I watched four ads in a row Thursday night and could not tell you who paid for three of them. Piano, single notes, high register. A drone shot of an emptied freeway. A city skyline at dawn with nobody in it. A voice, male, gentle, saying that in times like these, and then something about being here for you. Then a logo, held for two full seconds, as if the logo were the surprise.
One was a bank. One was a hotel chain. One was a car company.
Nobody planned this. That is the interesting part. Every marketing team in America got the same brief in the same week, from the same set of circumstances, and solved it with the same footage library and the same tone of voice, because production is shut down and the archive is what everyone has. The identical spot is a supply chain outcome as much as a creative one.
Which does not make it any less of a problem.
Advertising works by being attributed, and an ad that could belong to any advertiser in your category is a donation to the category leader.
That is not an aesthetic complaint, it is an arithmetic one. If a viewer cannot name you, the memory gets filed under whichever brand in the set they already think of first. You bought the media. Somebody else banks the recall. Every distinctiveness study of the last decade says the same thing and every solemn piano spot this month ignores it.
Here is the part that gets lost. Distinctive assets are not decoration you drop when the moment turns serious. They are the only reason anyone knows it is you. Geico did not stop being Geico because the news is bad. Progressive still has Flo. The brands holding their own shape right now are the ones I can identify with the sound off, and the sound is exactly what everyone else has bet on.
Seriousness and sameness are not the same choice, though they got confused this month. A grocery chain telling me its actual store hours, in its actual voice, with its actual typeface, is more useful and more serious than a drone shot of an empty street. Useful is a tone. Specific is a tone. Both survive a crisis better than reverence.
An ad that could belong to any advertiser in your category is a donation to the category leader.
The test is cheap. Mute the last five seconds, cover the logo, and ask a colleague whose ad it is. If they guess your largest competitor, you have your answer.
My karaoke bar in Southeast is dark, and the host who calls everyone baby sent the regulars a message last week that was four sentences long, in his voice, and I knew who it was from the first one.