It's time to get our brands on a healthier diet. Feeding them gobs of high-volume, automated, so-called personalized content is a starvation diet. And we all know how well that works.

The obsession started when we began dividing advertising into the separate camps of brand-building and performance-driving. All good advertising should sell. In fact other than brand size, the quality of creative has been shown to be the single biggest multiplier of profit. You can check out research done by Andrew Tindall at System1 or Nielsen for more on that.

An advertising diet made up of 70% digital content is like a human trying to survive on protein bars. Sure, it is technically doable. Similar to a protein bar, content is efficient, convenient and relatively low cost. You can create lots of flavours. But most doctors will tell you that trying to survive on Quest Bars can lead to poor outcomes. Like gastric distress. Or death.

YouGov found that while about 45% of people find TV ads annoying, over 70% find digital/social ads random and irrelevant. So much for hyper-personalization.

Most content lacks the scale to trigger any real emotion. Imagine if To Kill a Mockingbird were reduced to a social post. Emotion starts with creating a physiological response. Triggering emotion triggers action. But it’s hard to reach someone's soul through a 3” screen while they wait for their Uber.

The heavily-skewed content diet seems to be leading to loss of muscle mass. In the latest wave of the Brand Asset Valuator, we saw 43% of Leadership brands – brands that rank high on being different, relevant, familiar and respected - lose their leadership stature and fall into the fatigued or unfocussed quadrant. Sure brands grow to take their place, but that's a lot of churn. Wouldn't it be less costly to remain a Leader than to yo-yo up and down? Diet metaphor intended. And being a leadership brand has financial and business rewards. Leadership brands have on average 70% higher net promoter scores; deliver 2.5 times the revenue growth; and nearly 2 times the EBIT when compared with the thousands of brands in the BAV sample.

The main reason for declining leadership status is declining differentiation and consumer knowledge. This shouldn’t be a surprise. When brands use the same platforms in the same manner, with shallow creative that lacks an idea or distinctive voice, they disappear into the void.

Both Door Dash and Skip want you to know they deliver anything you want. Pretty functional message. But consider the two ways at it. One takes a literal, hard-sell approach. The other makes you fall in love. This work not only makes me laugh, it makes me feel like I have an edge on others. And despite being a fraction of Door Dash’s size, Skip feels humungous because it has a point of view.

Skip’s use of celebrity, simplicity and humour make it feel huge

Or consider how Roku sells its product features versus Rogers. Roku’s simple observations on the existential angst of the home-entertainment experience makes me want to put these on continuous loop. I'm not sure which of the three I like more, but the kid with the milk moustache (“Where’s the Remote”) made me wish I worked for Fellow Kids.

This year, commit to feeding your brand well. Resist the allure of binging on high-volume, low-cost content. There's room for work that closes the sale, but if we don't make our brands healthy, a deal will be all they have to offer. And as my bubbie used to say, "You are what you eat. So don't be cheap, fast or easy."

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