Somewhere in the country this morning, a marketing executive about eighteen months into their first proper job is being asked to plan a campaign, write it, design it, schedule it, report on it and brief three AI tools before tomorrow. They’re doing a decent job of it, all things considered. Nobody has ever shown them what a great job would look like.
That, rather than the AI, is the bit that bothers me.
There’s a line in The Incredibles that gets quoted at conferences roughly every eleven minutes (buckle up – there are a few bad jokes in this article. For transparency, I should confirm they are mine). Syndrome, end-of-evil-monologue: “when everyone’s super, no one will be”. I’ve been chewing on a duller, more commercial version: Good enough stops being good enough when everyone is.
Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way, because the internet has decided you have to pick a side. I use AI constantly. Copy, images, film, decks, campaign assets: work that used to take a week and a tasty budget line now takes an afternoon. Put it in the hands of someone who knows what they’re trying to achieve and it’s among the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever had. I am old enough to remember the early 90s when Photoshop was going to ruin everything, which is a sentence that has aged both the software and me. AI is more seismic, but I recognise the panic pattern.
So, AI is not my villain in this piece. But neither are you. This is a cautionary tale. Not quite The Terminator, but close.
The trouble begins when a business mistakes the power to produce something quickly and cheaply for the ability to produce something worth noticing. We’ve gone from democratised capability to commoditised adequacy, which is an ugly phrase, but I’m keeping it because it’s accurate.
Output is not strategy
Over the past three or four years, SMEs have hauled marketing production back in-house at real pace. Commercially, I get it. Why pay an outside partner per social post, per deck, per email, when your own team can turn them out by lunchtime for a fraction of the cost?
In many businesses, execution moved in-house faster than the strategic capability needed to direct it.
None of which is a dig at internal teams. Both large enterprise businesses and SMEs can run genuinely excellent in-house agencies, with brand, creative and marketing leadership sitting inside the building. Some SMEs are built differently though. The term ‘In-house agency’ is doing quite a lot of work there. Often, it means two capable people and an impossible list.
So you get more content, more often, across more channels, and at first glance that reads as progress. The calendar’s full. The feed is busy. The dashboard has plenty to count. Activity and effectiveness were never the same thing, though.
The most dangerous work isn’t obviously bad
“AI slop” is easy sport. We all know the specimens: hands with six fingers, staircases that lead nowhere, fabricated facts and copy with the breathless sincerity of three politicians trapped in a lift. Embarrassing, certainly, but visible enough to be spotted. Often after it’s gone live.
The more serious threat is quieter. Tidier, too.
It is the polished LinkedIn post with no recognisable point of view. The competent image that could sit on a competitor’s website without anybody altering a pixel. The well-structured article that contains no central thought. The campaign that is not really a campaign at all, just a loose bag of assets sharing a colour palette.
Not bad enough to stop. Nowhere near good enough to matter.
Every asset looks harmless on its own, and collectively the work starts eating away at the strategy your brand identity was built to carry. The business publishes more and communicates less. Your audience won’t have an opinion on it either. They’ll just stop noticing you, which is considerably worse.
The problem is not necessarily inconsistency. Often the work is impressively consistent: the same palette, tone and visual device. But those things make the assets look connected. They do not make them connected. They share a treatment, not an idea.
A thread is not wallpaper
Wallpaper repeats a pattern. A strategic thread develops an idea. It lets a master concept travel intelligently across messages, formats, audiences and moments: recognition without monotony. It knows what has to stay nailed down and what is allowed to move.
That takes controlled iteration, which is less glamorous than it sounds and mostly consists of admin: assets inside a campaign architecture, performance reviewed, audience reaction fed back into the system and work adjusted as circumstances change.
AI helps at every stage, exploring variations, accelerating production and finding patterns in data nobody has the patience to read. It can generate forty options and make a persuasive case for each. What it cannot supply is accountability for which one the brand should back, when the idea has tired or when the direction needs binning.
That’s judgement. It’s the scarce bit. It always was.
The plausible “why”
One of AI’s more seductive talents is explaining why whatever already exists was an excellent idea all along. Ask why a headline works, why that blue suits the brand or how a generic campaign ladders up to strategy, and you’ll get four confident paragraphs explaining that it absolutely does.
A plausible why isn’t strategic reasoning. It’s a reference written for a decision nobody actually made. The real questions come first: Why does this matter? Why this idea for this brand? Why would anyone stop scrolling? And why now?
An expert needn’t originate every idea. AI might throw up the candidate that cracks the whole thing open. The expert frames the problem, spots the option with meaning, develops it, argues with it and carries the can for the result.
I’ve watched that layer disappear. An organisation can keep every tool and carefully built instruction, yet lose the person who knows when the thread is gone. The machine keeps producing words. Nobody sees anything technically wrong, because there is nothing technically wrong.
The AI hasn’t degraded. The judgement around it has.
Engagement is an early warning, not the final outcome
The commercial return on brand and creative strategy is notoriously slippery. Engagement isn’t revenue. Never has been.
Attention comes first, though.
When output climbs while engagement falls, stop and look. It may be a platform change, distribution or a shifting audience. Or the brand may simply be saying more while giving nobody a reason to care.
This can be remarkably difficult to see from inside the workflow. The shift happened so quickly that plenty of businesses have become slightly snowblind to it. Everything is white, nothing has edges.
Questions I’d start with:
- Are we publishing as part of a designed campaign or because production is easy?
- Could a competitor publish this unchanged?
- Who has the authority and expertise to challenge, stop or redirect the work?
- Does the last quarter’s work still reflect our brand values and business strategy?
Competitor analysis earns its keep here, though not so you can copy the conventions of your category. Use it to find where every brand in the sector has started to look identical, and where the space is.
A different relationship with agencies
None of this points back to the old agency arrangement in which an external team produced every last asset and invoiced for every amends round.
Internal teams bring proximity, day-to-day knowledge and speed. External strategic partners bring distance, cross-category experience, creative challenge and an unsentimental view of brand drift. AI brings scale and new ways to explore and produce.
That quietly rewrites the external job description: less making everything, more designing the system. Campaign architecture, creative guardrails, defined review points, mentoring internal talent and periodic audits for repetition, incoherence and drift.
I use an accountant because I’m not a tax expert. I use a lawyer because I’m not a legal expert. I wouldn’t hand my tax affairs to an AI without qualified oversight, and I certainly wouldn’t send it to represent me in court.
Brand strategy doesn’t arrive with an immediate penalty notice, which is exactly why its erosion is so easy to ignore. No letter from HMRC. The damage accumulates quietly, through lost distinction, declining attention and several thousand individually acceptable decisions that stop adding up to anything.
The answer is not to take the tools away from the marketing executive at the beginning of this article. It is to put experienced judgement around her: someone who can frame the problem, challenge the obvious answer, show her what great looks like and take responsibility for the direction.
Sometimes that expertise sits in-house. For many SMEs, the practical way to bring it into the room is through a strategic agency.
AI should sit inside a strategy, not stand in for one.