'Connected Content': 80% Say a Bad Ad Is Worse Than No Ad at All

A new industry model has arrived, built for the age of extreme media fragmentation, cultural noise and artificial intelligence.

Connected content is an emerging "creative paradigm" laid out by Omnicom Media Intelligence in a new report:

"Multi-layered and multi-dimensional where an integrated ecosystem of signals, reactions, adaptations and responses continually shapes how a brand is experienced over time."

Put simply, it's a model to better integrate fragmented media, commerce, creator marketing and other channels into content creation for more effective campaigns, according to Omnicom Media Group Chief Intelligence Officer Joanna O'Connell.

"It's understanding all of the complexity and how consumer behavior underpins everything we do, because that's the world that brands are operating in."

"We're kidding ourselves if we think that, as marketers, we're controlling all of the signals. Before, we had a fairly designed user journey, fairly defined channels. We could set the agenda, the strategy, the creative, the platform, and we could learn from it. Now consumers are putting as many signals out there as we are." — Alissa Hansen, CEO, Omnicom Production North America

Connecting the dots: the cost of a bad ad

A challenge for marketers is that many of the signals point to consumers fatigued by non-engaging and non-relevant advertising.

Omnicom research	Share
Say a bad ad is worse than no ad at all	80%
Connect with ads they believe relatable to their personal experiences	84%
Are drawn to ads that seem relevant to the content they're consuming	76%
Feel connected to ads that appear at the right moment	78%
Believe a better-quality ad experience increases purchase likelihood	30%

"Most consumers — nearly everybody — aim to ignore ads. And they're quite successful at tuning ads out. For the consumers who are noticing the ads, there are so many formats that are annoying to them, and there are some formats that can turn that annoyance into active avoidance." — Pamela Marsh, managing director for primary research, Omnicom Media

One ad cannot fit every moment

An ad running during a mass sporting event like the World Cup should naturally look different from one running during a Netflix binge-watch.

"A sporting event is a great way to capture people's attention and their emotional availability in a shared experience. And that's a moment where you go big. But that's not the same moment as when they're leaning back watching 'Bridgerton' and they get a shoppable ad for something that's reflective of the wardrobe style of one of their favorite characters."

The approach is less "spray and pray" and more "catch and release."

The marketer catches signals across four dimensions — consumer, commerce, culture and category — and releases relevant content "attuned to that opportunity."

Pulling from just one dimension is limiting: "You need to consider all of them to deliver on the promise to fit the purpose and feel right in the moment, every moment."

Embracing fluidity

It may seem like a spiral into endless versioning, but what's required is a shift in thinking about how creative is developed and deployed.

The current campaign development model is still built for legacy systems: a central idea expressed in an anthem or hero commercial, then broken into smaller bits for other channels — simply taking an expression of the overarching asset and atomising it.

The current model views creative development as an endpoint: elements are created, passed to media for execution, and results reported back.

"In a connected content model the process is much more fluid and aided by systems that are constantly learning and improving, including AI. It's almost more like a living, breathing, constantly adapting and evolving model based on how consumers in the world actually behave. It's a move from single agents doing single, siloed things to connected agentic systems across different dimensional layers … like a starburst."

That approach can't be managed entirely by humans and requires technological investment: "Moving to a system of continuous learning, change and adaptation — you cannot do that without these technologies."

Two small starting steps

1. Treat creative and media as co-equal partners — briefed at the same time and encouraged to work together throughout development.

2. Undertake a simple audit

"Understand where there are gaps in your current creative production process, where it breaks down, where it might be siloed. Seeing those gaps is how you identify areas of opportunity, and that's when you can build a roadmap of what a connected content model could look like."

These adaptations need to be made sooner rather than later, because the tools are already available and only getting better.

"Culture moves too fast. People move too fast. Second-screening is real. You can't just rely on basic consistency if your goal is to be right in the moment, every moment."

Practical takeaways

Use the 80% as a creative approval threshold. If a bad ad is worse than no ad, shipping mediocre creative is negative, not neutral — it becomes the bar for whether to run at all.

Decompose relevance into three parts: relevance to personal experience (84%), to the content being consumed (76%), and timing (78%). Each demands different execution.

Turn "catch and release" into an actual process. Without signal collection across consumer, commerce, culture and category first, it degenerates into more versions.

Stop atomising the anthem. Named explicitly as the current model's flaw: splitting one big ad is not the same as making different things for different contexts.

Brief creative and media simultaneously — the cheapest first move. Channel-team separation causes the same failure described in SEO and PPC Alignment Starts With Your Org Chart.

Start with the audit — the one recommendation you can begin today. Knowing where the silos are is the starting point of the roadmap.

Don't mistake the agentic-systems talk for tool procurement. Data showing 88% of pilots never reach production is in Four Myths About AI Agents. Model change is an organisational problem; technology comes second.