Your audience will only remember one thing, so make it count

The creative illusion

Somewhere along the way in every creative career, there’s a quiet revelation. It’s not a thunderclap, more a creeping recognition. Most content, and let’s use that word loosely to cover marketing, comms, campaigns, advertising, and everything in between doesn’t fall flat because the ideas weren’t good enough. It fails because the core truth wasn’t there, or if it was, no one held onto it tightly enough. The brand got nervous. The team overcooked the messaging. The brief got stretched to fit too many angles. Creativity was designed by committee. Somewhere along the way, the work lost its gravity. And when there’s no centre of gravity, everything drifts.

We like to imagine insight is something we can mine from a spreadsheet or extract from a research slide. But real insight is rarely found in a pie chart. It’s something far messier and more human. A sharply observed truth about how people behave, what they believe, or the subtle contradictions in how they choose. It often arrives as a feeling rather than a fact, something you instinctively nod at because it already lives in your head. Not invented, just articulated. And when it’s right, everything else such as the line, the layout, the strategy starts to gather around it.

What good work remembers

Too often, though, teams try to say everything. Ten messages jostling for space. Something for every stakeholder. Content designed to protect rather than persuade. That kind of work may get signed off, but it doesn’t get remembered. Audiences are generous but distracted. They might give you one line. Maybe two. If you’re very lucky, three. That’s your window. And if you don’t decide what they should carry away, they’ll carry nothing at all.

This is something Luke Sullivan tackles in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This — the idea that our job as creatives isn’t just to be interesting or original. It’s to be clear. To cut through the noise by finding the thing that matters and building everything around it. He writes about how advertising, when done well, doesn’t talk at people. It connects by showing it understands them better than the next brand in the queue. That’s not about algorithms. That’s about empathy.

I’ve always found this easiest to understand when I think about the ads that stuck with me as a child. They didn’t explain everything. They didn’t need to. “Du vin, du pain, du Boursin” landed not because of a rational value proposition, but because it played to something more emotional — that soft, aspirational wish to feel a little more French and a little more sophisticated. The Weetabix line, “Have you had your Weetabix?”, was barely even a question. It was a knowing wink, tapping into the feeling that if you’d had one, you’d be unstoppable. Both ads thrived because they said one thing and said it with absolute confidence. They didn’t try to be clever. They just hit something true.

I saw echoes of that in Volkswagen’s noughties campaign, the one that translated safety features into everyday metaphors drawn from home life. Instead of dazzling with specs, they reframed the car’s safety through the lens of lived experience and in a shocking and unforgettable way. The message wasn’t shouted. It was felt. That’s the difference insight makes. When it’s real, you don’t need to explain it. You just need to hold your nerve and let it breathe.

The hardest part is the edit

Because here’s the thing. Most creative people grow up believing the magic happens in the making. In truth, it often happens in the removal. In what you choose not to say. In what you stop explaining. In what you delete because it’s clever but doesn’t serve the truth. In what you leave unsaid because it weakens what matters more. It’s the hardest part of the process, not the ideas, but the edits.

That’s what I explore in this piece about creativity culture, the idea that teams need to be given the space to think clearly, to sit with uncertainty, and to have the confidence not to say it all. Creativity, like music, needs room to breathe. Insight only emerges when people feel safe enough to be honest, and sometimes a little awkward.

We like to tell ourselves the creative world has changed beyond recognition. And yes, the tools are different. Generative AI can produce an avalanche of options before your coffee has cooled. Content is endlessly customisable, personalisable, and measurable. But none of that guarantees meaning. Technology can speed up the craft, but it can’t yet choose the truth. It can’t make the call on what matters most. That’s still a human judgement.

Back to the one thing

And here’s where it gets really interesting because what makes the difference now is not just how fast you work, but how clearly you choose. The real skill is not in writing 100 prompts. It’s in knowing which output carries weight. It’s not in being prolific. It’s in being decisive. In recognising that moment when something just feels right even if you can’t explain why. That’s taste. That’s instinct. That’s the bit no model can mimic, because it doesn’t come from code. It comes from experience.

And this brings us back to the one idea you want your audience to remember. The bit they’ll take with them even if they forget who said it. That’s the core of the job. Not just to say something interesting, but to say something unforgettable. To find the one thing the audience needs to feel and to make sure that everything you build hangs from that truth. Not many things. One.

Which is why the final stage of any project should never be about adding more. It should be about editing with care. Removing the distractions. Honing in on what’s essential. If you do that well, you don’t need to shout. The work carries its own weight. Because when you land a truth that resonates, the rest almost builds itself. That same discipline of stripping back complexity without sacrificing clarity is something I explored further in a recent piece about how to simplify without dumbing down, especially in the context of translating strategy into creative work. It’s all part of the same craft.