At ADFEST 2026, Prasit “Pop” Kunanuphanchai, Chief Strategy Officer, and Warunyoo “Big” Sorasetsakoon, Executive Creative Director, both of BBDO Bangkok, presented “When People Become the Brief Again.” Their session questioned why ads are so widely seen but barely remembered, and asserted that rehumanising the way we think is the answer.
Problems arise when designs ignore human behaviour. Big showed a park where people had ignored the paved walkway and walked t across the grass. The same happened with automotive design. Early electric vehicles moved almost entirely to digital screen controls, but eventually had to dial back the changes and brought back physical buttons for quick access. Both cases illustrated the same problem, design and technology should adapt to people—not the other way around.
And advertising needs to do the same.
The Illusion of Performance
Pop experimented with around 30 people and asked them 2 simple questions:
When asked how many ads they have seen on their phones that day, most will say a lot.
When asked how many they could actually remember, the most common answer was zero. The highest was two.
There is clearly a disconnect between performance and human receptiveness. An ad can perform well on paper yet leaves no impression on people. Pop described the gap through two views of the same campaign:
The Performance Dashboard: impressions, reach, viewability, green numbers and big numbers — the measurable outputs commonly reviewed in meetings.
Human Receptiveness in Reality: whether people actually connected with the work, felt something, remembered it or responded to it.
So we can deliver an enormous number of impressions without making a single meaningful impression. That is not performance, that is an illusion.
People do not hate long ads. They hate boring ones.
Pop used the iceberg model to challenge the familiar assumption that nobody watches long advertising anymore. If length were really the issue, the same audiences would not spend three or four minutes watching K-pop, T-pop or C-pop music videos, pay for two or three-hour shows, or stay with streaming series across several seasons. People are more than willing to give their time freely to things they enjoy. The question is whether you give them a reason to stay.
Yet shorter formats are often treated as the solution. Pop shared a recent brief asking for a 15-second film to create emotional connection, followed by six-second cuts to drive frequency. Brands are also competing for attention with much more than their category — from entertainment and celebrity gossip to social drama and the news cycle. Making an ad shorter does not automatically make it more interesting.
As organic reach declines, more budget is being pushed toward paid media. Platform algorithms continue to move toward less organic reach and more boosting, leaving less budget for creative and production. Pop shared one recent brief where the split reached 95% media and 5% creative and production. When most of the investment goes into making sure the work appears on screen, far less is left for making something worth watching. Visibility alone does not make advertising memorable.
For Pop, the answer is not to abandon performance measurement, but to add the human response alongside it. Keep the KPI, but add the KHI.
KPI — Key Performance Indicators: measurable indicators of campaign or media performance.
KHI — Key Human Indicators: indicators of the human response created by the work.
The word “impression” shows how KPI and KHI can measure the same idea in very different ways.
KPI — Impression, in Media KPI Context: objective and quantitative; how many times the ad is served.
KHI — Impression, in General Context: subjective and psychological; how people feel or perceive something.
One counts what ads were served. The other counts what stayed.
Pop then extended the same idea to other familiar metrics. Rather than removing the KPI, a human indicator can sit beside it:
Viewability + Replayability: was it seen, and was it good enough to watch again?
Reach + Laugh: how many people did it reach, and did it make them react?
Like + Goosebump Rate: did they click, and did they actually feel something?
Buyable SOV + Earned SOV: how much visibility was bought, and how much people genuinely talked about the brand with friends and family.
Big highlighted the importance of Playvertising. An approach that brings the instinct to play into advertising, aiming to create human response, not just measure it. People willingly spend time with drama, gossip and entertainment because they offer an escape from everyday life. Play works in much the same way. As children, people can play for hours without thinking about how long it lasts. Since boredom rather than length is the problem, play gives people a reason to stay.
Put Play Back into Work
For Big, that starts with the creatives themselves. Before asking people to play, you have to enjoy playing first. He traced his own instincts to Stephen Chow, whose comedy taught him that almost anything can happen, and to Khai Hua Roh, Thailand’s legendary comic book, which shaped much of the humour growing up.
He urged creatives to embrace the unexpected. Break the rules. Play with formats, characters, technology and even the product itself. He shared two campaigns that the products were part of the play:
“The Last Bad Breath Joke” for Darlie Double Action: Fresh breath is the product benefit, so the team cast a comedian known for his bad-breath jokes, and made him the one person who could not use the toothpaste. If his breath became fresh, he would lose the character audiences loved him for.
“Death of a Salesman” for Five Star Chicken: As part of Five Star Chicken’s “Mission to Five Star,” which mocks Thailand’s obsession with rating and reviews, the film follows a salesman selling everyday products as if they were Five Star Chicken. The hilarious delivery beautifully reminded people that for those qualities to deserve five stars, it has to be Five Star Chicken.
In the end, putting people back into the brief means looking beyond the data. People don't experience advertising as a spreadsheet. They experience it as a feeling.So perhaps the next evolution of advertising isn't about choosing between performance and creativity, or between technology and humanity. It's about putting the human back at the centre of both.
