Surely, we didn’t get into marketing to be vanilla.
Nobody gets into marketing to just produce adequate work.
Nobody sits in their first marketing job thinking “you know what I really want to do, produce content that’s fine, campaigns that are acceptable, brand work that no one will remember.”
But that’s the risk facing marketing right now: AI arrives, everyone gets very excited about efficiency, and slowly, quietly, without anyone really deciding to do it, the output starts to look the same. The copy sounds the same. The emails read the same. The LinkedIn posts, the landing pages, the brand stories, all a sea of sameness, produced at a faster rate.
The net effect is AI talking to AI and zero customer engagement!
We are trading the effort of being interesting for the satisfaction of being fast and box ticking.
Let’s be clear: AI is genuinely brilliant.
I’m not here to bash AI. Some tools have given marketers the gift of time which can’t be underestimated. Time that used to be spent doing first drafts, researching, reporting and loads of other tasks which were necessary but not setting the world alight. That time is now yours.
Done well, AI is the best creative assistant you’ve ever had. It removes the friction between thought and execution, and it helps small teams punch harder. It means you can test, iterate, and move with a speed that would have seemed impossible five years ago.
But the thing is, efficiency is not a brand strategy.
The problem with vanilla
Vanilla is safe and easy. And in a world where we are drowning in AI content more and more, it could be very damaging.
When everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, the same prompt training, the differentiator isn’t the technology, and it never has been. The differentiator is what you bring to it. The point of view. The personality. The courage to have a brand that stands for something rather than everything.
AI can generate volume. It can generate copy, but it can’t generate your brand’s earned credibility, its cultural relevance, or the feeling a customer gets when they encounter it. That stuff comes from humans doing hard, thoughtful, creative work and then using AI to scale it, not replace it.
Everyone is talking about AI making us obsolete, but the risk is it also makes us lazy and we take our eye off the ball.
The principles haven’t changed, they’ve become more important
This comes back to the same point I made in a recent article (here), the things that made marketing great before AI are exactly the things that matter now.
Clarity of purpose. A distinctive voice. Consistency. Emotional resonance. Tension. The willingness to say something that not everyone will agree with.
These aren’t new ideas. David Ogilvy was banging this drum. So was Bill Bernbach. So was every great creative director who ever pushed a team to go further than the safe answer.
What’s changed is the stakes. Because now, the brands that invest in genuine distinctiveness, do the hard work of knowing who they are and say it with confidence, will stand out in a way that wasn’t possible before, leading them to win sales, because everyone else is churning out polished mediocrity at scale.
And it’s full circle. This is also what matters to the LLMs
The large language models that underpin all these AI tools were trained on the internet. And the internet has always rewarded things that are interesting, distinctive and recommenced. Ironically, being vanilla and churning out sameness goes against this. The content that got shared, cited, linked to, and talked about was rarely the content that played it safe.
So, when you ask an AI to help you write something and it produces something generic, ask yourself: what did you give it to work with? Because the output is only as strong as the thinking you put in. Vague brief, vague output. Bland brand positioning, bland content.
But feed it a sharp point of view, a clear voice, a genuine story and suddenly you’re using the tool the way it was meant to be used, not outsourcing everything and hoping for the best.
The best-performing brands in the AI era won’t be the ones who used AI the most. They’ll be the ones who used it smartest to free up the humans to do what humans do best.
So, what are you doing with the gift of time?
This is where we need to focus. Think more, be braver, invest in the brand work that keeps getting deprioritised because there’s always something urgent in the way.
Briefing properly. Developing real brand and proposition strategy. Obsessing over storytelling. Pushing creative until it’s genuinely interesting rather than just acceptable. The opportunity is not to create volume but to do better work because of it. The most successful brands I see are doing this upfront and using this thinking to power everything, and not compromising because of the tools.
Surely, we didn’t get into to this to simply be vanilla.
Here are five things you could do now:
1. Develop a genuine point of view and publish it
Not a mission statement, but a real considered opinion on something that matters in your industry. Something that a competitor couldn’t say because they can’t claim it. If everyone in your space would agree with it, it’s not a point of view, it’s wallpaper.
2. Audit your content for the word “we”
Most brand content is relentlessly self-indulgent: We do this, we offer that, we’re excited to announce. Flip it. Start with the customer, their problem, their ambitions. Brands that talk with people rather than at them feel completely different, even when the product is the same.
3. Pick a battle with a bad idea in your industry
This could be a lazy assumption, an outdated practice, a myth that everyone accepts but nobody questions. An alternative view well-argued shows confidence, earns respect, and attracts the kind of customers that are aligned with how you think.
4. Bring some texture to your storytelling
Specificity is the enemy of vanilla. “We helped a client grow their revenue” is forgettable. “We helped a 12-person logistics company in the Midlands go from spreadsheets to a pipeline that actually worked in six weeks” is a story. The texture is what makes people believe you and remember you.
5. Give someone in your team permission to make the calls
Vanilla can be a people problem, not a creativity problem. Things often need to get through layers of approval and there are no clear guardrails for opinion. The best brands have someone who has strong opinions and the authority to use them. If every piece of content must please everyone, it will end up pleasing no one.
