Nothing's $1.3B Bet: Brand Chief Calls Smartphone Ads 'Boring'

By Nathan Brooks

Nothing, the London smartphone maker valued at $1.3 billion after a $200 million Series C round in 2025, thinks the fastest way to fight Apple and Samsung is to stop making ads that look like theirs. "Consumer tech's becoming pretty boring," says Charlie Smith, Nothing's chief brand officer. "Everyone just copied the success of Apple, which was about minimalism, aluminum, and glass. [Tech] really lost a lot of its personality."

Smith joined Nothing in January after seven years running marketing at LVMH-owned fashion house Loewe. He now leads a "retro futuristic" design approach — transparent casings that expose internal components — and an ambition to become Britain's next consumer "super brand" after Dyson. Adam Bates, Dyson's former head of design, is Nothing's design director. Carl Pei, who co-founded OnePlus, started the company in 2020.

The timing is brutal. Global smartphone shipments fell 20% in the third quarter of 2026, the weakest Q3 since 2012, according to Counterpoint Research, as rising memory-chip costs pushed up prices. Samsung's market share climbed from 19% to 23%; Apple's rose from 18% to 22%. Nothing is charging uphill into a shrinking market controlled by two giants.

Why does so much marketing look the same?

Most smartphone advertising relies on "glossy renders" and camera-spec storytelling, Smith says. "There's no real community building or emotional hook. Sometimes brands really see marketing as a formula, almost like a mathematical equation, and that's what produces really boring, generic results."

The pressure behind that formula is measurable. Some 56% of marketing chiefs say their CFO is pushing harder for evidence of marketing's financial impact, according to Duke University's 2026 CMO Survey of more than 300 marketing leaders. Of those, seven in 10 say they've doubled down on short-term results and sharper performance tracking.

Playing it safe is also expensive, Smith argues. "If you have an amazing idea, people are going to share it organically," he says, "whereas if you're just using paid media to boost something very predictable, you're having to spend a lot more money to do it."

He watched the shift happen at Nike. From 2015 to 2018, Smith ran Nike's account for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at the ad agency R/GA. Back then, "Nike did not stick to a fixed schedule of campaigns. It reacted to cultural events as they happened and let local teams shape the message instead of running the same ads globally." The 2018 'Nothing Beats a Londoner' campaign was full of references only Londoners would get.

Later, Smith says, Nike started "focusing more on performance marketing, data, and its direct-to-consumer business," and "a lot of that magic and creativity was lost." The lesson for practitioners: immediate-sales metrics crowd out the brand-building that makes organic reach cheap.

What does risk actually look like at Nothing?

Smith's operating question for his team: "What's the opposite of what we would be expected to do here?" When Apple scheduled its launch the day before Nothing's in March, Nothing graffitied over Apple's invitation and Pei posted it online. Smith calls the real cut-through ingredient "extreme risk taking and boldness."

He concedes it's easier at a small company where creative risk is already cultural, and where one team controls the website, stores and brand end to end. Ideas don't get watered down crossing departments.

Ideas also come from outside the building. "Good ideas come from everywhere, and it's about the leadership embracing them," Smith says. Each year Nothing's fan community elects a board observer — a volunteer who attends quarterly board meetings and presents customers' views on products and launches to directors. Nothing shortlists candidates; the community votes on its forum. Members have previously helped design one of its phones.

Without Apple or Samsung budgets, Nothing spends small and local. In July it launched the Club Nothing Fund, giving four independent creators or music collectives $10,000 each to stage nightlife events. Smith's filter for such deals: "Are you genuinely adding something to this culture, or are you just taking from it?"

Does human-made content still win?

AI-generated content has made audiences harder to impress. Thirty percent of Gen-Z described brands using AI in advertising as "inauthentic," according to an IAB survey. "We've lost our sense of wonder," Smith says.

His answer is putting humans on display. At Nothing's March launch at Central Saint Martins, the London art school, more than 300 students met the industrial design team and tried the products. At Loewe, Smith filmed craftspeople at work and had creators post rough, unpolished TikToks that went "against the codes of luxury." "Some of the best-performing content on digital channels is the most human and analog," he says.

Formulaic marketing promises certainty. In a market where every phone looks the same, Smith is betting the bigger risk is being boring — and for marketers counting clicks, that's a wager worth watching.