Throw One Tennis Ball

Throw one tennis ball

Throw someone a tennis ball and they'll catch it. Throw them seven and they'll catch none, and probably get one in the eye.

It's one of the most expensive lessons in social media, and most of us (agencies very much included) have paid for it at some point.

It usually starts in a meeting. Somebody wants the new flavour on the page. Somebody else wants the brand equities in there (taste, heritage, the bit about real ingredients). Then the campaign line needs to appear. Then the summer platform. Then the NPD calendar, the retailer promo, and a lovely little nod to the TVC. Every request is reasonable. Every stakeholder is right. And yet the account that comes out the other end says a little bit of everything and not much of anything. We know, because we've helped write plenty of those briefs ourselves.

That isn't anyone in the room getting it wrong. It's what happens when a channel that's brilliant at one thing gets asked to do eleven.

You're the only one who sees all seven balls

Here's the strange part. When a brand throws seven balls, the only people who see all seven are the people throwing them.

Inside a business, everything connects. You've read the annual report. You've sat through the new brand strategy offsite. You've seen the research, the segmentation and the deck from global. From where you're standing, the summer platform, the new flavour and the brand equities clearly belong to one story.

We feel it too. Paradoxically, the closer we work with a brand, the harder it gets to see it the way a customer does. Spend enough time inside the building and you forget that none of that context ever leaves it. Your customers have never seen the annual report, and they never will.

They don't see the seven balls together, either. They catch one, wedged somewhere between a UAP video, a wall of AI slop and a dog dressed as Elton John. Then maybe three days later, another one. Each ball has to make sense on its own, to someone who has no idea the others exist.

That's why one ball works. It's the only thing that adds up from the outside.

Social is not your website

Social media stopped being a network and became an entertainment platform. Most brands are still making broadcast content for a feed that now rewards the best content on the internet, and the feed isn't making it easy.

Look at what your audience is actually doing. Around two hours a day on TikTok. Roughly six seconds per video. Something like 1,200 videos a day, on a 14cm screen. That's 168 metres of scrolling a DAY, while overstimulated, underslept and running 23 tabs. You are not competing with the brand next to you on shelf. You are competing with a golden retriever who learned to skateboard.

The numbers say brands are already losing that fight:

• Instagram brand engagement has fallen around 75% since 2020.
• TikTok brand engagement halved in a single year, and it's still falling.
• A Facebook brand page with 10,000 followers now averages 2 to 7 interactions per post.

In that environment, a message has maybe one shot to land. One. So when a brand tries to say five things, the feed tends to hear none of them.

As Sarah Carter put it, and it's a line worth keeping close: "Your customers don't care." It sounds harsh, but it's actually freeing. They don't need to understand the brand architecture. They just need the next six seconds to be worth it.

Taglines were built for a different internet

For most of advertising history, a tagline worked because everyone saw the same thing. A handful of TV channels, a few radio stations, the same billboard on the way to work. Repeat a line often enough, to enough people at the same time, and it entered the culture.

That world is gone. Media is now so fragmented that no two people see the same feed, and there's no shared moment for a line to sink in. Try naming a brand tagline from the last 15 years that genuinely broke through the way the classics did. It's surprisingly hard.

Taglines still have a home on a billboard or at the end of a TVC. On social, though, people don't remember what a brand says. They remember what it does, and who it is.

The brands winning are throwing one ball

La La Land Kind Cafe stands for one thing: kindness. Every post, every cup, every bit of chaos on the page comes back to it. You know what they mean in a second.

Now do Starbucks. Seasonal drinks, loyalty points, app features, merch, sustainability, a new oat thing. What do they stand for on social? It's harder to say. There's so much good stuff in there that no single thing gets the chance to stick.

The best performing accounts look nothing like their brand's website, and that's the point. They pick one thing to be famous for and they become annoyingly good at it. People fall in love with that one thing, and the love is what sends them off to learn about the products.

We've seen this play out in our own work:

• Red Rooster. We leaned into one narrative (a chicken shop that might be laundering money) and stopped trying to make every post do every job. Between September and November 2025, that one bit drove 44 million TikTok views, a 2.7% engagement rate and 35.7% positive sentiment. The campaign products rode on its back: over a million views each for the Smokin' BBQ Crunch and Triple Burger videos.
• Loctite. The brief was repair, reuse and recycle: important, but a tough thing to make anyone stop scrolling for. So we built one thing, a Museum of Second Chances, first online and then as a real gallery in Collingwood. 1.4 million TikTok views, 100 gallery attendees, 30+ influencers through the door, 80% positive sentiment. And a Webby, for making superglue sexy (which is a sentence we'll be putting on our tombstones).

Neither of those accounts tried to say everything. That's exactly why people remembered anything.

Why a character is the best ball you can throw

If you're lucky enough to have a brand character, you already have the strongest single thing your brand can be famous for. The research is fairly blunt about it:

• Pictures beat words. A 2025 study found visual representations are easier for people to recall than words. A character will be remembered long before a campaign slogan that's six months old.
• Characters beat celebrities. System1's research on Super Bowl advertising found brand characters typically outperform famous faces. You own the character. You rent the celebrity.
• Characters build feeling. A 2024 study on brand mascots found they create an emotional connection that lifts engagement with both the brand and its products.

That last study comes with a catch. Giving a brand human qualities cuts both ways, and the safe bet is to project the best of being human. On social, the best of being human means humour, meme literacy, a bit of brain rot, and a personality that posts as itself. It does not mean reciting product attributes. Nobody has ever made friends with a list of ingredients.

Gen Z don't hate brands. They hate being sold to.

The I Hate Ads report from Student Edge and Youth Insight is the clearest proof point we've seen. 81% of young Australians hate ads, but only 28% actually want fewer of them. The problem isn't advertising. It's advertising that feels intrusive and fake. What they want instead is content that teaches, inspires and feels real.

The brief for brands writes itself: make ads worthy of the group chat. A character with a genuine point of view can do that in a way a product grid never will.

Lore beats heritage

A fair question we hear a lot: "Our character doesn't have any history." That's actually an advantage. Gen Z's nostalgia doesn't run on chronology, it runs on lore. They're nostalgic for eras they never lived through, and they'll happily adopt a backstory that's mostly vibes. A character doesn't need 40 years of heritage. It needs a story people want to be in on, and the confidence to keep telling it.

One ball doesn't mean one message

Here's the good news. Choosing one thing to be famous for doesn't mean dropping every other objective. It means routing them all through the thing people already care about.

The character becomes the spokesperson for everything, without the ball ever changing:

• The new flavour isn't a pack shot. It's the character's new merch drop, and he will not shut up about it.
• The campaign idea isn't a tagline in the corner of the frame. It's something he does, over and over, until people expect it.
• The seasonal platform isn't a separate content stream. It's his big moment of the year, and he treats it like the Grand Final.
• The cultural moments aren't a calendar of "Happy Donut Day" tiles. They're him inserting himself into the conversation, uninvited and slightly too confident.

Every message still gets out. It just arrives wrapped in something people chose to watch, instead of something they scrolled past at speed.

And there's a simple reason it works. Mark Ritson's line: "Marketing is memory-making. If they don't think of you, they can't buy you." Memories come from state changes: surprise, humour, delight, the occasional bit of outrage. Nobody has a state change at a product attribute. People have them at characters all the time.

So, which ball?

The hardest part of this isn't creative. It's internal. Most approval processes (ours included) are built to add rather than subtract. Every review round brings another objective, another disclaimer, another CTA, each one completely sensible on its own.

Every marketer we work with is balancing real pressure from above, beside and below. The ones who win on social are the ones who get the room to protect simplicity. Helping them make that case is a big part of our job.

So before the next content calendar, ask the only question that matters: if this page could only be famous for one thing in the next 12 months, what would it be?

Then throw that ball. Over and over. Until people catch it without looking.

Juggling is very impressive at parties. It just doesn't tend to sell many burgers.

Kill Boring Dead. Be interesting, or die trying.