You know the meeting.

Someone brings work with a character in it, or a joke, or a film that doesn’t mention the product until the end.

The room goes quiet in a particular way. Nobody says it’s bad. What they say is that it feels unserious. Our buyers are technical. They’re evaluating a platform, not a soft drink. They want proof, specifications, a case study with a number in it.

So the work gets made safe. The character goes. The film turns into a product demonstration with music underneath. The headline explains a capability.

It survives the review. It goes out. Nobody remembers it a week later.

I’ve been the person who killed that work. More than once.

At the time it felt like rigour. Like the grown-up call.

What I didn’t understand is that the decision has a price, and it doesn’t turn up anywhere near the decision.

Because nobody remembers the advertising, the business has to buy its way into every conversation instead. Bid on the search terms. Buy the lists. Extend the sequences. Send the sales team in cold, deal after deal, and discount to close.

All of that lands in the accounts as cost of acquisition. None of it is ever traced back to a creative choice somebody made two years earlier.

The opposite of emotive isn’t rigorous. It’s forgettable. And forgettable has a price.

Now it’s measurable, which changes the argument.

Andrew Tindall’s analysis for Effie Worldwide and System1 links the Effie database of campaign outcomes to System1’s emotional measurement of the same campaigns. 1,265 campaigns, across the US, UK, Ireland and Europe, between 2007 and 2023, covering roughly $140 billion of category revenue.

Within the subset where return data could be matched, 147 campaigns, the finding is blunt.

The dull ones returned $4.40 for every dollar invested.

The least dull returned $7.10.

A penalty of about forty per cent, coming not from a smaller budget or a weaker offer, but from work that made people feel nothing.

And then the finding that removes our exemption.

When the categories are ranked by emotional neutrality, which is what dullness actually is, B2B sits among the dullest. Alongside pharmaceutical and financial services.

The usual explanation is that this reflects the audience. Serious buyers, serious category, serious work.

The data suggests it reflects us. As Adam Morgan puts it in the same study, categories aren’t dull. Only marketing is.

Related work by System1 with the IPA puts the mechanism in the language finance uses. Advertising with high emotional neutrality needs materially more spend to shift market share by the same amount as advertising that provokes a response.

Dullness doesn’t just underperform. It invoices you.

You end up buying what emotional work would have earned.

The best argument against me is Salesforce, so let me deal with it.

Anyone using Salesforce to argue for brand investment has a problem. They’re one of the heaviest spenders on acquisition in enterprise software. Sales and marketing has absorbed something like forty to fifty per cent of revenue across most of their history, well above their peers, and they’ve never pretended otherwise.

If you’re looking for evidence that brand makes acquisition cheap, it isn’t there. The filings say the opposite.

So the claim worth making is a different one.

Brand didn’t make Salesforce’s acquisition engine cheap. Brand is what made an expensive acquisition engine rational.

The ratio has two sides, and almost every argument about marketing efficiency only ever discusses one of them. A business can spend heavily to win a customer and still be sound, as long as that customer is worth enough, stays long enough and buys enough afterwards to carry the cost.

That second side is what they worked on, for twenty-five years. How long customers stayed. How much they bought later. How little discounting it took to win them. How much of the selling an entire ecosystem did on their behalf.

Judged as a cost line, the spend looks indefensible. Judged as a ratio, it looks like capital allocation that worked.

Which is the whole point, and it’s why this matters beyond the creative argument.

A weak brand raises what it costs to win every customer. Dull work raises what it costs to be remembered at all.

Both are costs of absence. Neither appears as a line in your accounts. Both get paid, every month, through the cost of acquiring customers.

That’s why they stay invisible. Nobody’s hiding them. There’s just nowhere in the reporting for them to show up.

Until somebody works out the ratio, and then they’re the first thing you see.