$189 Billion is the Cost of Dull Ads. Brands need to Hear System1’s Warning Bells

Have you ever watched an ad and felt absolutely nothing? Not excitement, not annoyance. Not even confusion. Just a blank emotion. That feeling is becoming one of advertising’s most expensive problems. 

When viewers cannot emotionally connect with the creatives, they are less likely to remember it, respond to it, or act on it. The result is a cycle where brands compensate for weak creative with larger media budgets. They hope more impressions will solve what is fundamentally an attention and emotion problem. 

Damning evidence across the industry from Peter Nelson’s IPA to Karen Nelson-Field’s attention research, collectively quantified by System1 highlights the cost of neutrality in creatives. The cost of this neutrality is roughly $189 billion in wasted media spend, nearly equivalent to the GDP of Greece. 

There is a lot to unpack. What are quietly bleeding brands? Why are emotionally neutral ads becoming so common? And what does the data suggest marketers need to change? 

To understand the scale of the ‘dull ads’ problem and what brands can do to escape the “dullness,” we spoke with Vanessa Chin, SVP of Marketing at System1. 

The attention problem nobody is solving 

Dr. Karen Nelson-Field’s contribution to the report may be the most commercially damning of all. Using biometric attention data from 115,000 real ad views across TV, social, web, and gaming environments, her research shows that around 80 percent of ad impressions receive no active attention whatsoever. 

The consequences are compounded with creative quality. Non-dull ads command 13.5 seconds of active attention on average, while dull ones just one second. Attentive reach drops from 85 percent of viewers for the best creative to 34 percent for the worst.  

In practical terms, dull ads are barely seen at all. 

The report estimates this dynamic is costing advertisers 43 cents of value for every dollar spent in low-attention environments.  

Yet the dominant response from the industry, allocating more budget to social short-form, is making the problem worse. 

Speaking to Ad Pulse, Vanessa Chin placed the root cause squarely in how brands approach creative adaptation.  

“When brands cut a 40-second TV ad down to 15 seconds, emotional storytelling is usually the first thing to go,” she said. “Low-attention media does not mean attention is impossible to win, but it does require a different approach.” 

Short form is not the enemy, dull creative is

System1’s data makes a critical distinction that the industry has been slow to absorb. The problem is not short-form media per se; it is that short formats push creativity toward salesmanship, and salesmanship feeds neutrality. 

Across the report’s database of 9,737 ads, the creative features most strongly correlated with defeating dull story unfolding, hummable tunes, knowing glances between characters, and recognizable settings — all of which correlate with longer ad durations. The features most associated with dullness in voiceovers, words on screen, flat backdrops, and talking to the camera are the default shortcuts of short-form production. 

Fluent devices offer a partial solution. Brand characters, jingles, and taglines are among the strongest anti-dull signals in short-form content precisely because they do the emotional work quickly. Familiarity accelerates feelings. But building those assets requires long-term commitment; the opposite of the quarterly optimization cycles many brands now operate on. 

“Over the past 20 years, many brands shifted towards narrower, sales-led creative optimized for digital and performance marketing,” Chin noted. “That focus on short-term attribution came at the expense of long-term distinctiveness and emotional connection.” 

The neutrality problem is a cultural problem

System1’s data shows that 48 percent of advertising responses are neutral; a figure that has not shifted in two years despite growing industry awareness. Does this mean brands know the cost of dull, and they are not fixing it? 

Chin’s diagnosis is cultural rather than technical. “Brands have become more risk-averse, prioritizing short-term performance over long-term emotional connections,” she told Ad Pulse. “Neutrality is often the outcome of playing it safe.” 

The consequences extend well beyond brand metrics. 

The B2B sector is the most acute case. B2B advertising registers 54–60 percent neutrality, compared with a market average of 48 percent. This is happening when the category continues to function with innovation-led messaging aimed at in-market buyers.  

Chin sees this not as a fixed constraint but as a competitive gap.

“When categories like B2B significantly underperform emotion compared to areas like CPG, that gap becomes an opportunity,” she said. “The brands that break through are usually the ones borrowing more emotional and distinctive creative behaviors from the best B2C advertising.” 

The measurement gap

One complicating factor the report addresses directly: neutrality is almost invisible in qualitative research.  

When System1 coded 42,726 consumer verbatims seeking explanations for neutral responses, only 1 in 5 contained an identifiable reason. The remaining 80 percent are vague expressions like ‘it was fine’ or ‘no feeling’. They offer no useful diagnostic signals. 

This makes focus groups an unreliable instrument for detecting dull. Chin’s view is that the cure requires a change in measurement as much as a creative one.

“The way you research creativity shapes the creativity you get,” she said. “Measure emotion properly, and you give creativity permission to work.” 

System1’s own analysis of the Effie database supports this. Brands using quantitative emotional measurement produced more emotionally positive campaigns and fewer low-response ads than those relying on other methods. The implication is direct: the testing process itself is partially responsible for the output. 

Showmanship as strategy

The report majorly focuses on five creative pillars: storytelling, drama, melody, humor, and fluent devices. Together, these represent a right-brained creative approach focused on people, relationships, and shared moments rather than product claims and functional benefits. 

The data on storytelling alone is striking. It has the highest anti-dull correlation of any creative feature tested, significantly outpacing characters acting, music and tunes, and knowing glances.  

The mechanism is psychological. The story narrative engages the brain’s broad, right-hemisphere attention, which processes context and change over time. When audiences anticipate what happens next, emotional stakes form. When the story resolves positively, that feeling transfers to the brand. 

Humor is a format-agnostic tool. Across short-form, medium-form, and long-form content, amusement is the single most consistent predictor of anti-dull performance. Unlike storytelling, which needs time, humor can land in five seconds if the setup is right. It thrives on the exact tension, surprise, and contradiction that dull creativity systematically eliminates. 

Melody rounds out the picture for brands operating in constrained formats. A hummable tune can establish an emotional tone in the first second of an ad. It also carries recall power whenever they are heard again. 

The business case, restated

Chin’s framework for connecting showmanship to commercial outcomes is direct. “The strongest campaigns skew towards showmanship because emotion drives memorability and long-term growth, but they do not neglect the fundamentals of selling,” she told Ad Pulse.

“If audiences remember the feeling but cannot remember the brand, the commercial impact is weakened.” 

The industry’s fixation with the brand-versus-performance divide may itself be part of the problem. The report’s data does not support a clean separation between the two. Emotional campaigns build the future demand that performance campaigns then convert. Treating them as opposing disciplines means neither works as well as it should. 

“The challenge is not choosing between showmanship and salesmanship,” Chin said, “but making sure they complement each other rather than operate in silos.”