Premium Sameness
Lately two companies approached me. No connection between them whatsoever. Different categories, different customers, exactly the same idea: a team of characters, each embodying one attribute of the brand. The helpful one. The clever one. The bold one. A brand A-Team.
I don't know where either of them got it. But I have a suspicion: they asked AI for ideas, and this is what came out first. The point isn't to blame AI for generic ideas, though. I've come across that concept before, in more variants than I can count. If you've sat through enough presentations, so have you.
How can that be? Well, the human approves what's familiar. Havas has been measuring the result for years: three quarters of brands could disappear overnight and most people wouldn't care. Interchangeable, long before AI. And generative models, at their core, are statistical pattern-fillers. In the end, both – human and AI – pull toward the middle, which is also why "human in the loop" won't save us. The person in the process isn't the correction. They're the force that was already pulling that way.
What's new is the scale. The machine suggests what's likely, a million times a day. What used to be a habit is now infrastructure. And you can already see it: Now that AI has broken through the bottleneck in production, the channels are being flooded with generic content. And I'm not talking about AI slop. AI slop is loud and cheap. What you see is increasingly professional and high-quality. And yet completely interchangeable. Premium Sameness. Stuff nobody objects to and nobody remembers.
So what now? "A brand should stand out" is the oldest advice in the business. And if looking good stops being a difference, the unlikely idea becomes more important than ever. It might look slightly wrong at first. Which is often exactly what makes it right. And this isn't just a creative person's lament. Sameness is a line in the budget, because it shows up on the media invoice: Peter Field's work on the cost of dull advertising puts it at roughly twice the media budget for the same profit growth, and 2.6 times for the same share growth.
And that's the irony of it all. If you let AI come up with "your ideas" because it's cheaper, it could end up costing you dearly.
