American designer Frank Chimero once said that ‘people ignore design that ignores people’. The same is true of advertising, and even when people don’t ignore it, they tend to forget it almost instantly.
The modern marketing machine works brilliantly for distribution, and badly for memory. We can target more precisely than ever, personalise at scale, optimise in real time, and push content through more channels at greater speed than the industry could have imagined twenty years ago. Distribution has never been easier. Yet 45% of UK consumers say brands ‘don’t understand them as people’. Distribution is solved. Connection is not. The system that makes brands easier to deliver has made them harder to care about.
Humour, ritual, shared experience, personality and participation have been compressed into content, placements and outputs. The things people remember have been flattened by the system designed to scale them. Music becomes content. Community becomes targeting. Every cultural moment becomes something to optimise, scale and squeeze performance out of. After a while, brands start sounding the same, distinctiveness erodes, and consumers stop feeling much beyond passive recognition because everything has been built for the feed first and people second.
We’ve built a machine for delivery, not memory
Optimising for platforms rather than people is the problem. Modern marketing is smarter, faster and more measurable than ever before, but people don’t remember perfectly optimised delivery systems because people aren’t ones and zeros. People remember atmosphere, participation and the feeling that something had life in it. The rough edges disappear in pursuit of efficiency and eventually so does the sense of human presence.
The philosopher Alan Watts had a word for what gets lost when human systems become too efficient. He called it the wiggle. Existence is wiggly, Watts argued, irregular, alive, full of motion that resists being straightened out. The wiggle is what makes something feel real. Modern marketing has optimised most of the wiggle out of itself but it’s this that leaves more lasting memories.
We need more wiggle
By wiggle, I mean aliveness, energy, personality, spontaneity. The sense that there are real people behind a brand and real life happening around it. The things that make brands feel lived rather than delivered. The brands creating lasting impact understand that media is not just about distributing messages, it is about creating environments people genuinely want to spend time in.
Wiggle shows up across categories when brands stop optimising and start participating. Guinness understands it through ritual and occasion, like Rugby, where the atmosphere around the product matters as much as the product itself. McDonald’s understands it through ‘fan rituals’, recognising and amplifying the ways audiences’ remix and share the brand, rather than dictating to them. Dr Martens has protected its connection to music and subculture by turning store space into live show space, supporting the scenes and communities that shaped the brand in the first place. Even in grocery retail, Ocado champions small founders, women-built brands and independent makers, adding personality and human texture to a category that could easily become nothing more than frictionless convenience. The common thread is enrichment, not extraction.
And it’s good for business
What matters is not whether a brand feels authentic, but whether people actively participate in it, recommend it and bring it into conversations of their own. Owned and earned channels already do more of the heavy lifting than paid media: the IPA’s 2025 Influencer Database found creator-led content delivers nearly twice the long-term ROI of brand-led paid social. Reddit is one of the top ten cited sources for Perplexity while brands account for less than 1% of ChatGPT’s sources.
In an environment shaped by creator ecosystems, reviews and algorithmic retrieval of human behaviour, the brands generating genuine wiggle give the machine more to work with than brands relying purely on paid delivery.
This is not only about culture-first brands or fandoms. The wiggle can be loud or quiet, big or small. It lives in whatever is happening around a brand that the brand did not pay to put there. It takes listening for, and taking part in.
That is the commercial value of the wiggle. Ritual travels. Shared experience travels. Atmosphere travels. The brands generating real participation are getting surfaced and scaled by people, platforms and algorithms, powering future demand more efficiently than paid media alone.
Dan Holt is a strategy partner at Havas Media Network.
