Nobody Asked for Another AI Campaign

There is a particular kind of brand content that has become very easy to recognise.

The lighting is perfect. The composition is perfect. The person is vaguely aspirational. There is probably a laptop somewhere. Maybe a coffee. The product is sitting in the middle of an impossibly clean environment.

Technically, there is very little wrong with it.

And that is exactly the problem.

We have reached a point where producing something polished is no longer particularly difficult. AI has made that even more obvious. A good prompt can take you surprisingly far, and a good designer can take it further.

The production barrier is disappearing.

The creative barrier isn't.

This distinction matters.

Because a lot of brands are using new tools to solve the wrong problem. They are producing more versions of things they haven't really thought through yet.

More social posts. More campaign concepts. More product images. More short videos. More variations of the same idea.

The machine is very happy to keep producing.

The audience is not.

There is already an enormous amount of competent-looking content circulating online. Most of it disappears almost immediately. Not because it is badly made, but because there is very little behind it that makes somebody want to remember it.

We don't think the answer is to reject AI.

That would be like blaming Photoshop for bad advertising.

AI is useful. Very useful. It can help with exploration, visualisation, prototyping and production. It can take an idea that would previously have required half a day and put something on the screen in minutes.

That is fantastic.

But speed creates a new responsibility.

When making something becomes easy, deciding what is worth making becomes more important.

There still needs to be somebody willing to look at the idea and say that it feels too familiar, that it doesn't belong to the brand, or that there might be a better direction entirely.

Somebody has to recognise when the reference has become the idea.

Somebody has to know when more isn't better.

That part of the process is still remarkably human.

And perhaps that is why taste is becoming more valuable at exactly the moment when production is becoming cheaper.

The brands we remember rarely win because they produced the most content.

They win because there is something recognisable behind it.

A certain way of speaking. A certain way of looking at things. A decision that other brands would not have made.

AI can help produce the work.

It cannot decide what the work should mean.

That is still the interesting part.

Provence thinks the next advantage in creativity will not come from producing more. It will come from having better reasons to produce anything at all.