thanks. And the mechanism connecting the gorilla to the chocolate bar was never located, because it lived in the part of the transaction that cannot be instrumented: the feeling of several million people enjoying the same strange, generous, pointless thing at the same time.
The Sony Bravia Bouncy Balls Masterpiece
Then, after a century of waiting, Wanamaker's question was answered. Digital advertising could see what broadcast never could: who clicked, who bought, who scrolled past. A programmatic advert is placed in the milliseconds between you clicking a link and the page loading; an algorithm auctions your attention to the highest bidder based on what it knows about you, and what it knows is considerable. Every pound of spend acquired a tracking number. Global advertising revenue passed $1 trillion in 2025, with 73% of it now purely digital and linear television in steady decline; Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon capture nearly two-thirds of every new advertising dollar entering the market. The wasted half had been found. It was located, isolated, and cut. Money moved out of the broad, extravagant, unaimed work and into the targeted, attributed, efficient kind.
The industry then ran the experiment on itself, and its own archive returned the verdict. In 2013, Les Binet and Peter Field published the largest study of advertising effectiveness ever conducted, through the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the UK industry's professional body, whose databank holds decades of campaign results. Across 996 campaigns, 700 brands, and 83 sectors, the optimal allocation was roughly 60% to brand building, the broad emotional work, and 40% to activation, the targeted measurable kind. Brand spending compounds for years. Activation spikes and decays in weeks. Campaigns weighted toward the measurable showed strong opening results that eroded year after year, because they harvested demand without ever planting it.
The unaimed half, the half Wanamaker called waste, was doing the heavy lifting all along. The research was published, widely read, and widely praised. The industry inverted the ratio anyway. Brand effects take years and cannot be attributed to a quarter; activation can be presented to a board on Thursday. In every budget meeting, the measurable lesser thing defeats the unmeasurable greater thing, because only one of them can speak for itself in advance.
The consequences arrived on schedule. In November 2025, Omnicom completed its $13 billion acquisition of IPG, creating the largest advertising company in the world and cutting 4,000 jobs on completion; across the two companies, roughly 13,000 advertising jobs disappeared in eighteen months. As part of the restructuring, DDB, the agency Bernbach founded in 1949, was folded into TBWA, and the name was retired after 76 years. One industry veteran called the merger "a funeral for advertising." The same month, Cannes Lions, the most prestigious prize in commercial creativity, announced a new award for 2026: the x, for work that delivers "measurable business outcomes." The prize for creativity now requires receipts.
Something larger than an industry is disappearing inside this story. Adverts were the last genuinely shared media experience, and they were shared for an unglamorous reason: the technology could not tell anyone apart. Everyone got the gorilla, whether they ate chocolate or not, and so on. On Monday, everyone could talk about the gorilla. The playground quote, the office impression, the catchphrase your family still uses: each one required millions of people to receive a message that was never meant for them. Culture is what happens when communication overshoots its target. Precision has abolished the overshoot. No two people now see the same feed, the same homepage, the same recommendations, or the same adverts; each of us is served exactly what the model believes we want, and nothing we could possibly share. The commons did not collapse because people stopped wanting common things. It was optimised away, segment by segment, because aiming is more profitable than belonging.
Which returns us to the living room, the rewound VHS, and the man laughing at a bank manager offering seventy-five thousand pounds to a stranger. By every metric which now governs a trillion-dollar industry, that advert failed. It reached a man with no intention of switching lagers and a five-year-old who could not buy anything. Both of them were the wasted half. And it is the only advert that households remember.
Wanamaker got his answer, a century late: they found the wasted half, and it was the half doing the work. Orwell got his, too. For fifty years, the people who put horses in the surf and a gorilla behind a drum kit laboured to prove that advertising could be more than the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. They succeeded. Then the industry discovered exactly which animals were hungry, and went back to the stick.
See you on the next one.
As part of this deep dive, we have created a YouTube Playlist full of our favourite adverts from better times. Check it out here and add some of your own
Refs
George Orwell: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
