Over the last twenty years, marketing effectiveness has fallen sharply. Campaigns, ads, and fundraising appeals are moving fewer people to act, even as budgets and frequency continue to rise. The pattern is unmistakable. It’s not just that everything looks and sounds the same; it’s that much of what’s being repeated is simply bad.

Almost nine out of ten acquisition mailings now rely on premiums, faux memberships, or match offers. We’re not only sending the same thing to everyone, we’re sending the same thing as everyone. Copying in itself isn’t fatal but copying bad ideas is.  The nickel package feels like a metaphor for the broader state of acquisition: We’ve run out of story, so we’re mailing loose change.

Art Imitates Culture

Art has always reflected the values of its time. Renaissance art was vibrant, detailed, and human. It celebrated form, color, and story. Then came the Reformation, which stripped away those elements in favor of rigid symbolism and restraint.

Would you want your marketing or fundraising to be described as vivid and human, or rigid and flat?

Recent studies of thousands of ads reveal a consistent pattern: the creative ingredients that make people feel and act are disappearing, while those linked to flat, forgettable work are multiplying.

Hallmarks of less effective marketing and fundraising:

• Abstract ideas instead of lived experience

• Words superimposed on visuals

• Mindless repetition mistaken for clarity

• Adjectives-as-nouns (“the possible,” “the extraordinary”)

• Disembodied voiceovers that tell instead of show

• Cropped fragments of people—just hands, eyes, or smiles

• Rhythmic or percussive soundtracks that substitute for emotion

Hallmarks of more effective marketing and fundraising:

• Real people with agency, voice, and movement

• Dialogue that builds connection

• A genuine setting grounded in time and place

• A story with progression—problem, intervention, resolution

• Melody that supports feeling instead of driving tempo

• Communication that’s implicit and human, not literal and forced

• Writing that shows rather than tells

We’ve moved from realism to representation, from people to patterns. When creative becomes pattern-based instead of person-based, it loses its emotional grip. People respond to life, not abstraction. They respond to characters who feel real, to words that carry weight, to stories that make them care. Those are the elements that activate empathy and identification—the foundations of attraction.

What Good Still Looks Like

Compare these two lines:

I walked through the forest. It was already Fall and I was getting cold.

Versus:

The dry orange leaves crunched under my feet as I pulled the collar up on my coat.

The first tells you what happened, the second lets you experience it. That’s the difference between information and immersion, and it’s the same gap that separates effective creative from the lifeless kind that fills most inboxes and mailboxes.

Where We Go From Here

The Renaissance wasn’t just a flourishing of art. It was a return to realism and human truth after a long period of abstraction. Marketing and fundraising could use a similar rediscovery.

The answer isn’t more channels or louder campaigns, it’s better craft. The kind that treats stories as vehicles for meaning, not containers for messaging.

The work that moves people has never really gone away. It’s just been buried under process, repetition, and the false comfort of conformity. Reviving it starts with the same principles that guided the best art, and the best fundraising: honesty, dimensionality, and the courage to show people as they are.

Kevin