The Great Lost Art of Subtlety

Does subtlety work in advertising anymore? With video ads hitting the saturation point, do people still have the patience for a subtle payoff? Remember when you couldn’t tell what product the commercial was for? (Wasn’t that great?!) It got people talking about the commercial — and ultimately the product — even more.

Now, it feels like viewers need to be hit over the head to notice anything. Viewers give something one or two seconds of attention and then scroll on, and everything gets lost in the sheer volume of noise out there.

And now with AI‑generated content churning out an exponential amount of so‑so material, you lose even more of the humanity. You don’t get The Look from an actor — that subtle, nuanced facial expression that says everything without a single word, whether it’s humorous or heartfelt. We can’t lose that humanity in advertising, or any visual medium. And say what you will, it cannot be imitated, no matter how advanced technology gets.

So how do we keep the soul in marketing?

For creators, there is something special about the tactile use of hand‑drawn animation made from putting pencil to paper. Puting ac tual thought in to every edit, the lighting and color grading choices. The “crudeness” of it all, for lack of a better word. AI and computer‑generated material is too… perfect. And yes, that’s a bad thing. It’s not human. You can’t relate or connect to it as much.

It’s literally like art. Sure, there is digital art now, but people still flock to museums to see handmade artwork. There is something about drawing from your life experiences — and the emotions around them — to come up with an idea that actually resonates with the viewer on a human level. You can train AI to “think” (well, based on random input from humans, and as we know: Garbage in, garbage out) but you cannot make it actually think and espeically feel. It will never be able to anticipate what human reaction it will get from its creation, and therefore it won’t totally “get it.”

Sadly, a lot of people don’t care anymore. But is that just because they’re used to the slop? And again — doesn’t that just make them scroll past even faster?

Take this classic commercial for Lee Jeans. How would you even begin to explain to AI how to create this? Maybe it could be done, but it seems like it would be more work to tell it what to create — to explain facial expressions (that it will never understand) — than to just film and edit it.

To the creators out there: don’t give up. Don’t give in. At some point, I really do feel the needle will sway back the other way and people will want to feel again. Yes, even in their advertising.

And honestly — that’s where teams like CRASH+SUES come in. Not because we’re anti‑technology, but because we know how to use it and keep the humanity in the work. The nuance. The soul. The stuff AI can’t fake. The stuff people still respond to, even if they don’t realize it yet.

The pendulum will swing back. And when it does, the people who never stopped caring about subtlety will be the ones leading the way.