It’s easier than ever for marketers to drift into shallower waters. Where speed, volume and efficiency trump building genuine connections. As part of her Cannes Lions research piece, our Brand Futures Director, Nat Moores, spoke to leading experts in the worlds of marketing, creativity, tech, music and even sport, to understand whether depth needs protecting – and how it can be done if so. Here’s what she learned.
Let’s start, as every deep-dive article should, with an existential question. In a world of shortcuts, does depth even matter anymore?
Because whether we like it, love it or loathe it, there’s a shortcut for every stage of the creative process now.
Not so long ago, it was widely accepted that ‘good’ or even ‘good enough’ would take time. Some people could do things quicker than others, sure, but ultimately there was a baseline amount of time, thought or effort that something would need to exist.
Whereas now, client expectations are increasing because you can shortcut things. Things are getting busier, especially in agencies, and you’ve got to do more. So now the idea of ‘good’ is judged on what there’s time for, and how much money someone is paying for it. And if ‘good’ is being squeezed… what does it mean for ‘great’?
All of a sudden, depth is a choice rather than a given. It needs to be more intentional than ever – but are we making the right choice?
Introducing our latest research
To find out, we’ve created ‘Depth Perception’. A new project speaking to a broad cross-section of people about the subject of depth. Not just creatives, not just marketers, but people who work in AI and tech, creators, poets and musicians too. It all adds to the conversation, because creative depth can be really hard to define.
For some people, it’s about craft. Some talk about storytelling. Some talk about the length of time of their video content. Some look at it as brand longevity. All of those things can be true. But if it’s not one thing, then how do we prove that it’s potentially being lost?
The first question we asked was, does depth even matter anymore? We didn’t want to be all evangelical about holding on to manual processes or talk about the good old days. We needed to have conversations in the active, live environment we’re in. For example, we know that attention spans are dwindling, so, if getting people’s attention is the most important thing, does work even need to last, or connect at a deeper level, because algorithms prioritise quantity over quality? Maybe we don’t need to come up with the jingle that we’re still singing 20 years later. Maybe it’s just not that deep anymore?
Looking at the Now and Next
The argument for preserving depth now is different than it was ten years ago. The temptation to create more with less thought, less consideration, less time, less craftsmanship, less research is so strong now. The floor has been raised enough that you can get away with it. But brands and their work still need to cut-through. And that means making a connection with the consumer. People can absorb a lot of content, they can absorb a lot of advertising, but there’s a difference between watching something and remembering something. There’s a difference between seeing something and noticing it.
I’m guilty of it myself. This morning I was on the way to work, stood on the tube, and I realised I was listening to a podcast and watching a video at the same time and trying to read the subtitles of the video and listen to the podcast. The human brain cannot possibly cope with this amount of noise. So the sooner we get back to a forensic understanding of the businesses we serve and identifying where we can offer real value, the faster we’ll be back on our feet. What is the need for our industry in a world where a client could give some brand guidelines to an AI and have 5,000 pieces of content produced in a week? We all need to understand the consequences of that.
Applying those lessons to brands
Marketers need to know that, ultimately, if there’s no depth in the input, there’s no depth in the output, and that will be felt in the lack of people caring about or wanting to engage with your brand.
There’ll be a lot of people who would argue these days that brand isn’t important, or less important, but I’m a huge brand champion. You could argue that, through things like zero-click search, people are going to care less and less about brands. But I still wholeheartedly believe that brands can be lighthouses in the stormy sea of endless choice.
This is where it got really interesting in the conversations we had. The thing most people disagreed on, or had different ideas on, was where depth should be preserved in the process, or where it’s being lost. Some people literally talked about: if you’ve got enough depth in the brand, you don’t need as much depth in the content or the stuff you put out, because it will be drawn from that depth. You can put stuff out there fast and you don’t need too many guardrails around it. But if you don’t have any depth to the brand, then every brief will need to be watertight. And if you don’t have enough depth in the brief, then everything else will be shit.
I’m not sure that’s fully resolved through the research – that’s what we’ll be exploring in more detail next. But it at least brings some spotlights onto it. For example, we spoke to Conor Smith, who runs a million-follower meme page. Ultimately, his content is the same stock people in the same template, wrapped into something funny. It seems simple and almost off-hand, but he then talked in detail about how he put all this depth into the process. That’s why it worked.
Finding fresh insight in an unexpected place
When we talk about shortcuts in our world, they’re pretty low-stakes shortcuts. You could present something to a client, you’ve taken a shortcut and had a gamble, you might get a bollocking if it’s shit. But then I met Kateryna Sadurska. Kateryna is a world-record holding freediver. She is phenomenal. And what Kateryna did was put this hypothesis into an incredibly high-stakes environment, where shortcuts can literally mean you black out under the water. If you’re not dragged up in time, you can die.
What was useful in taking the issues and challenges and questions we’re facing, and the processes we’re working through, into Kateryna’s environment, is that it exposed a lot of the things you might justify to yourself, or explain away, or not think are a big deal. That’s where the idea of training for depth – and depth as a discipline – came through. When you know you have to go through a rigorous process just to be able to go one metre deeper than you’ve previously been, suddenly the intention becomes more interesting.
What I thought would happen is that the clients and the marketers and the AI people and the creators would talk about their world, and Katerina would talk about her world, and then I would stitch it together.
But Kate talked beautifully about the size of the ocean being like the big, scary expanse of a creative project before you find your focus and get started.
And then when I spoke to Anouk Jans, the Creative Director of Zalando, she talked about how what you do in the deep parts helps you move faster at the surface. It’s the relationship between the surface-level, shallow stuff and the deep — they’re not one or the other. What you do in the depths helps you work faster at the surface, and what you do at the surface can help you know what to dive deep for.
I found that really powerful. Kateryna says herself that she lives at the surface. She spends 99% of her time at the surface. She spends 1% of her time in the depths. But what she does down there, and the process of going down there, helps to change what she does at the surface.
Concluding thoughts
To me, we’re not saying every single time you do anything it needs to be deep and meaningful at the deepest point. Actually, in this world where we do have to do high volume, we do have to do speed, and efficiency is going to be more important than ever, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
But it’s important to go deep when the time is right, and if so, you need to be intentional about it. Depth is a discipline, and what you do at the surface and what you do at the depth can interact with one another.
To read Depth Perception and understand the steps needed to depth as a discipline, access part one of Smarts’ research here.
Image: The Tag, Emma McKernan, 2026