Anathea Ruys
4 hours ago

It's time to take a stand against bland marketing

AI can crunch data, but can it truly create magic? Anathea Ruys, CEO of UM Australia, urges brands to use it wisely—or risk fading into the noise.

It's time to take a stand against bland marketing

Australian marketing professor Mark Ritson once said, “AI will make us all masters of efficiency, but slaves to mediocrity. The more we automate, the harder it becomes to stand out.”

So, let’s look beyond the hype and focus on the real opportunity. Business leaders and marketers who rely solely on AI for targeting and activation risk falling into a trap: Campaigns that may be efficient but fail to resonate deeply. The real power lies in a hybrid approach—one where AI handles the heavy lifting of data crunching while human intelligence drives creativity, emotion, and brand differentiation.

But mediocrity, or blandness—in films, literature, art, advertising, or media—can creep up insidiously and silently. It’s why Hollywood is saturated with prequels, sequels, and remakes. It’s also why advertising is littered with globally repurposed campaigns that swap in a local voice-over but fail to spark genuine engagement with today’s discerning consumer.

On the one hand, CMOs are increasingly being asked to find efficiencies, and the talk about AI in this endeavour is anything but silent. On the other, they’re also finding themselves justifying their contribution to the bottom line. By leveraging the power of generative AI, the opportunity to reduce headcount or cut down on production budgets could create savings of 5% to 15% of total marketing spend—a potential global impact of $463 billion annually, according to McKinsey. This is noisy chatter that enthrals procurement, finance teams, and CEOs across all industries.

Historically, the C-suite has been reluctant to fully embrace or trust the way media and marketing have been measured. Outputs like reach, cost-per-click, or cost-per-thousand don’t impress CFOs and do little to stave off cuts to marketing and media budgets. This is another area where embracing AI can provide enormous benefits to marketers. Those econometric modelling providers who have leaned into generative AI to build their modelling have been able to reduce cost, increase speed, and, critically, the frequency of models generating outputs that are CFO-ready. Shorter timeframes, closer connectivity into planning and investment tools, and a genuine willingness to follow the data—to shift investment, pivot on formats, and hold creative to account—will provide the confidence needed to protect and grow media and marketing investment.

Robust test-and-learn frameworks will ensure brands are always learning to generate more growth. The media industry has always been limited by time restrictions and the capacity of humans to process data—such as the number of media plans they can physically create and analyse to contrast and compare different outcomes. Enabling AI to support the creation of infinitely more options will allow human intelligence to add to those elements that create the opportunity for brands to stand against blandness.

Our recent study that analysed 10,000 brands across 17 countries and five million data points identified three critical components of success: Visibility, variability, and vibrancy—the brand pattern being the relationship between the three components that drives growth.

  • Visibility is the foundation. If consumers don’t see your brand, they can’t buy it. Traditional marketing metrics like awareness and attention fall into this category.
  • Variability is what sets brands apart within a category. This includes perceptions of quality, value, and reputation.
  • Vibrancy is the multiplier. It captures how well a brand connects with culture through buzz, word-of-mouth, and social engagement.

The scale of the research, conducted with Felipe Thomaz, associate professor of marketing at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, enables the ability to monitor and measure how brand patterns develop within categories. When combined with generative AI, there is a huge opportunity to go beyond traditional, simplified marketing models to define and quantify the unique nature of each brand. The findings demonstrate that understanding and exploiting what makes a brand different is the number one driver of brand growth. These opportunities will only become more important as AI becomes more pervasive.

These incredibly robust analytical and modelling tools can provide a rich foundation for businesses to unlock nuanced opportunities to drive real growth. The power in using generative AI to automate multiple options of what we have always done manually will allow human intelligence to focus on building the nuance in marketing plans that will elevate brands.

Asking the right questions of AI to get to “good” media and marketing ideas that lean into brand outcomes allows us, as humans, the time and ability to focus on turning “good” ideas into “great” ideas.

Ultimately, the right use of AI—creating efficiency in the right way—will enable human focus and creative focus on the areas that make a genuine difference for brands, and more importantly, enabling them to stand against blandness.


Anathea Ruys is the CEO of UM Australia.

Source:
Campaign Asia

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