When Did Marketing Stop Being Fun

Somewhere along the way, marketing got very serious.

Very polished. Very safe. Very... well, the same.

Everyone following the same playbook, using the same hooks, the same formats, the same templates, the same energy. Best practice culture has done a lot of good things for marketing, but it's also quietly squeezed the personality out of it. And I think we need to talk about it.

What happened to the fun?

How many brands can you remember that genuinely made you stop and laugh. Or raised an eyebrow. Or made you think "I can't believe they said that." There used to be more of them.

Now when you open your Instagram feed and count how many ads look and sound identical. Same trending audio, same hook structure, same aesthetic, same vibe. Safe. Optimised. Forgettable.

The obsession with best practice and being perfect has created a generation of marketing that technically ticks all the boxes and often generates absolutely zero emotional response. And here's the uncomfortable truth, boring doesn't convert either. It just fails quietly, so nobody notices.

Personality is actually a competitive edge

People buy from brands they like. Brands they remember. Brands that made them feel something, even if that something was just "oh that made me laugh" or "I love how they make me feel".

As we touched on in our pattern disruption piece, anything that breaks the expected pattern gets attention. And right now, having an actual personality is one of the most disruptive things a brand can do. Because almost nobody is doing it well.

The challenge comes when brands don't want to put a face to the brand. It doesn't mean your brand can't have a personality, it's just far harder to execute for a smaller brand. But often it can be more sustainable and easier to craft if done well. So don't stress if you don't want to put your face on the brand, there are ways around it - but you still need a human element.

Brands that get it right

Okay, so we're talking brands and having fun with your marketing, here are a few who I think are doing it brilliantly:

Duolingo built an entire brand identity around chaos and a slightly unhinged owl. It has nothing to do with language learning rationally, and everything to do with why people actually follow them. People even love to hate him and his sassy, slightly unhinged notifications.

Who Gives A Crap sells toilet paper and somehow has one of the most enjoyable brands on the internet. Witty, warm, genuinely funny. You'd never guess the product from the vibe. With limited edition prints, and sassy messages, they're always having fun and it works for them.

And Brittney from Fayt is a great example of a founder whose personality is completely woven into the brand. She is a wonderful, kind human, who has built a brand that feel like her. She feels like your internet bestie so you trust buying from her.

Frank Body disrupted the beauty space with their cheeky, flirty, unapologetic voice. They weren't afraid to call it like it was. You could read anything they did and know immediately it was a Frank Body product.

These aren't accidents. These are brands that made a deliberate choice to have a point of view, and stuck with it. They didn't try to blend in, they just owned their weird and leant all the way in to it.

At the end of the day fun doesn't mean unprofessional. It means human. And human is what people connect with.

How to actually bring it back

This is the practical bit, and I want to be clear upfront, bringing fun and personality back doesn't mean everyone needs to be doing unhinged Duolingo content. It means finding what's genuinely yours and leaning into it. And your brand doesn't have to be fun either. I lean fun and weird because that's my vibe, but maybe yours is moody or edgy, or something completely you - the important part is you lean into it.

Get real footage from actual customers. Not the polished, perfectly lit UGC that's starting to look like every other polished perfectly lit UGC. The genuine stuff. The silly stuff. The customer who was so genuinely excited by your product and showed their personality. That content is gold and people can feel the difference.

Have an actual opinion. This is a big one. So many brands are terrified of saying anything that anyone might disagree with, so they say nothing interesting at all. What do you actually think? What's your take on how your industry operates? What do you disagree with that everyone else seems to accept? That's your content.

Don't try to blend in with your category. Look at what everyone in your space is doing and ask yourself how you can do something different. Not for the sake of it, but because blending in is the fastest way to become invisible. If you weren't trying to fit into the category how would you do things?

Embrace the less polished. A less than perfect video filmed in your warehouse, a behind the scenes moment that didn't go to plan, a founder who is just... a real person. Audiences are more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They know when something is genuine and they know when it isn't. Show the human moments.

On Founder Content. If founder content feels natural to you, do it. If it doesn't, that's fine too. Not everyone's personality translates well on camera and forcing it is worse than not doing it at all. Find where your brand's personality lives and work from there. If you don't want to put your face to camera though, you do have to find other ways to showcase the brand personality and that can be a little tricker but not impossible Duolingo and Frank Body do it beautifully!

Your brand voice should sound like a person. Read your captions, your website copy, your ads out loud. If it sounds like a press release or a robot, start again.

The brands people remember are rarely the safest ones in the room.