There was once a centre. A middle ground where advertising still had a spine, where it still stood upright, looked people in the eye and spoke in a voice that was neither a whisper nor a scream.

That centre is gone. And in its absence, advertising has split into two wild feverish extremes.

On one side, there are the Delusional Creatives. Breathless, manic, convinced they are messiahs rather than practitioners. They see themselves not as advertisers but as misunderstood artists, held back by clients who lack vision and by audiences who lack intellect. They spin out campaigns like abstract poetry. Fragmented, cryptic, speaking in riddles that no one is meant to solve.

They create for each other. For the industry. For the award shows. For the self-congratulatory panels where they sit nodding, smiling and crying at their own genius. The rest do not get it; they sigh, sipping their cocktails, lamenting the death of taste, the tyranny of the market. As if the failure is not theirs. As if it is the audience’s fault for not being able to decipher their masterpiece.

Think of the numerous reverse-engineered Cannes winning campaigns that make industry insiders weep but leave consumers baffled.

Ads so abstract, that they require an entire PR campaign to be understood. Creatives who believe they are breaking all sorts of boundaries but forget that advertising is meant to sell, not impress other creatives in a closed loop.

They mock conventional ads, calling them uninspired, yet fail to realise that simple ideas often win. They forget that the world does not have time to decode their (so-called) genius. That no one pauses mid-scroll to analyse an ad like an art critic. The best advertising has always been the kind that feels effortless, like a story whispered in your ear rather than an overthought experiment forced down your throat.

On the other side there are the Data Fanatics. The Algorithm Priests. The Keepers of the Spreadsheet Gospel. They believe that everything – every impulse, every desire, every flicker of human emotion – can be broken down into a statistic, a heat map, a trackable metric.

They do not care about words or images, about resonance or recall. They do not care if an ad is beautiful, if it stirs something in the chest, if it lingers in the mind like an old melody. They care about numbers. About efficiency. About whether the engagement rate moved up by half a percentage point. They will say things like: “The data tells us this will work.” As if data is a god. As if it cannot lie.

They do not ask why. They do not ask who is behind the numbers, what they feel, what they long for when they stare at a screen. They do not know. Some of them do not even care to know.

It’s why we now have AI generated headlines that ‘perform well’ but sound robotic (RIP copywriting). It’s why clickbait thrives because the numbers say it works, even if it erodes trust, credibility and authenticity. It’s why performance marketers celebrate a 0.02% engagement lift, ignoring that the brand they are selling has no soul left.

The obsession with data has led to an industry where creativity is no longer a craft. It has become a formula, a template, a dry existence waiting for its own death. Where success is measured in ‘optimised impressions’ rather than lasting impact. Where the human element of storytelling is sacrificed at the altar of analytics, leaving behind campaigns that may be effective in the short term but utterly forgettable in the long run.

And in between these two – the Deluded Poets and the Data Fanatics – there used to be the Thoughtful Strategists.

The ones who listened. The ones who did not just track behaviour but understood why people behaved the way they did. The ones who knew that an abandoned shopping cart was not just a statistic but a story. Of hesitation. Of guilt. Of a mother pausing, calculating the weight of a purchase against the weight of her child’s school fees.

The strategist did not drown in numbers, nor did they disappear into their own ego. They knew when to let creativity breathe and when to rein it in. They knew when to use data and when to ignore it. They knew that advertising was neither an art nor a science but something in between.

They weren’t just strategists; they were translators, bridging the gap between creativity and commerce. They understood that a campaign’s success was not in how many awards it won or how many clicks it got, but in how deeply it connected with people, how it made them feel, and how it made them fall in love. And because of this, their work endured. But we killed them.

We very quietly killed them when someone out there decided that advertising was about quick, sasta, template-based wins instead of long-term brand building. When the already dry marketers decided to become CFOs in disguise, measuring success in small quarterly spikes rather than that little thing called brand building. When the oh-so accommodating procurement department started running the show, demanding more and more and more for less, forcing agencies to churn out campaigns like our controlled desi population.

We killed them when creativity was forced to justify its existence through dashboards instead of human responses. When insights became regurgitated data points rather than journeys into people’s hearts. When advertising stopped being about persuasion and started being about optimisation for clicks, impressions and mindless engagement that led nowhere.

We killed them when agencies stopped pushing back, when “YES SIR, YES SIR” became the anthem they started to sing. When they became vendors instead of partners, when they traded strategy for survival, choosing compliance over conviction.

And now, the industry sways wildly, lurching from one extreme to another, trying desperately to find meaning in work that either speaks in riddles or does not speak at all.

And so, we are left with nothing. Advertising that is either too abstract to be understood or too mechanical to be felt. Campaigns that vanish the second they appear. Brands that spend millions to scream into the void, mistaking noise for meaning.

The ones who could have held us steady are gone. The ones who could have reminded us that advertising, at its best, was never about creativity for its own sake or data for its own sake but about people.

And yet, maybe not all is lost. There are still some – few but present – who refuse to let the centre collapse entirely.

Who understand that you don’t just grab attention, you earn it. Who refuse to dilute the audience down to numbers on a dashboard and refute the industry echo chambers. Who remember that an ad should not just be seen – it should be a feeling, something that touches the heart and forms a bond. Who understand that the way forward is not nostalgia, it’s restoring what worked: balance.

Brands must demand more than impressions; they need ideas that endure. Agencies, oh, my dear agencies, you need to fight for thoughtfulness, for connection, for love, not just chase trends. Everyone involved needs to remember that their job is not to serve themselves, it’s to serve the audience.

Because advertising was never meant to be a pendulum, lurching between absurdity and emptiness. It was meant to be a beautiful balance. And if we remember that, maybe it still can.

Ad Mad Dude runs the eponymous Facebook page. admaddude@gmail.com