When I was 15, I did work experience in a furniture shop. The salesman I shadowed was a lifer. And the most successful in the store.

On my first day, he let me in on his secret.

He created a story for every customer.

It helped that he was Irish, with a lilting tone that drew you in. But the magic wasn’t just charm. It was judgement. He could size someone up in seconds and tailor a story to provoke a reaction. It might be a laugh, a gasp, sometimes even a small sob - some form of emotional shift before the customer had even turned their attention to the boucle three-seater.

I asked him, “Why did it work?”

He was modest about it. All he would ever say was that imagination had kept him happily on the shop floor for 40 years.

It wasn’t meant to be advice, but it was. And I think about that often.

Because marketing today doesn’t have an attention problem.

It has an entertainment problem.

Attention is earned, not taken

The brands winning today aren’t the loudest. They’re not the salespeople hovering at the door with a disingenuous smile offering an all-to-eager “How can I help?”

They’re the ones people actually want to spend time with.

We live in an era where attention is fiercely protected. People skip, scroll and block anything that feels like persuasion. Not because they hate brands, but because they’ve learned to recognise the patterns and visible seams of ‘the sell.’ Even when we think we’ve sufficiently hidden them.

As an industry, we didn’t suddenly forget how to be creative. We just optimised ourselves into irrelevance. We became very good at measuring stuff people didn’t want.

It’s really obvious when you think about it. Nobody wants to be advertised to. Everyone wants to be entertained. And that’s why the most successful brands today behave less like advertisers and more like entertainers.

Conversion is the outcome. But captivation is always the cause.

That belief sits at the heart of why we relaunched ELVIS under the proposition of Serious Entertainment™.

From campaigns to worlds

Entertainment is messy. It’s emotional and unpredictable. It doesn’t sit neatly in a channel or media format.

But it is always what people remember.

Somewhere along the way, marketing became obsessed with short-term optimisation. With proving immediate impact and squeezing efficiency from every touchpoint.

Campaigns spike and then quietly disappear, whereas entertainment compounds. It builds worlds, stories, and characters people recognise and want to return to.

AI as an imagination multiplier

When my accidental mentor was selling sofas in the nineties, he relied solely on instinct and imagination.

Today, we have extraordinary technology at our disposal.

Much of the discourse around AI is framed by fear - automation, replacement, sameness. But AI is at its best when it’s not used as a content machine, but as an imagination multiplier.

Used well, it doesn’t create more ads. It creates more possibility.

At ELVIS, our technology platform Backstage™ acts like a living cultural radar. It scans real-time signals across entertainment and culture, streaming data, search behaviour, emerging creators, fandom shifts, and identifies where brands, audiences and culture are about to collide.

It spots intersections that would be almost impossible to detect manually.

That intelligence, combined with human judgement, allows us to pressure-test ideas early, invest with confidence, and focus only on ideas that earn the right to scale.

If we use AI simply to increase output, we flood an already saturated system.

If we use it to sharpen instinct and expand imagination, we create fewer, better ideas, and give creativity the space it deserves.

In an age of AI-generated sameness, originality is the moat. IP is the asset. And entertainment becomes the edge.

Back to the shop floor

Looking back, that salesman understood something instinctively that marketing is now rediscovering at scale.

People respond to stories.

They respond to emotion before information.

They respond to generosity.

He didn’t have dashboards.

He didn’t have predictive modelling.

He didn’t have AI scanning cultural shifts.

He had imagination. Empathy. And timing that would make even the best comedians envious.

Today, we have the opportunity to combine those timeless human qualities with powerful technology that helps us see further and move faster.

In a world where everyone is fighting for attention, the brands that win won’t be the most efficient.

They’ll be the most generous.

The ones who tell stories, people choose. The ones who create work so entertaining, so valuable, that people wouldn’t just pay attention to it - they’d pay for it.