How the Best Marketers Actually Use AI (Hint: It's Not a Prompt)

There's a trap in AI marketing right now that's making brands invisible and most marketers are walking straight into it. My team and I study thousands of campaigns across the brands we work with and the ones we compete against. The ones using AI the most had the lowest brand recall. The ones using it the least were falling behind on volume. But a small group figured out a third way and they're outperforming everyone. Here's exactly what they're doing differently. Chapter 1, AI is making marketing average. Most marketers think AI will make their creativity better and in many ways it already has. Today one person can generate ad visuals, write scripts, produce voiceovers and even create animations that rival Pixar's. These were once things that would require entire creative teams and even millions and millions of dollars. But there's a side effect no one talks about. Instead of making brands more distinctive, AI is actually pushing everyone towards the same middle of the road ideas. And here's the thing nobody in marketing wants to say out loud. AI doesn't create originality. It creates the statistical average of the internet. Ben Affleck explained this well in a recent conversation with Joe Rogan. >> For example, you try to get chat GPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's really by its nature it goes to the mean, to the average. He said generative AI tends to produce the average version of things because it's trained on massive data sets that predicts the most likely next output. That's exactly what we're seeing in marketing right now. Don't believe me? Let me show you. Open LinkedIn right now and scroll. You'll see the same hooks, the same structures, the same 10 tips posts, different brands, but the content feels almost identical. And the data proves it. A study from originality.ai found that over 54% of long-form LinkedIn posts are now AI generated. 189% increase since chat GPT launched. And here's the part that matters. Those AI posts get 45% less engagement than original ones. Your audience can't always explain why something feels off, but they scroll past it anyways. Right now, the default workflow for most marketers looks like this. Open chat GPT, type give me 10 ad headlines, maybe write a blog post about this topic and publish whatever comes out. The problem, thousands of other marketers are asking the same tools the same questions. So, you end up with different companies publishing slightly different versions of the same content. If your AI workflow starts with generate content, you're already limiting your creativity. But this isn't about your content sounding generic. There's a deeper problem and it's costing brands something they can't easily get back. Chapter 2, your brand is a feeling not a logo. One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is thinking a brand is just a visual identity, a logo, a color palette, maybe a tone of voice guide. But that's not what a brand is. A brand isn't what your marketing looks like. It's what people feel when they see it. I was talking about this recently with Matt, our global SVP of creative and creative technologies and [music] he said something that stuck with me. A brand doesn't live inside a design system or a brand book. [music] It lives in the reaction people have when they encounter your company. Think about Levi's. When you see Levi's, there's a feeling. Classic American cool, durable, timeless. Now think about Dove. For years they've reinforced one core idea, real beauty. Those brands don't just produce content. They produce recognizable emotional signal. And when companies rely too heavily on AI generated marketing, that signal disappears. Everything starts sounding polished, but strangely interchangeable. Want to see what that looks like in practice? Look at Coca-Cola. They took one of the most beloved Christmas ads of all time and remade it with AI twice. >> [music] >> Both times the internet called it soulless. One analyst scored the AI version just 22 out of 100 compared to the YouTube ads. A marketing professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison said the backlash hit so hard because Christmas represents a connection and community, values that felt fundamentally at odds with AI generated content. The brand that reinvented emotional advertising couldn't replicate the feeling with AI. That's not a technology problem. That's a taste problem. Your customers may not consciously say "This feels AI generated." But they can feel when a brand has no real point of view. And when every brand starts sounding the same, the ones with a clear identity are the ones people remember. So if AI is making content average and it's stripping out the emotion out of brands, what are the companies that figured this out are actually doing? That's where this gets interesting. Chapter 3, use AI to expand ideas not replace them. The real power of AI isn't generating finished output. It's expanding the number of ideas you can explore. Most marketers are using AI like a shortcut to the final answer. But the smartest teams, [music] they're using it earlier in the process when ideas are still in brainstorming phases. In traditional advertising agencies, creative teams didn't jump straight into writing the ad. They started by tossing around ideas, half-formed concepts, odd connections, cultural references. Sometimes someone from another team would walk past a brainstorm and suggest something unexpected. A small observation that completely shifted the direction of the campaign. Those moments weren't planned. They were often where the strongest ideas came from. Today, AI can play that role in the early [music] stage. Instead of asking AI to write the final ad, use it to explore different angles, new concepts, cultural references, different ways to frame the idea. That creates creative divergence instead of convergence. Matt described how he does this with our clients at NP Digital. Instead of asking AI to write headlines, he starts with a loose territory around the brand. Themes like journeys, experiences, the emotional state the brand wants customers to feel. From there, he pushes the conversation wider asking for related concepts, metaphors, adjacent ideas. During one of those explorations, the word flow surfaced. That single word ended up becoming the seed for the entire direction of the campaign. That's the difference between using AI for answers and using AI for exploration. The best marketers don't treat AI as a writer. They use it as an idea accelerator. The tool that helps them see more possibilities before choosing the strongest one. But companies that are really pulling ahead, they're not just changing how they brainstorm. They're building something bigger. Chapter 4, build a creative system not a prompt. The biggest misconception about AI in marketing is that it is just a tool. You open chat GPT, generate content, move on. But the companies getting the most value aren't treating it like a single tool. They're building systems around it. Think of it as a brand AI stack. Instead of relying on one generic model, these companies build multiple AI tools trained for specific roles inside the brand. One system analyzes contextual trends and surfaces ideas the brand could react to. Another evaluates whether a campaign idea actually fits the brand's voice. Another explores creative directions before the team commits to one. In that setup, AI isn't replacing the creative team. It's acting like an ecosystem of assistants helping the team think faster. Instead of generating one idea and hoping it works, teams can explore dozens of directions, test them quickly and refine the strongest ones. The marketers who win with AI won't be the ones writing the best prompts. They'll be the ones who design systems that help their teams discover better ideas faster. But even the best systems need one thing AI still can't do. And this is where the real competitive advantage lives. Chapter 5, the real competitive advantage is human taste. >> [music] >> As AI keeps improving, the one thing in marketing that's becoming cheaper every year is execution. AI can write copy, generate visuals, produce ad variations faster than most teams, which means the competitive advantage is shifting somewhere else and the data tells us exactly where. Research shows that human generated content receives over five times more traffic than AI generated content with steady growth while AI content traffic fluctuates. But here's the part most people miss. The highest performing companies aren't avoiding AI. They're the ones who have figured out where AI should help and where humans should lead. That's the third way. AI can surface thousands of possible ideas, but someone still has to recognize the one that's worth building entire campaign around. In the AI era, the skill that matters the most isn't prompting. It's taste. And if you need help with taste, check out my ad agency NP Digital where we were just named performance marketing agency of the year by Ad Age. The ability to look at a wall of AI generated options and say, "That one. That's the one." That's what can't be automated. The future of marketing won't be AI versus humans. It'll be creative teams using AI to explore more ideas, test more directions and move faster. While the final decisions will still come from people who understand culture, customers and the brand they're building. Brands that combine both will move faster than everyone else without becoming average. So here's what I want you to do. Take your last 10 pieces of content, strip the brand name off, show them to someone on your team and ask, "Can you tell this is us?" If they can't, you're already in the trap. Drop a comment and tell me what you found. And if you want to go deeper on which [music] AI tools actually work for marketing and how to build this into your workflow, watch this next video.