The Spectacle Trap: Escape now! Ideas have found their alibi

Chapter 0: The Indictment 

On February 8th, 2026, much of the world paused. For many not in Santa Clara, it unfolded live across screens or scrolling.

A cultural spectacle. The ads took centre stage, and politics picked a side. Somewhere beneath the noise, a sport was cheered and played.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, it was the Super Bowl. And for a few electric hours, it arrived with force and took over almost everything. But when you step back, you see it as fleeting. It’s here for a day, then fades until next year.

The best ideas never recede. They bam. They hit the chest and stay there. They’re built on truth, expressed with precision (Hegarty, 2011), hitting the right brain (Wood, 2019).

The industry is incredible at producing this work. We can recall the Audi clowns (A&AD, 2018). The expression was cinematic. It was (good) strange and held a truth only Audi could own: precision engineering. Driving “Vorsprung durch Technik” (advancement through technology), a car that is highly engineered, precise and powerful, makes the chaos of a clown's world manageable.

The ad didn’t overexplain the technology. The clowns make it visceral. Helped the viewer feel it. The clowns had profound business effects. Audi grew three times faster than the overall UK automotive market (WARC, 2018).

My concern isn’t that spectacle exists. It’s that the sequence has reversed. Spectacle is chased first, before meaning and truth are found (Wood, 2021).

You see it in the brief. Rather than first asking “what is true about this brand, about these people?”, they often start with “where can we appear?” “How can we show up on TikTok?” It has become a philosophy, not a tactic, and we believe that the next big thing is the next answer. A new wrapper, same empty box.

In 1967, Guy Debord, a French theorist and founding member of the Situationist International, wrote The Society of the Spectacle, describing a society in which lived experience was displaced by its representation. Where appearance became more valuable than meaning itself (Debord, 1967). This isn’t only an advertising problem. Across politics, media and public discourse, the appearance of truth has become more valuable than its substance. The industry didn’t invent this condition. It was industrialised.

Debord’s concept of recuperation explains why attempts to course-correct can often fail. Our critiques become content. The industry's rebellion becomes the campaign.

Mark Fisher pushed the diagnosis further. He called this hauntology. A culture so saturated with its past, it forgets how to imagine what’s next (Fisher, 2014). What gets passed around isn’t real innovation. It’s the shape of it. The look of newness. The aesthetic of radical. Without the substance that made it matter.

Fisher was writing about music. But it also lands on our industry. The purpose campaign, the cultural moment, the social cause. They are not new ideas. They are recycled forms. The trap is that we don’t know we’re in it. It's a belief we’re moving forward. To name it progression.

The industry knows. Spectacle has become our ideas’ alibi. The crime it conceals is the slow abandonment of truth.

Chapter 1: The Prosecution

The industry didn’t invent the retreat from truth. But it accelerated it, monetised it, and made it look like progress. The cost is worth naming before we get to the choices.

Truth here doesn’t mean honesty in the moral sense. It means finding something precise and human that only this brand can say, the ground on which any idea can stand. Remove it, and the work can still perform. Just minus the bam. Commercially, Binet and Field demonstrate that emotionally grounded work delivers long-lasting business results (Binet and Field, 2013).

The pressures that led to the trap are understandable. Boardroom scrutiny. Quarterly targets. And yes, let’s not forget ego. The desire to impress, to appear progressive. You can defend them in isolation. But there’s more beyond pressure.

The wrong question about culture 

The industry stopped asking what brands believe and began asking where brands can appear: searching for relevance, the desire to participate in trends. Brands are told to earn a seat within culture. This framing assumes that culture is a space to enter.

It is the behaviour of a guest at someone else’s party. Hovering at the edge of the room. Asking permission to be present. Hoping culture notices rather than having something worth saying that culture needs to hear. As Ritson believes, brands have wildly overstated their own importance in people’s lives (Ritson, 2022).

Ideas grounded in truth hit differently. They express a point of view that compels people to listen.

The wrong question about the audience

The industry replaced understanding with data. Now, we have unprecedented access to data and targetable attributes. It’s genuinely scary. What people click, skip, save, and share is tracked to the inch.

Data tells us fathers buy running shoes midweek at 6am. It doesn’t tell us that’s the only hour of the week that belongs entirely to them.

As Orland Wood argued, the balance has shifted towards analytical, systematic, and categorising approaches (Wood, 2019). The industry now knows more about how to drive a response than about what makes people feel.

At Qualtrics, they found that 71% of market researchers agree that, within 3 years from 2024, synthetic responses will make up more than half of data collection (Qualtrics, 2024). I believe we are living it now.

The industry has built the most sophisticated understanding of human behaviour and used it to lose sight of humans. Data is the brief. The metrics before meaning.

The wrong question about technology

Capability has replaced intention. New platforms and formats are prompting the same questions: how can we use them? What can it do? People are asking less if they can improve the clarity or integrity of what’s being expressed.

Technology isn’t the enemy. It’s the tendency to make its capabilities our primary focus.

The photographer Eric Pickersgill, in his series Removed, removes smartphones from everyday moments. What you’ll notice is that without the devices, the people remain entirely disengaged from the moment. It’s the tool that’s shaped the behaviour (Pickersgill, 2025.

In advertising, technology creates the illusion of progress. A new platform feels like a new idea. A new format feels like creative ambition. Yet, the medium was never the message. Yes, it can help expand our targeting, identification, and scaling capabilities with ease. The story is attractive, rendered in 4k. It’s important to note that it’s a tool. Not the idea itself.

As Yuval Noah Harari noted, humans are vulnerable to the stories that control them. From money to progress to efficiency. The stories become the unquestioned default (Harari, 2011).

In advertising, they also become the brief. The platform becomes the idea. And the work that follows is technically accomplished, culturally present, and increasingly empty.

The sequence that should run truth first, expression second, scale third, runs backwards. Spectacle is chosen first. Expression is built around it. Truth is pointed to later, if at all.

The trap wasn’t set by enemies. It was built by people who cared, making reasonable decisions one after another. This makes it difficult to name and call out.

Chapter 2: The Defence 

Spectacle is not a con. It is the machine that propels ideas. It’s the difference between what joins culture and what remains stuck on a desk. And these moments are painstakingly difficult to build. But when achieved, they can carry genuine meaning

In 2025, Vaseline identified many bizarre and unconventional uses of its product. They scientifically validated and amplified that truth, gaining over 63 million social interactions and a 43% increase in sales. Vaseline achieved both cultural and commercial impact (Cannes Lions, 2025). In cases like this, data did not replace human understanding. It revealed it.

In 1999, AMV BBDO did the same decades earlier. It found a single product truth: that a Guinness takes time to pour. And built a myth around it. The surfer on the screen wasn’t the idea. The wait was and Guinness knew it. Jonathan Glazer shot it in Hawaii. One of the most expensive ads of its time was made. The spectacle didn’t manufacture the truth. It released it (AMV BBDO, 1999).

In February 2026, Anthropic used the Super Bowl spectacle to take a position. They shared a single truth: many people still don’t trust AI, and OpenAI are already corrupting conversations with ads. The spectacle showed everyone. Claude’s trust narratives rose 255% post-campaign (Pulsar Platform, 2026).

The cause has been misinterpreted. Spectacle is not inherently empty. Choosing spectacle first doesn’t forgo what’s inside. The problem isn’t the size of the stage. It’s what we had to say before stepping onto it. That’s not a defence of spectacle. That’s an indictment of the argument against it.

Chapter 3: The Evidence

The pattern becomes obvious when you compare the cases.

Spectacle without truth

In 2010, Pepsi redirected its Super Bowl budget to the Pepsi Refresh Project. A social media initiative that invited consumers to propose ideas for social good.

The initial numbers looked strong. Millions of interactions, widespread coverage, and strong industry approval. But it failed where it mattered. Pepsi and Diet Pepsi lost approximately 5% of market share over the following year.

As Leslie notes, the campaign succeeded on spectacle metrics but not on the measure that mattered (Leslie, 2025). The work had no roots in how people choose a soft drink.

Truth without spectacle 

In 2011, Patagonia placed a single-page ad in The New York Times on Black Friday with a simple message: “Don’t buy this jacket.” There was no campaign, no large amplification. Only a belief. Sales increased by 30% (Thebrandshopper, 2025). They didn’t seek attention. They led with truth.

Truth with spectacle

In 2018, Nike’s Nothing Beats a Londoner campaign identified a specific, under-recognised truth: young Londoners felt overlooked by brands that claimed to represent them.

The campaign featured 258 real individuals and was rooted in lived experience. The spectacle followed the meaning. Product searches skyrocketed. The content spread without paid amplification. (Wieden+Kennedy London, 2018).

People feel the difference even if they can’t explain it. When there’s something true underneath, work earns its place. When it’s absent, it performs and leaves.

Chapter 4: The Escape 

Hegarty argued that creativity isn't an occupation. It's a preoccupation (Hegarty, 2014). The distinction matters more now than when he wrote it. An occupation can be systematised, delegated, and processed. A preoccupation cannot. It precedes the brief, survives the meeting, and outlasts the pressure to make something impressive instead of something true.

The escape from the spectacle trap doesn’t begin with a new process. It begins with people for whom finding the truth is a compulsion. Jason Bagley, former ECD at Wieden+Kennedy, identifies the quality that defines great creative leadership as the ability to believe before there's any reason to (Bagley, 2021). Not after the data arrives. Not after the room agrees. Before. That disposition cannot be taught through a framework or captured in a brief. It is prior to the work.

But disposition needs conditions. The briefing room is a performance space. Everyone in it is someone. A role. A specialism. A position to defend. Truth rarely surfaces in rooms where people are performing.

Frédéric Gros, in A Philosophy of Walking, observes that history's most productive thinkers, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Thoreau, did their clearest thinking on their feet.

Nietzsche was unequivocal: only ideas gained from walking have any worth (Nietzsche, cited in Gros, 2014). The observation isn't romantic. Walking removes the performance. The body moves. The role falls away. Walking surfaces the truth. What happens next depends on who’s in the room.

But finding the right truth isn’t sufficient. For much of the industry’s recent history, the discovery of truth and its expression have been separated organisationally. Clients request, strategy identifies, creatives interpret. Like passing paper under doors. The brief mediates between them. What begins as a precise insight becomes generalised by the time it reaches execution.

Brian Eno called it “scenius.” The idea that creative achievement emerges not solely from individuals, but from the environments that they share. People who share instincts, challenge assumptions and refine ideas collectively (Eno, 1996).

Teams are built and integrated around judgment rather than specialism. The question isn’t how many people are in the room. It’s whether the people in the room can evaluate the work on one test above all others: does it land with enough weight to stay—does it bam?

Dieter Rams’ tenth principle of good design helps point to a simple setup for the bam: good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better (Lovell, 2011). It’s about eliminating everything that isn’t essential. The same standard applies here.

Technology belongs here, too, but in its right place. AI can generate volume and sweep what humans cannot. It can’t determine meaning. The tools that accelerate production, optimisation, and coordination should free people to focus on what only people can do. Judgment, sensitivity and the ability to tell substance from surface.

So, what changes on Monday morning? One question: “What would it cost this brand to abandon what it believes?” This sets the dangers. Being clear on what can be lost.

Before the brief is written, the people who share the same standards around truth are together. Yes, this could be a client who sets the context, a strategist who finds, and a creative who builds. They are beings present together. Their judgment is what binds them.

The escape was never a structural problem. It was always a question of what you believe before the room fills up.

The Verdict

Bam! The judge's gavel lands.

The industry is not innocent. It has long possessed the talent, resources and ambition to produce exceptional work. Work that bams. But the thing is, the industry still chose spectacle. Over time and often for rational reasons, decisions favoured appearance over meaning. The industry built the trap decision by decision. If spectacle became a philosophy, another philosophy can replace it.

This does not require new tools or formats, or even the next cultural moment. It requires something more durable. A commitment to a simple question: what is the truth? Not what platforms reward or what is trending.

This standard must be defended by those around the work, by their judgment, not their title. The capacity to tell the difference between work that means something and work that only sounds like it does.

Technology will not resolve this. As production becomes easier, the distinction between work that bams and work that performs will become clearer.

February 2027. The Super Bowl will come around again. The screens will fill. Culture will be once again compressed into a few electric hours. And the ads will also take centre stage. Somewhere beneath the noise, there will be a sport being played.

The question is not if brands will be there. That’s a certainty. The question is whether the truth can be seen there, too. The spectacle trap will remain. Don’t get distracted by it. Find the truth and make the work bam.

The industry didn’t lose the ability to create incredible ideas. It lost its standards of truth. The spectacle trap isn’t unique to advertising. It belongs to any field that confused the performance of meaning with meaning itself. But ours is the one that was paid to know better.

Thoreau saw it first. “Men have become the tools of their tools.” (Thoreau, 1854) The escape is simply the refusal to be one.

Julian Roberts is Head of Strategy at WPP. This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.

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