In 2025, Brits bought 558,050 new gray cars. They bought 12 purple ones.
Andrew Tindall, who wrote that stat up for The Drum, uses it to make a point about advertising. Gray hides the dirt, holds its value, nobody laughs at you for driving it. Every choice that gets you to gray makes sense on its own. Add enough of them up and 70%+ of new cars are gray, black, or silver.
Global ad campaigns go the same way, he argues, and he spent a year with Publicis London and Effie proving it. A good creative idea goes into a room full of stakeholders, each with a reasonable note. One market wants more reassurance. Legal wants a smaller claim. Somebody asks why they can't just do what the category leader does. Nobody kills the idea. It just gets sanded down, one sensible edit at a time, until it's gray.
Worth saying plainly: the research backing this is Publicis London and Effie's own "World Class" study, comparing 124 multi-market Effie campaigns against the rest. The business results reported are self-reported by the brands and agencies that entered them, and it's an observational comparison, not a controlled experiment, something Tindall says himself. So treat the specific numbers as directional, not gospel. Directionally, though, they're stark: the most emotionally flat campaigns in the dataset returned $4.40 for every unit of spend, the least flat returned $7.10. Not a single global campaign in the bottom third for creative boldness reported profit growth. In the top third, nearly 12% did.
I buy the mechanism. I think it's bigger than Tindall's frame, though.
He's describing what happens to an idea once it hits a committee. I think the committee is only half the story. The raw material going into that room is getting more average before anyone in legal even sees it.
Everyone's pulling from the same well now
Adam Mastroianni wrote an essay called "The Decline of Deviance" that Tindall name-checks. His argument: people in general are getting less strange. Crime in the US has roughly halved in 30 years. Americans move house less often than they used to. Pop songs repeat more words than they used to. Even scientific abstracts started using the same handful of words, "delve," "showcase," "meticulously," right around when ChatGPT showed up.
That last one is the tell. We didn't all independently decide to start saying "delve." A tool trained on the average of everything handed us the average of everything, and we took it.
That's the piece I'd add to Tindall's argument. It's not just that a committee softens a bold idea. It's that fewer genuinely strange ideas are being generated in the first place. Subcultures used to form in actual isolation, scenes, cities, forums nobody outside them could find. Isolation is what let an idea get weird enough to become a real identity before the wider world ever saw it and sanded it down. Hyperconnection collapses that runway. Everyone sees the same trending sound, the same AI tool, the same "best practice" template, on day one, before anything has had the privacy to get strange.
You don't get Liquid Death's metal-and-skulls take on bottled water, or Manors Golf's streetwear rebuild of a country-club dress code, by committee. You get them from someone who built a weird idea somewhere the algorithm wasn't watching yet, then refused to sand it down once people were.
The job isn't to avoid gray. It's to know where you're allowed to be weird.
Tindall's research found something I think is the real unlock, not every brand needs to max out every lever to escape average. Emotion, surprise, provocation, category-breaking, visual distinction, you don't need all five. You need to find where your brand's energy actually lives and push harder there than feels comfortable, while staying coherent with what the brand actually is.
This isn't permission to be chaotic for its own sake. It's closer to what brand strategy was always supposed to do: find the specific place you're allowed to be extreme, and defend it when the room tries to average it out.
Most brands never find that place, because most brand work still optimizes for the committee instead of the subculture. Less "will this test well with everyone." More "who would this be exactly right for, and am I willing to lose everyone else to get it."
The gray car isn't a marketing problem. It's what happens by default now, to campaigns and to culture, when nothing pushes back. The brands worth following are the ones still pushing.
Sources
Andrew Tindall, The Drum — Is your global campaign just another gray car? (Publicis London / Effie "World Class" research; note the business-result figures are self-reported by Effie entrants and observational, not a controlled study, per Tindall's own caveat)
Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History — The Decline of Deviance
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