Why brands are fleeing reality—and what it costs them.
Hey escapists—
Lately, marketing doesn’t look like marketing.
Saint Laurent shoots films.
Jacquemus drops handbags the size of buses into impossible streets.
Hotels run mini soap operas.
Everyone else, armed with generative AI, floods the feed with worlds that never existed. Authentic storytelling? Too slow.
The new game is escapism as strategy—a quick dopamine jolt dressed as brand vision.
It works—for now. But the more interesting question isn’t ifit works.
It’s: what are we mortgaging to make it work?
Why the surreal sells (for now)
Attention is a predictive machine:we notice what violates our expectations. After a decade of hyper‑real content, the brain’s filters are numb. Surrealism—floating bags, liquid architecture, impossible sunsets—breaks the pattern, and the algorithm rewards whatever breaks patterns consistently.
That’s the whole play: novelty → watch time → distribution → social proof → budget.
The numbers explain the addiction. Saint Laurent’s surrealist show delivered eight‐figure earned media value. Jacquemus’ make‑believe stunts hit hundreds of thousands of likes on drops where the ideawas the product. A fragrance launch in Roblox pulled millions of interactions because, frankly, where else are you going to smell pixels?
Surrealism is cheap to scale now (hello, gen‑AI), and the ROI curve looks seductive.
But economics has a quiet law: every novelty has a half‑life.
The first giant handbag is magic. The fifth is wallpaper.
Where this road actually leads
Escapism scales until it doesn’t. Spectacle has creative inflation baked in: to get the same attention, you must go bigger, weirder, louder. Budgets rise, marginal returns fall, and the brand slowly detaches from product truth. You’re no longer selling the shoe—you’re selling the hallucination around the shoe.
There’s a deeper cost: connection drift.
Stories become so polished they feel hollow; tone turns theatrical; the audience senses puppetry. Short‑term metrics stay green (views, likes), while the long‑term signals rust (repeat purchase, word‑of‑mouth, price premium).
That’s how brands lose gravity: the narrative floats; the product stays on earth.
Timeline?
Look at the last decade’s cycles—Instagram minimalism → TikTok hyper‑reality → AI surrealism. Each wave burned hot for 2–4 years before fatigue and parody set in. When your aesthetic becomes a meme template, the spell is already breaking.
The long‑term bill (you will pay it)
Call it experience debt: you borrow attention today with spectacle and pay it back later with distrust if the product can’t match the promise. Three compounding interests:
- Trust erosion: If the fantasy outruns reality, customers feel fooled. Once trust fractures, performance media becomes a tax just to stand still.
- Meaning collapse: When everything is “epic,” nothing is meaningful. Distinctiveness blurs; memory structures fade. You trained the audience to chase novelty, not you.
- Operating drag: Ever‑escalating productions eat creative time and cash. Meanwhile, competitors quietly improve product and service—things that compound.
Escapism is a sugar high; the crash is operational.
When does the spell break?
You can see it coming if you stop staring at vanity metrics. Watch:
- Engagement mix shifts: likes hold, saves/comments fall—people are watching, not wanting.
- Search intent decouples: social mentions spike, branded search flatlines—awareness without desire.
- Price sensitivity creeps: discount dependence rises after big “world‑building” launches—illusion without willingness to pay.
- Parody lag shortens: time from launch to TikTok parody shrinks—your spectacle became a punchline.
Those are not vibes; they’re early‑warning indicators.
Is escape the answer? Yes—and no.
Yes, because spectacle cuts through a saturated feed. No, because escapism is a means, not a model. Rule of thumb: for every minute of spectacle you publish, deposit ten minutes of proof. Call them trust deposits.
They don’t trend, but they do compound.
What to do on Monday
- Anchor the unreal in a real asset: if the world is fake, the logo/shape/sound must be unmistakably yours. Otherwise you’re financing generic wonder.
- Cap the sugar: seasonal bursts, not a constant drip. Schedule exits; surprise by going quiet.
- Model the half‑life: forecast novelty decay in your media plans; don’t chase last month’s spike with a bigger spike.
- Instrument for meaning: track saves, replies, branded search, repeat rate—not just views. If spectacle isn’t pulling those, it’s theatre, not marketing.
- Close the loop: pair every campaign film with a product truth—durability test, sizing wizard, service promise, creator tutorial that survives the trend.
And in the End..
Escapism is the marketing drug of the moment: fast, dazzling, deceptively cheap. Use it—but don’t live on it.
The future won’t belong to the brands that build the loudest illusions. It will belong to the ones that know when to step out of the dream, show the work, and let product reality carry the story.
Put differently: earn attention with dreams, earn loyalty with proof.
Until next time, stay awake.
Alex
At Kredo Marketing we help brands grow without spectacle dependency. Strategy, clarity, and trust—because fantasy alone won’t pay the bills.
