Every advert in the feed

Scroll through a feed in Kuwait on any evening and the furniture adverts have started to look like one advert.

The same pale sofa in the same pale room. The same slow push towards a cushion. The same three words of text, the same soft music, the same discount badge in the same corner. Different shops, sometimes in different countries, arriving at the identical answer.

None of them set out to copy. Each one looked at what had performed, trimmed what had not, tested again, and moved a little closer to the middle. Do that enough times with enough numbers behind you and you end up exactly where everyone else ended up. Average is not a failure of the process. It is what the process produces.

This has always happened as markets mature. Phones converge, logos converge, shop fronts converge. What has changed is the speed. The tools that pull work towards the safe centre are quicker and better funded than they have ever been, and they are very good at their job.

Then somebody makes a thing that every report would have rejected. A room that is not beige. An advert with a person talking plainly for a full minute. Most people tell them it will not work, and usually they are right. Occasionally they are not, and the whole category quietly rearranges itself around them.

Nearly every breakout surprises the people who were measuring.

You cannot get there by refining the version that already exists. Improving the average produces a slightly better average. The only way out of the grey middle is to make something that did not come from it.