“Differentiation” used to be everything
There was a time in advertising agencies when “differentiation” wasn’t just another phrase in a strategy deck. It was practically sacred.
Creative Directors demanded it. Clients obsessed over it. Entire campaigns were built around the idea that brands had to stand apart or risk disappearing into the wallpaper. And for most of my forty-odd years in advertising and design, that principle made perfect sense.
Lately though, I find myself wondering whether marketing is becoming strangely… similar.
Not necessarily worse. Just oddly homogenous.
Like supermarket own-brand cereal packaging. Pleasant enough, professionally executed, but somehow interchangeable.
It’s a thought that keeps returning as AI increasingly inserts itself into the creative process. Every week brings another platform capable of generating headlines, visuals, campaign concepts and social content in seconds. The results are often polished and technically impressive. Ask AI for “bold disruptive branding” and out pours a stream of slick typography, carefully curated colour palettes and motivational language about “transforming customer experiences.”
The problem is that everybody now seems to be getting variations of the same answer.
Everything looks contemporary.
Everything looks competent.
And almost everything feels faintly familiar.
When Creativity Meant “The Relevant Unexpected”
Perhaps that’s inevitable. AI systems are trained on existing material. They learn from patterns, trends and probabilities gathered from millions of examples. In simple terms, they’re designed to recognise what usually works.
But creativity was never really about doing what usually works.
When I first joined an advertising agency, the senior partner, a local advertising legend called Bill Adamson drummed into us repeatedly:
“Effective creativity is the relevant unexpected.”
That distinction mattered enormously.
Not simply unexpected. Relevant unexpected.
Anybody can be bizarre. Advertising has never struggled to produce random absurdity. A llama waterskiing through a bank advert would certainly be unexpected, but unless you’re selling llamas or water skis, it probably isn’t helping much.
The brilliance came when surprise and relevance collided.
That was the sweet spot. The idea had to stop people in their tracks while still connecting emotionally to the product or brand itself. When it worked, the campaign lodged itself permanently in people’s memories.
And memory, ultimately, is what marketing is for.
Are We Becoming Addicted to Being Quirky?
These days though, I sometimes feel the industry has become obsessed with the “unexpected” while quietly abandoning the “relevant.”
Scroll through social media for ten minutes and you’ll encounter brands desperately trying to perform eccentricity. Everybody wants to sound disruptive, provocative or rebellious. Funeral directors make TikTok videos. Insurance companies communicate entirely through memes. Every coffee brand describes itself as “bold” and “authentic.”
Ironically, the result is that everybody now looks identically quirky.
There’s a strange conformity to modern disruption.
Why AI Is Producing Increasingly Similar Creative Work
And AI may unintentionally be accelerating it.
Because AI is exceptionally good at recognising established visual and verbal trends. Ask it to generate “innovative marketing ideas” and it will generally produce ideas based on existing notions of innovation. It doesn’t truly leap sideways into the irrational unknown; it rearranges patterns it has already absorbed.
Which raises an interesting question.
Could AI Have Created the Cadbury Gorilla?
Take the famous Cadbury gorilla advert.
A gorilla sits behind a drum kit, solemnly waiting before launching into Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight.” On paper it sounds ridiculous. Which, to be fair, it absolutely was.
And yet it worked brilliantly.
Not because gorillas have any obvious relationship with chocolate, but because the advert created anticipation, joy and emotional surprise. It was bizarre, memorable and strangely uplifting all at once.
Now technically, AI could certainly generate the visuals today. Give it thirty seconds and it could create fifty photorealistic drumming gorillas without breaking a digital sweat.
But could it have conceived the idea in the first place?
That’s the part I’m less convinced about.
Creativity Was Never Supposed to Be Sensible
Because many of the best advertising ideas I encountered over the years emerged from instinct, intuition and occasionally complete madness. They came from human beings making strange emotional connections that didn’t necessarily follow logical patterns.
In fact, some of the strongest concepts I ever saw sounded dreadful when first presented. We used to joke about the creative team that suggested the Guinness Dancing Pint Man.
“No really it’s a guy dancing around a massive pint of Guinness – trust me it’ll be amazing!”
I sat through countless meetings where clients stared at us in horrified silence as though the creative department had collectively imbibed too many pints of the black stuff.
Then six months later the campaign would be winning awards and shifting product by the lorry load.
The Problem With “Perfectly Acceptable” Ideas
The danger with AI isn’t that it produces terrible work. More often, it produces perfectly acceptable work. And that may actually be more problematic.
Bad ideas get rejected immediately.
Polished mediocrity quietly slips through.
Because AI-generated work often arrives looking finished, refined and strategically sound. There’s a temptation to trust its smoothness. Endless iterations can be generated and tested until every rough edge disappears.
The result can feel oddly sterile.
Like music written entirely by committee.
The Hidden Danger of Algorithmic Consensus
Of course, marketing trends existed long before AI arrived. In the 1980s every logo appeared chrome-plated. In the 1990s brochures were filled with businessmen pointing enthusiastically at invisible graphs. By the early 2000s every technology company seemed required by law to include somebody wearing a headset while laughing at a computer screen.
Creative clichés are hardly new.
But AI dramatically increases the speed and scale at which sameness spreads. A successful visual trend can now replicate across thousands of brands almost overnight. One vaguely surreal campaign aesthetic becomes fashionable online and suddenly half the industry is producing diluted versions of it by Friday afternoon.
Differentiation becomes harder because everybody is drawing from the same endlessly recycled pool of references.
When Marketing Starts to Feel Like Airport Lounge Music
Even the language has started flattening into a recognisable AI dialect.
You can often spot AI-generated copy because it sounds polished but curiously bloodless. Everything is “elevated,” “immersive” or “transformative.” Companies no longer sell coffee; they “craft meaningful beverage experiences.”
Nobody actually speaks like this.
Human beings are messy communicators. We ramble, contradict ourselves and occasionally say something unintentionally brilliant while trying to explain where we parked the car. That unpredictability is often where originality lives.
Why Human Eccentricity Still Matters
Some of the most talented creatives I worked with over the years were gloriously eccentric people. One art director communicated largely through sarcastic muttering whilst smoking a Players No. 6 and drinking a can of Tuborg special (yes, we were allowed to do that then). Another disappeared halfway through brainstorms only to return with ideas scribbled on pub napkins that somehow turned into national campaigns.
An algorithm would probably classify both as operational inefficiencies.
And yet their oddness mattered.
Creativity has never been entirely rational because human beings themselves aren’t entirely rational. We carry around strange memories, emotional baggage and bizarre cultural associations accumulated over decades. Sometimes the most powerful ideas emerge from those unexpected collisions.
That’s difficult to replicate through probability alone.
Efficiency Isn’t the Same as Originality
Mind you, I’m not remotely anti-AI. I’ve already lived through one genuinely seismic technological shift when computers arrived in design studios during the late 1980s and early 90s. Compared with that revolution, AI feels more evolutionary.
Good creatives will absolutely adapt to it.
Used properly, AI can speed up repetitive tasks, assist ideation and free people to focus on larger conceptual thinking. That’s valuable. Every creative generation has absorbed new tools and survived perfectly well.
What concerns me slightly is our growing tendency to confuse efficiency with originality.
They are not the same thing.
Efficiency helps deliver work faster.
Originality makes people remember it.
The Risk of Sanding Away Every Rough Edge
And memorable work has always required a certain amount of bravery — from agencies, clients and creatives alike. Truly differentiated campaigns rarely emerge from safe consensus thinking. In fact, if everybody instantly agrees an idea is sensible, there’s a reasonable chance it isn’t especially original.
The best campaigns often make people slightly uncomfortable before they make them impressed.
Which brings me back to Bill Adamson’s age old phrase: “the relevant unexpected.”
Not random weirdness.
Not algorithmically generated familiarity disguised as disruption.
But ideas that genuinely surprise people while still meaning something emotionally.
That balance may become harder to achieve in an AI-driven world increasingly shaped by averages and optimisation. Yet ironically, that may also make true creativity even more valuable.
Because when audiences are drowning in polished sameness, genuinely distinctive thinking becomes impossible to ignore.
The Future Still Belongs to Unexpected Thinking
Perhaps the future doesn’t belong entirely to AI, nor entirely to nostalgic old advertising veterans reminiscing about Cow Gum and marker pens.
Perhaps it belongs to the people who understand that tools are only ever tools.
The challenge itself hasn’t changed in forty years.
Create something people haven’t seen before.
And make sure it’s relevant when you do.
