We have turned the finest communication engine in history into a digital peeping Tom.
Today, marketing teams are trapped in a prison of performance dashboards and retargeting funnels, watching diminishing returns with growing panic. We have perfected the mechanics of following a man down the street to sell him a pair of shoes he bought yesterday, while totally neglecting the craft of giving him something he actually wants to look at.
More than 900 million people now use ad blockers. Millions more pay subscriptions just to avoid us. Let’s be brutally honest: that is not a media problem. That is a product problem.
When the work is intrusive rather than interesting, the audience opts out. They haven’t switched off Netflix, the World Cup, or their favourite creators; they’ve switched off us. We must ask a blunt question of every single execution: If people had a choice, would they choose to watch this? If the honest answer is no, throw it in the bin and start again.
In the short term, stalking looks terribly clever. It satisfies the accountants. You can show an offer to a precisely defined segment, twelve times a day, and watch the click-through rate in real time.
But stalking does not build the only asset that ultimately matters: the brand as a permanent corner of someone’s mind.
This tragic shift from persuasion to promotion has hollowed out great companies. When work is optimised only to push today’s conversion, it fails to earn tomorrow’s affection. You end up with lower margins, weaker pricing power, and a pathetic need to constantly bribe people back with discounts. Look at any category where everyone is over-targeted and under-loved. It’s a race to the bottom.
Advertising is supposed to be a growth engine. It creates demand, builds preference, and breathes life into culture. When the work stops inspiring, the engine stalls. If your marketing team is constantly under pressure to “do more with less,” it’s usually because the work isn’t doing anything at all.
We live in an attention marketplace. Therefore, every piece of communication has a simple hurdle to clear: the Entertainment Test.
The Entertainment Test
If you remove your logo from the commercial, does the film still deserve attention? If the answer is no, you are not in the entertainment business. You are in the interruption business.
Entertainment isn’t about splashing out on expensive jokes or slapping a celebrity onto a bad idea for decoration. It’s about respect. Your audience is scrolling between a friend’s wedding photos, a breaking news story, and a Hollywood trailer. In that context, your competition isn’t the rival brand in your category, it is everything else on the screen.
Look at the streaming platforms. They win attention by making stories people are hungry to watch, not by buying more digital billboards reminding you that the show exists. Great brands do the same. Adidas’s “Backyard Legends” didn’t earn tens of millions of views because it stalked people around the internet. It succeeded because it rewarded their time with a story worth watching.
To stop stalking and start inspiring, we must design the work as an experience, not a "touchpoint." (A dreadful word, touchpoint. It sounds like a medical examination.)
We must ask at the very beginning: How will this idea improve someone’s day, even by fifteen seconds?
A stalking brand follows you around the internet with cookies, optimising purely for the algorithm. It relies on interruption as a core strategy. An inspiring brand does the exact opposite: it creatively invades culture, appeals to raw human emotion, and treats entertainment as the final product.
For a utility brand, that might mean a moment of profound recognition by showing the invisible, chaotic frustrations of a commuter with beautiful, comedic truth. For a low-interest category like toilet paper, look at Who Gives a Crap. They elevated a mundane necessity into a cause that made people smile and feel proud to display in their bathrooms.
Experiences people welcome share three simple truths:
They are made for humans, not algorithms.
They carry a clear point of view that could only come from your brand.
They respect the audience’s time by rewarding attention with emotion: laughter, wonder, or a truth that makes them nod.
When you hit those notes, media becomes a force multiplier, not a crutch.
Most stalking behaviour begins at the brief. When success is defined purely as a short-term response from a micro-targeted audience, the natural outcome is work that pesters. If you want to change the output, you must change what you ask for.
Take that question - Would anyone choose to spend time with this? - and paste it in bold, black letters at the top of every brief. Make it the law.
Then, strip out the jargon. Beyond the business objectives, insist on one human truth. Something your audience would agree with even if they never bought your product. Specify the feeling you want to leave behind. Do you want them amused? Moved? Challenged?
Finally, define bravery. What does it look like, in your category, to stop repeating what everyone else is saying and offer a story only your brand could tell? If you aren't being provocative, you are being invisible.
If we ask teams to inspire, we have to measure more than clicks. I am not suggesting we ignore data, but we must widen the lens to include signals of genuine human value.
Look at engagement quality. Are people watching to the end when they have the option to skip? Are they sharing it without a prize draw forcing them to? Are the comments reflecting genuine emotion, or just bots? These are the indicators that your work is landing as art, not an annoyance.
Then, look at the long-term health of the business:
Uplift in consideration among light buyers (where real growth lives).
Absolute distinctiveness scores.
Spontaneous search demand for your campaign phrases.
Earned media that treats your work as a cultural moment, not a media buy.
When leaders see that inspiring work doesn't just feel better, but actually performs better on the balance sheet, the debate ends. "Stop stalking. Start inspiring" ceases to be a creative slogan. It becomes a highly profitable commercial strategy for building a brand that people actively choose to let into their lives.
After all, data creates compliance. Creativity creates desire. Which would you rather own?