The Great Escape

A packed sports bar holds its breath. On an old boxy TV, a man is standing at the precipice of freedom… a door in the sky. Millions watched him live inside a perfect world, but the moment Truman finally walked out? They erupted in cheers (and you probably did too).

We’re living in our own version of Seahaven.

Brands exist as a shiny glaze over the messy tensions of our world. Never quite mixing in, just smoothing over the cracks with the same garden-variety inspiration on loop. We’re served a version of reality that’s happier, more palatable and easier to consume. Just like Truman, it’s enough to make your eye twitch.

II believe our differentiation crisis is not just a marketing crisis. The same forces flattening brand communications are flattening culture, taste and travel too. This reframe matters, because if the problem is cultural, the solution must be too. Contribute a solve here, meeting a genuine human need, and growth will follow.

Our culprit is frictionless ideology. Twenty years of engineering our world, online and offline, for seamless consumption. Where whatever captures attention the fastest scales, regardless of whether it deserves it. Simplicity wins, and the diverse, the complex and meaningful are all optimised away. Brands bold enough to reintroduce friction can become the antidote.

Meanwhile, technology has done something more disorientating, melting the line between media and culture. Media used to be a delivery channel, reporting on culture and transmitting entertainment, but then getting out of the way. As audiences became participants these boundaries collapsed. Culture in the anthropological sense of building community, forming identity and shared experiences, is happening in media.

Sociologist Stuart Hall [Hall 1980] showed long ago cultural objects don’t have fixed meanings given by their creators, their meaning is made in the exchange of how audiences receive, interpret and use them; and dependent on their context, identity and community. Brands are no different now. They’re no longer advertisers, but cultural objects. This demands a fundamentally different way of building them, relinquishing fixed meaning and restructuring to grow as cultural objects do - experienced and shaped by people in real time.

Therefore, I'm making the case for Imperfect Brands™. They will be the ones to grow from here. Brands that drop the corporate polish, the frictionless emptiness, and the self-centred insistence on one sanctioned version of themselves.

Imperfect brands are built on two key behaviours:

• Brand texture - the deliberate use of friction to create memorability in a world smoothed to meaninglessness.
• Brand porosity - the mechanics and confidence to open the brand up and let it be carried, shaped and reinterpreted by others.

Imperfection isn't new. We’re biologically wired to notice what breaks the pattern. Imperfection is proof of life in a world of synthetic smoothness, and proof of sincerity in a world of polished performance.

This essay is for brands that want to grow in 2026. For the brands willing to be imperfect on purpose and grow because of it.

The Age of Smooth

In 1996, Bill Gates described a dream of ‘friction-free capitalism’, [Gates 1996] that has echoed through Silicon Valley and the world ever since. The mantra? Smooth, simplify, optimise. Embed technology seamlessly into everyday life and remove all barriers to use and purchase. This isn’t just the operating system behind our consumer technology, but has revolutionised our lives and economies in a myriad of ways. It’s the operating system of how we live.

The success has been spectacular. Ecommerce collapsed both the distance between wanting something and owning, and the distance between having an idea and launching a brand. The UK is seeing it’s biggest start up boom in history. [GEM UK 2025]

Algorithmic curation is perhaps the most culturally consequential manifestation. Across music, film, journalism, we no longer go looking for things. Things come to us, via algorithms filling neat playlists on assumed tastes. We have more music at our fingertips than any generation in history, but can you remember the names of the artists in your daily mix?

Spotify’s own research found that algorithmically programmed listening is measurably less diverse than what we’d find on our own too. [Anderson et al. 2020] The removal of friction doesn’t just mean things don’t stick but also breeds a distinctly 21st century homogeneity.

It wasn’t always like this. Mark Fisher's concept of 'popular modernism' [Fisher 2017] recalls a 1970s-80s in which mainstream pop culture routinely contained ambiguity, strangeness and difficulty, and thrived precisely because it asked something of its audience. Cultural flattening, Fischer argued, didn’t happen because people stopped wanting depth. It happened because systems benefitted from optimising depth away.

The same logic plays out in our cities. Urbanist René Boer points to a world where Uber, Google Translate and Apple Pay save us the trouble of encountering foreignness in foreign places. Boer calls these ‘smooth cities’, noting the grim paradox that tech makes travel easier than ever, but simultaneously ‘flattens complexity and diversity’ that makes it worth visiting. [Boer 2023]

Frictionlessness succeeds in many ways. It makes things faster, easier and more accessible. However, the byproduct is an oversaturated environment past the point of human processing. There’s more of everything, with less need for human involvement, all converging to an indistinguishable mean.

In 1990, in the advent of the internet, social scientist David Harvey described ‘time-space compression’. [Harvey 1990] He saw that technology, by collapsing distance and accelerating access to information, creates a perceived shrinkage of the world and destabilises the reference points through which we make meaning. Thirty years on, frictionless logic has compressed not just time and space, but culture itself, hollowing diveThe crux of the frictionless problem is that human capacity is the limiting factor. The output of maximum frictionlessness isn’t maximum consumption. It’s meaninglessness.

How Smooth Ate Strategy

Brands absorbed all of this. Not just in their UX and digital products, but also in their communications. Everything got smoother, more optimised, more polished.

For a long time, this made sense. Polish denoted competence and modernity. Production was expensive, making it a proxy for credibility. A foundational study on cost signalling confirmed perceived ad spend can increase perceived product quality by up to 14%. [Kirmani 1990] If a brand could afford polish, the world understood it as serious and worth trusting.

The media landscape reinforced the model. Reach alone explained 83% of the variation in effectiveness across different media. [Binet and Field, 2017] With reach as king and TV dominated reach, the effective model was to make one perfect thing, put it where millions will see it and repeat.

The platforms too played along. Meta’s pre-2024 ad system was built around audience targeting; creative was just the cargo. Cutting down a hero and retargeting repeatedly made sense.

The effectiveness playbook and the frictionless ideology worked in symbiotic harmony. ‘Be single-minded. Be everywhere’, was effective in a world where the conditions rewarded it. The fundamentals haven't changed. Brands still grow through penetration. Emotion still outperforms rationality. What's broken is the assumption that polish and singularity, templated and repeated, is still the way to drive any of it.

Production quality is no longer cost signalling, with AI collapsing the cost of looking professional. The media landscape exploded, one polished hero struggling to stretch effectively across dozens of touchpoints. Tom Roach explains this creative fragmentation as the inevitable consequence of scaling singularity across an ecosystem that has quadrupled in size. [Roach 2024] Meanwhile competition is rife, more advertiser and creator voices are in the mix than ever. UK ad spend hitting a record high of £46.7bn. [AA/WARC 2026]

Platforms too are evolving, as creative fragmentation fails even on their own terms. Meta reported an average 60% drop in conversion after four exposures of the same performance asset. [Meta via Roach 2024] Paid social ROI has been declining despite increased spend [Thinkbox/ Profit Ability 2 2024] Meta's Andromeda update now reads creative with AI, matching content to user and predicting engagement before the ad enters the auction. Creative has become the new targeting signal, demanding variety. The hero-and-scale model isn’t just culturally outdated, monotony is now mechanically penalised.

Our production model is churning out templated copies, with less meaning. Our agency model isn’t structurally set up to match the new demands of continuous, varied, culture-first creative, and it shows. Brands’ Compound Creativity Score has declined by 25% in a decade, not because of creative inconsistency, but from hollowness. More assets that ever are being produced, all meeting brand guidelines but struggling to build cumulative creative equity. [System1/ IPA 2025]

In 2020, campaign business effects were at their lowest in 25 years. [IPA/ Field 2020] 65% of ads have weak or no associations with the brands that pay for them. [WARC/ Cannes Lions 2024] 85% do not meet the 2.5 second attention threshold to stand a shot at building memory. [WARC/Lumen 2024]

We’re pumping more money in for less impact. The best strategy won’t help you if you’re playing the wrong game.

The Imperfect Hero

Wabi Sabi is as wise as it sounds, a 700-year-old Japanese philosophy that reveres the beauty of transience and imperfection. Punk rioted against the slick corporate machine in rowdy DIY glory. Barely a decade after digital music production went mainstream, producers started adding vinyl crackle back in.

Imperfection intuitively reads as proof of life and soul. Artists have always known this.

Researcher Jakko Kemper named our modern affinity for the human-touched, the 'aesthetic of imperfection', documenting a desire for the non-synthetic in an era of mass-produced smoothness. [Kemper 2024]

The unease isn’t new. In 1935, in the throes of industrialisation, Walter Benjamin argued that the mass-produced art copy loses the ‘aura’ of the original. Mass production might create perfect copies, but perfect copies are hollow, losing the very thing that made them meaningful. [Benjamin 1935] Sound familiar?

The point isn't that mass-production is bad. It's democratised everything from toothbrushes to cars. The point is the distinction between commodity and cultural object. Your product can be mass-produced. Your brand can't afford to be, if it wants to mean anything.

The Anatomy of Imperfection

Imperfect brands are built in three key layers.

• The Brand Core – The non-negotiable centre of what the brand stands for. Distilled into the distinctive brand messages that anchor everything stand for. A core idea tight enough to hold, and loose enough to travel.
• Brand Texture – How the brand expresses itself. Deliberately rougher, more human and more emotionally varied than its frictionless counterparts. A creative choice that gives a brand a surface people feel and remember.
• Brand Porosity – Designing a brand that is carried by others, from creators and UGC to LLMs. Systematically open-ended brands built for reinterpretation, compounding reach without compounding spend.

Brand Core

Distinctive brand messages > assets

DBAs ensure recognition when you're in control of the execution. But to grow like a cultural object, moving through communities and creators, it's the message that travels, not the logo. Be strict on what the brand means, but fluid on how it looks.

To reassure the naysayers, this isn’t anti-consistency, this pitch is for consistency of core with the diversity of expression to keep people interested. Growth comes from strengthening the same memory structures, not parroting the same thing

Unsurprisingly, fluent devices like characters, scenarios and catchphrases outperform logos, colours and typography, tripling the chance of reporting gains in brand distinctiveness. [Effie/ System1, 2025] They’re naturally better suited as carriers of messages.

But fluent devices still require fluency. An off-the-shelf character is as flat as a logo if no shareable meaning is attached. Take 'You're not you when you're hungry' versus 'sweeet' (left here for you to guess the brands). Same vehicle, but only one has entered everyday language, doing brand work in conversations no media plan can buy

Guidelines for a porous brand look less like a rulebook and more like media training. Define the non-negotiable core, then build a deliberately permissive section on expression. Equip everyone who carries the brand with the message and character, then trust them to express it naturally in context.

Brand Texture

Emotional range

Most brands operate in the same narrow emotional register: aspiration, warmth, positivity. A frictionless emotional strategy that feels safe but produces neutrality 52% of the time. [System 1/ Extraordinary Cost of Dull] Cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that a society obsessed with positivity eliminates the conflict, ambiguity and strangeness that gives life depth and meaning [Han 2015] Brands can learn from this

McCain's flexed emotional range in 'Real Teatimes', celebrating the messy, imperfect reality of family life where competitors projected only aspirational visions of dinnertime. McCain’s proudly included vulnerability, chaos and the uncomfortable truth that family life isn't always beautiful. In a declining commoditised category, price elasticity halved, sales rose for a decade and £79m was delivered in incremental profit, making it the most awarded IPA paper of all time. [IPA Effectiveness Awards 2024]

Go fearlessly into spaces like vulnerability, self-deprecation, absurdity or even divisive conviction where your competitors won’t follow. It’s not about being negative, it’s about being unexpected enough to be scarce and therefore distinctively memorable.

Have an opinion

Filter bubbles and a K-shaped economy have split audiences along cultural and economic lines. Every feed and worldview are different. There's no neutral centre to broadcast to anymore. A brand message designed to please everybody reaches nobody; too generic for the algorithm to surface and too bland for the engagement signals that carry content across audiences. Stance is how brands traverse fragmentation. You can't avoid expressing an opinion if you want to be seen. You don't need everyone to agree but you need enough people to care.

Douglas Holt's shows that brands become iconic by positioning themselves at the fault line of cultural contradictions. [Holt 2024] The brands that grow are the ones engaging with the world directly, signalling there's a human in the building willing to be judged.

Nike's 'Dream Crazy' featured Colin Kaepernick after the NFL effectively blacklisted him for protesting racial injustice. People burned trainers in response. But ‘Believe in something’ wasn't just Kaepernick's story, it was an incantation of ‘Just Do It’. Nike positioned itself at the fault line of America's deepest cultural tension and online sales rose 31% immediately after, and long-term brand value increaded. [Nike 2018]

Visible human fingerprints

When synthetic content is indistinguishable from human content, visible human origin becomes the new marker of value. The effort heuristic kicks in; when people believe human effort went into something, they value it more. [Kruger at al 2004] Judgement calls and aesthetic choices that couldn't have been optimised all stand out. In an automated world, running on minimum viable effort, visible fingerprints don't just signal value. They are the value.

Roland Barthes would call the polished surface of brand communications a 'myth', smoothness presenting itself as simply what professionalism looks like, disguising the fact that it's a constructed choice. [Barthes 1957] The visible human fingerprint is the demythologising move that breaks the illusion of effortless corporate polish and replaces it with something audiences instinctively trust more: evidence a person was here.

This extends to fallibility too. Aronson's Pratfall Effect showed that competent entities become more liked after a visible blunder. [Arson et al. 1966] KFC ran out of chicken, responded with a full-page 'FCK' ad. No corporate apology, no crisis management speak, just a three-letter admission that said more about the brand's confidence than any campaign could. Imperfection isn't a risk for strong brands, it's proof they're strong enough not to pretend.

Platform cultural depth

Football is the UK’s most consumed cultural product and it’s more complex, more tribal and culturally layered than ever. The podcast boom sees millions spending hours with detailed opinionated long-form content.

Mark Fisher argued that the disappearance of challenging, experimental work from mainstream culture wasn't a failure of popular appetite, it was driven by commercial logic optimising for the safe and proven. [Fisher 2014] When frictionlessness flattens culture to make it more shippable, this isn’t audience-driven. Brands offering cultural depth are meeting an unmet need. WARC shows diverse, culturally specific creative drives higher recall in 90% of tested cases. [WARC 2024]

Tesco's 'Food Love Stories' brought cultural depth to mass retail. Specific stories about specific people, their regional accents, real domestic settings, individual relationships with food. Resulting in £980m incremental revenue and a Grand Effie. [Effie/ System12025]

Burberry under Daniel Lee returned to British subcultural specificity, weaving in football terraces, working-class heritage, regional identity and rain. Distinctiveness was rebuilt through the complicated texture of actual Britishness, rather than smoothing for a global audience. Cultural specificity is distinctiveness.

Brand Porosity

Build scaffolds not scripts

I, like millions of others, woke up with festive joie de vivre to unwrap my annual Spotify stats last December. Arguably, meaningless numbers, but they’re my meaningless numbers. Question the listening age metric all you like, but the marketing science is foolproof. Open structures for audiences to complete with their own meaning, trigger sharing as personal expression. So, build scaffolds, recognisable enough to be unmistakably yours, but open enough to be reinterpreted and carried by others.

Hito Steyerl explains how cultural objects remixed and shared create 'visual bonds'; social connections mediated through the shared object. [Steyerl 2009] This is a 2026 reach strategy based on social mechanics and how culture travels but only works if you build space for remixing into your brand. Cultural success is less about the permanence of the original and more about the transience of the copy

The scaffold is not only for your audiences. It becomes your brand team’s answer to the continuous, culturally responsive demands of the landscape. With scaffold in place, the team orchestrates a network of creative partners designed to produce variety at pace. Always-on production leads driven by a feedback loop of performance data and cultural signals.

‘Should have gone to Specsavers’ is the pinnacle of a sturdy scaffold, making possible an endless variety of real-time quips, from referee errors to celeb blunders, across social, print and outdoor. [IPA Effectiveness Awards 2024, WARC 2025]

Multiple cultural entry points

Guinness' 'Made of More' platform ran across radically different cultural contexts, from Congolese Sapeurs to wheelchair basketball in America to national rugby pride across four home nations, each expressing the same core idea through the community's own story. One distinctive brand message expressed across multiple cultural entry points generated £1bn in value created over eight years. [IPA Effectiveness Awards 2020]

Anchor on a truth broad enough to cross contexts and leave the meaning open enough for each community to complete. Show up in their context, not yours. Guinness doesn’t make advertising about Guinness drinkers, but about sport, friendship, boldness; the things different communities already care about.

Claire Bishop's theory of networked attention shows that we don't experience cultural objects in isolation. Our understanding of something is shaped by an awareness of how others experience it simultaneously through different lenses. Bishop, 2024] This is the cultural mechanism for penetration in a fragmented world, as multiple cultural entry points compound meaning. Every community that claims the brand adds richness to how everyone else perceives it. The multiplicity isn't dilution, it's depth.

Strength in numbers

Brand discovery is shifting from search to AI. LLMs synthesise brand meaning from what's said about you across reviews, creators and platforms like Reddit.

A brand that only speaks in its own sanctioned voice has a brittle footprint in these systems. A brand carried by many voices has a rich, resilient one. Porosity isn't just a cultural strategy. It's how you build presence in the discovery infrastructure of 2026, for humans and algorithms. [WARC 2025]

Compounding Imperfection

Texture and porosity are the behaviours. The next question is how to measure their value and whether it converts to growth.This thesis treats brands as cultural objects, not advertising vehicles. Cultural theory has bolstered marketing theory throughout, and our measurement follows suit.

Pierre Bourdieu's landmark ‘Forms of Capital’ is the original framework for how cultural value compounds into real-world power. [Bourdieu 1986] Bourdieu was talking about people, not products, but bear with me.

He proposed that a person’s value in society isn’t just economic, it accumulates through multiple forms of capital: cultural, social and symbolic.  His key insight was that these convert into each other. Cultural capital compounds into social capital, into symbolic capital, and ultimately into economic capital. This is how culture becomes capital. We can map the same chain to brands, to plan and track how cultural value converts and drives growth.  The framework below sets out key focus of brand behaviour, compounding into building the core and commercials. The metrics are illustrative and can be adjusted around the same structure around what matters to a specific brand.

The conversion point metrics are a diagnostic, flagging where in the chain a brand is getting stuck.

A textured brand that isn't converting to porosity is loved but isn't travelling, so the scaffold needs work. A porous brand that isn't compounding brand meaning, probably lacks the texture that builds connection and trust. A brand strong on both that isn't converting commercially has a distribution or product problem, not a brand problem.

This is a working version, but the validation will come in market, running the model alongside econometric modelling to prove the relationship between texture and porosity scores, and business growth, and surface specific multiplier effects for each behaviour.

An imperfect future

There's no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you." That's Christof, the director who built Seahaven, but it could just as easily be spoken in the boardroom. Give or take, this has been the dominant philosophy of brand-building for twenty years. Construct a perfect world. Put your product at the centre. Pull the audience in and don't let them out.

We've been so busy constructing worlds, we've forgotten how to exist meaningfully in the one we share. We had slots to fill, so we built things to fill them. New media changed the rules of the game. Culture is happening live with brands, humans and creators all in the same space. The manufactured world looks more manufactured every day and the gap between brand-world and real-world widened.

For a brand to visibly eschew perfection is to say shows you get it. You’re right here living in the real world like the rest of us. That isn't a stylistic choice. It's a self-awareness. In an increasingly insane world, it's a glimmer of sanity people are desperate for.

Culture is rhizomatic, anyone can input from anywhere, and this is a hard reality to reorganise for. Imperfect brands are a quiet democratisation. The brands brave enough and culturally fluent enough will be the ones to grow.

Kally Boshnakova is Head of Creative at the Ministry of Justice (on secondment from WPP Media). This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.

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The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.