AI and avoiding a sea of advertising sameness
July 19, 2025
Clients expect more, better, quicker, cheaper. Agencies are exploring and creating tools to help deliver on that promise while working to create new compensation models that protect their ingenuity and financial security.
There is a risk to marketers and their agencies that is not being discussed: the risk of AI advertising tools leading to an even greater sea of advertising sameness.
Let’s discuss.
CMOs, senior marketers and agency executives are often tasked with the critical challenge of creating distinctiveness for their brand or business. There are many reasons for this, including the very narrow product or service differences that exist at any moment in an industry. Despite a drive to be distinctive, most companies in the same industry look and sound the same.
Before AI, the advertising in most categories has always been a sea of sameness. In beauty…
In grocery:
In high end sports sedans:
Those examples from advertising history happened before AI.
Now that AI is exploding across our industry, what will happen?
I fear that AI tools, without careful and thoughtful human guidance, could make advertising even less distinctive. Today, AI learns from what already exists. That is what it knows. Humans are needed to take things that are similar, one of the crowd, and make them stand alone.
This is a wakeup call for marketers, agencies and creatives everywhere. Don’t let AI make advertising even LESS distinctive. Let’s challenge ourselves to enhance distinctiveness and impact.
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
