Why Imperfection, Humor, and Lo-Fi Tone Win Global Effectiveness.
The Year Advertising Finally Relaxed.
After a decade of obsession with precision, polish, and brand control, 2024 was the year creativity finally exhaled.
The LIONS Creativity Report Series 2024, a global study of award-winning work and jury commentary across thousands of campaigns, documents a creative reset. The winners of the year weren’t the sleekest or the most expensive. They were the ones that felt alive.
Marketers stopped worrying about perfection and started embracing participation. Brands let go of their composure and started acting like people again, messy, funny, flawed, curious. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, put it succinctly: “People want to be talked to like they’re people.”
Across every medium and market, the best work traded control for connection. The old advertising posture, polished, serious, rehearsed, suddenly looked robotic. Humanity became the new premium.
Humor Returns
The launch of a new Use of Humour Lions category drew 798 entries, with 3.6% winning metals, outpacing the global average of 3.1%. It wasn’t coincidence, it was cultural need.
Amid geopolitical heaviness and algorithmic sameness, laughter cut through fatigue. From Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts’ “First Edible Mascot” (a Grand Prix winner and +21 million units sold) to CeraVe’s “Michael CeraVe” conspiracy that blurred Reddit rumours with brand myth, humour became the most serious business in marketing.
The absurd worked because it was honest. Pop-Tarts’ chaotic stunt, baking a mascot live, then eating it, wasn’t meticulously airbrushed. It was ridiculous, self-aware, and alive. CeraVe’s fake internet rabbit hole thrived on imperfection: the joke was the strategy.
Humour isn’t new to advertising, but in 2024 it stopped being about punchlines. It became about personality. The laugh isn’t the end, it’s the handshake.
The Craft of Stupid Ideas
Jeff Immel of Weber Shandwick described it best in the report: “Stupid ideas take rigorous attention and craft.”
It’s a paradox that defines the year’s best work. The most unhinged, “stupid” ideas were also the most precisely executed. The craft was invisible, but essential.
The Pop-Tarts team’s mascot wasn’t chaos by accident. It was the result of weeks of controlled mess — designing something that looked improvised but was engineered to feel spontaneous. Similarly, the Dramamine “Last Barf Bag”campaign turned travel sickness into entertainment through deadpan humour and absurd commitment.
This wasn’t laziness or rebellion. It was strategy. The art of 2024 wasn’t to look professional, it was to look real.
The audience is too fluent in advertising language to fall for perfection anymore. They want craft that hides itself behind energy. What wins attention now is confidence in imperfection, precision that looks loose.
Be Scrappy, Stay Seen
The next big creative advantage isn’t production value, it’s proximity.
As LIONS Report Volume II showed, the most effective campaigns used what they had and made it work hard. Lo-fi aesthetics, handheld videos, real people, reactive formats, drove engagement because they felt closer to the audience’s own creative environment.
“Less perfect, less commercial” has become the creative language of the internet. The shift is cultural, not budgetary.
User-generated energy now powers professional campaigns. Brands are no longer the only authors; audiences co-create, remix, and shape brand meaning in real time. The strongest creative leaders didn’t fight that — they facilitated it.
In 2024, participation became proof of relevance. A brand that insists on polish looks out of touch. A brand that embraces chaos looks confident.
Open Invite: From Audience to Ally
The final part of the LIONS 2024 series reframed persuasion as an outdated act. The best work doesn’t convince; it invites.
Campaigns that blurred the boundary between brand and community outperformed those that spoke from a pedestal. The most powerful stories in the report, from entertainment tie-ins to interactive storytelling, were co-authored experiences, not broadcast messages.
Community has become creativity’s delivery system. From Reddit collaborations to collective storytelling on TikTok, brands that open creative ownership to audiences are rewriting the relationship between communication and culture.
Advertising used to ask, “How do we make people care?”
Now it asks, “How do we let them in?”
The New Equation: Relatability + Absurdity = Effectiveness
Perhaps the most unexpected creative geography lesson of the year came from Thailand.
Thai humor, surreal, unpredictable, deeply local, became a global export, showing that absurdity transcends borders. Campaigns like “Sammakorn Not Sanpakorn” (which dramatized misheard words to hilarious effect) and Delight’s “Not Very Sweet” series achieved something rare: universality through weirdness.
Delight’s campaign drove 7.8% customer growth, powered by its willingness to mock itself and the category it belongs to. That emotional accessibility, a willingness to look silly to feel real, is the connective thread between Thai advertising, Pop-Tarts, and CeraVe alike.
Relatability used to mean realism. Now it means vulnerability. The brands that dare to break their own image are the ones we trust most.
Recommendations
Ditch Brand Formality. Speak like the people you’re trying to reach, plain, direct, alive.
Make Humour Strategic. Absurdity drives memorability and shareability; engineer it with intent.
Use Constraints As Catalysts. Lo-fi, reactive, participatory work performs best in cluttered feeds.
Invite Co-Creation. Treat audiences as collaborators, not consumers.
Champion Vulnerability. Let your brand show edges, humour, mistakes, humanity. That’s where trust lives.
Bottom Line: Perfection Is No Longer Persuasive.
The future of creativity belongs to brands confident enough to be imperfect.
Humour has replaced polish. Participation has replaced persuasion. And the brands shaping culture now are the ones that loosen their grip, and sound human while doing it.
