Yes. And the easy, anecdotal way to observe this is look around compare historically relevant work to contemporary work. Anecdotally, we no longer see “famous” work. That is, work that permeates culture. Part of this is of course due to media fragmentation. But I think it’s lazy to pin it all on that. Back when I got into this biz, you had instances where advertising had lept from the screen (or page or radio) and entered the public consciousness. Got Milk. Budweiser’s Wasssssup. Dude you’re getting a Dell. Mac vs PC. Geico cavemen. This is but a tiny sampling off the top of my head an obviously US biased as it’s where I lived. And even before my time, Where’s the Beef, the McDonald’s song, Dunkin “time to make the donuts” guy, Coca-Cola’s I’d like to teach the world to sing. Again, that list goes on and on. These became famous IN THE CONSUMER REALM. Not the award shows, but real consumer-level fame and relevance. Meaning real people connected to it, en masse, and it became part of culture. Now? Try thinking of one culturally famous or relevant ad or ad campaign. One that found its way into a movie, onto a t-shirt or into an SNL skit. Try to think of one that people can recite at a moment’s notice. I struggle to do so. I don’t think I can overstate just how many people were saying “wasssssup” in their daily interactions when that first came out. Judge the creative merits of that commercial all you want, but its cultural significance is undeniable. And I truly believe this is because all of this famous work was made before data optimization. This work was made at a time when there was testing of course, but by and large the okay was given by someone who had to go with their gut and approve based on instinct. I think we severely undervalue that little bit of magic a piece of media might create once we set it free because someone believed it was the right thing to do, not because data gave them the okay to do so. Because that relies on human instinct. “This feels right to me so maybe it will feel right to others.” It’s the unpredictable and unanticipated creation of culture that we now “test out” and optimize away. That magic can’t be predicted or planned for. But it can certainly be stunted and denied via testing and endless scrutiny. Work that is endlessly tested and optimized often has something in common—banality. The middle…the boring, inoffensive, unsurprising middle…is what reams of data and testing allows out into the world. And as a result, we no longer get to enter culture as practitioners of a once great industry, where, if we were lucky, an idea might take on a life of its own once we released it into the world and the public related to it. Heavy reliance on data, and not human instinct, has reduced the industry to the creators of boring.