Context is the Content
I watched the Super Bowl Sunday night. Like everyone else. And by the third quarter I realized I couldn’t remember which ad was which.
Not from the game. From the commercials.
Celebrity. AI. Outlandish premise. Celebrity. AI. Outlandish premise. Over and over again. According to iSpot, about 70 percent of this year’s spots featured a celebrity. That same firm found that 15 out of 66 commercials, roughly 23 percent, featured AI in some way. The humor was pitched at the same volume. The stakes were equally absurd.
Here’s what’s interesting: individually, a lot of these commercials were genuinely good. The Budweiser Clydesdales? Reliable heartstring pull. And the Coinbase spot, which was basically just karaoke-style lyrics to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody” scrolling across the screen, no celebrities, no high concept, felt like a breath of fresh air. Almost a palette cleanser. It worked because of where it sat, surrounded by so much production and spectacle. But stacked next to each other, break after break, the rest started to blur. They started to feel like the same commercial.
I’d call it the Saming Effect. And I think it’s one of the most underappreciated challenges in brand building.
Same Gray, Different Story
There’s a famous demonstration from Josef Albers, the artist and educator who wrote Interaction of Color in 1963, widely considered the most influential book on color ever published. It’s almost embarrassingly simple. Take the exact same shade of gray and place it on a white background. Then place that same gray on a black background. On white, it reads dark. On black, it reads light.
Same gray. Completely different experience.
Albers called this simultaneous contrast. The idea that nothing is ever perceived in isolation. Everything we see is shaped by what’s next to it.
“In order to use color effectively,” he wrote, “it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”
Swap “color” for “content” and you have the story of Super Bowl LX.
What Comes Before, What Comes After
This is something we thought about constantly at InStyle. Putting together a magazine was never just about making sure each individual story was strong. It was about flow. What comes before a story matters. What comes after it matters. And not just for pacing, but for contrast. A high energy celebrity profile followed by a quiet, intimate personal essay gives the reader a breath. It lets each piece land differently than it would on its own. A bold, saturated fashion spread followed by something restrained and graphic makes both feel more intentional.
We even worked this way with our advertisers. We placed ads with real attention to what surrounded them, because a full page luxury ad sitting next to an equally luxurious editorial spread could either elevate both or flatten both. We wanted our partners to shine. And that meant thinking carefully about their context, not just their content.
The juxtaposition was the design.
The Whole Is the Thing
I think about this in my day job, too. A great neighborhood sings when there’s variation. Mixed use, different energies, an array of reasons to come and come back. It’s the contrast that creates the feeling of discovery. When everything operates at the same frequency, you get a blur. When there’s range, you get a place people want to walk through, linger in, and return to.
So What Can You Actually Do About It
If any of this resonates, here are a few things I’d encourage you to think about, whether you’re building a brand, running a campaign, curating a space, or just thinking about how your work shows up in the world.
Know your surroundings before you finalize your creative. Most brands develop content in their own bubble. Their own brief, their own boardroom, their own competitive set. But your audience never experiences your brand in a bubble. They experience it between two other things. Before you lock something in, it’s worth asking: what will people have just encountered before they get to us? Your work isn’t only competing with your direct competitor. It’s competing with whatever is right next to it.
When everyone goes big, consider going simple. The spots that stood out Sunday night weren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the longest celebrity rosters. They were the ones that felt different from what came before and after them.
Think in sequences, not singles. If your brand shows up across multiple touchpoints (social, out of home, retail, events, email), consider the order people encounter them in. What’s the arc? What’s the contrast between moments? A great brand experience should feel like a well considered playlist. Not a shuffle.
Develop what I’d call your “signature register.” This goes beyond look and feel. It’s about your brand’s emotional frequency. Are you the calm, steady voice? The playful, surprising one? The warm one? The precise one? When you really know your register, you can walk into any environment and immediately create contrast just by being yourself. The brands that got lost Sunday night didn’t have a weak ad. They just didn’t have a strong enough sense of self to survive the context they were placed in.
Context isn’t a detail. It might be the whole game.