When Boring Products Get Brilliant Ads—and Why We Can’t Stop Watching
It started with dish soap. More accurately, a YouTube pre-roll ad for a brand I'd never heard of, selling a detergent with the same enthusiasm you'd expect from a John Wick trailer. There were slow-mo bubbles. A whispered voiceover. An inexplicably emotional cello score. For 25 unskippable seconds, I was hooked.
Why? Because elevation is the game now. Not differentiation, not disruption. Elevation. You take your average, invisible, almost-unnecessarily-existing product, and craft a cinematic religion around it. We're not selling a mop. We're selling redemption. And oddly, it works. People watch. People share. People write columns about it, apparently.
It’s not about performance anymore—it’s about performance art. New Zealand brands are catching on too. Just look at that 2025 chicken feed campaign that played like a Wes Anderson film, complete with symmetrical barns and pastel wheelbarrows. Tell me you didn’t admire the rooster's emotional arc. I did. Twice.
This is where things get deliciously weird. When marketing teams treat "boring" as an artistic constraint rather than a death sentence, real creativity slips in. There’s genius in silly. Dignity in deadpan. You can sell gravel with the right monologue. The next frontier isn’t in your TikTok feed or your VR headset. It’s in the lovingly overproduced story of why Carol’s compost smells nicer than Pete’s—and why that matters.
Why? Because elevation is the game now. Not differentiation, not disruption. Elevation. You take your average, invisible, almost-unnecessarily-existing product, and craft a cinematic religion around it. We're not selling a mop. We're selling redemption. And oddly, it works. People watch. People share. People write columns about it, apparently.
It’s not about performance anymore—it’s about performance art. New Zealand brands are catching on too. Just look at that 2025 chicken feed campaign that played like a Wes Anderson film, complete with symmetrical barns and pastel wheelbarrows. Tell me you didn’t admire the rooster's emotional arc. I did. Twice.
This is where things get deliciously weird. When marketing teams treat "boring" as an artistic constraint rather than a death sentence, real creativity slips in. There’s genius in silly. Dignity in deadpan. You can sell gravel with the right monologue. The next frontier isn’t in your TikTok feed or your VR headset. It’s in the lovingly overproduced story of why Carol’s compost smells nicer than Pete’s—and why that matters.