Have you noticed that a lot of graphics and designs are starting to look the same? 

Some big campaigns are giving you deja vu or everything seems entirely unremarkable? 

Well you wouldn’t be the only one… 

Three in four marketers now worry that AI-generated creative makes brands look and sound the same. 86% have seen AI outputs that resemble competitor content.

So we’re all sinking into sameness AND

• Marketing budgets are sitting at 7.7% of company revenue this year. Same as last year.
• Gartner’s own survey found 59% of CMOs don’t think that’s enough to actually deliver on what they’ve been asked to do, 
• The same report points out that media inflation means every paid dollar buys less reach than it used to. 
• Add cost-of-living pressure making audiences choosier about what earns their attention, 
• A harder job convincing people to notice you at all, 
• A leadership team where everyone has an opinion on the how marketing should be done…

Well you’ve just cooked up the perfect storm!

That’s the actual weather marketing is operating in right now; businesses are playing it safe and avoiding risk because of a high pressure environment. 

Makes sense right? 

We say WRONG

What “safe” used to mean

You used to know the big brands by the big production budgets or billboards, that was it. There were always brands that went the step further but it wasn’t essential. 

Now marketing and advertising is more affordable, people can fake 4K video, full team of talent, styling, storyboarding etc. with a well done prompt… and 20 minutes, now we’re not making the argument it’s going to be an amazing quality BUT it is pseudonymous with what we were taught to see as impressive. 

So, naturally, it’s not impressive anymore… because it’s not scarce. It’s accessible. 

The floor dropped out

Production quality, scale and consistent presence, the three things that used to protect a cautious brand, are now available to almost anyone with a couple AI subscriptions and an afternoon. AI has closed the gap between a brand with a serious budget and one without. 

What it hasn’t closed is the gap between a brand with something to say and one without.

Recent estimates put a significant share of new web content as AI-assisted or AI-generated, no surprise… but that means every brand relying on the same tools, trained on the same data and optimised against the same patterns, is converging on the same output. 

In 2024, Klarna cut its marketing agency spend by 25% and moved a significant share of its creative production in-house through generative tools, publicly reporting close to USD10 million a year in savings. Smart move? 

…well, hate to break it to you but they would go on to admit, a year later, that they had pushed automation further than the business could actually support and had to start rebuilding the human capability it had cut. 

We’ve heard the story before, it seems to be all over the news nowadays. 

People are more disconnected from brands than they’ve been in years, because they see their own attention as a currency. Social platforms brands are now competing with cute cat videos and AI fruit characters for attention (no, really, it’s a thing). 

With every brand competing for the same sliver of attention, audiences have got selective about where they spend their attention currency. More and more we’re seeing people get behind unpolished, real content that represents a stand, an opinion or a value. Buying is inherently emotional but your audience is becoming more emotionally intelligent.

The data on risk aversion

LIONS’ State of Creativity 2025 report, drawn from more than a thousand marketers and creatives, found that only 13% of brands consider themselves risk-friendly in their creative decisions, while 29% openly describe themselves as highly risk-averse. The same report, citing WARC and Deloitte research, found that risk-taking brands generate FOUR TIMES higher profit margins and are 33% more likely to achieve long-term revenue growth than their cautious counterparts.

… if that’s not the magic ingredient we don’t know what is! 

Gartner’s research tells a version of the same story from the CMO’s chair. In a survey of more than 400 CMOs, 84% reported high levels of strategic dysfunction inside their own organisations, and Gartner found that CMOs who successfully shape their market, rather than simply operate within it, are eight times more likely to succeed in the role. Heading into 2025, Gartner told CMOs plainly that incremental improvement wouldn’t be enough, and that differentiation needed to sit at the centre of strategy.

This isn’t really the narrative we’re hearing though, we hear that AI should be making teams do more with less and produce more of the same result. 

What’s the answer then? When marketing teams are faced with less budget and more pressure as well as executive teams that have low risk appetite… 

There needs to be a perception shift around what ‘risk’ actually is in marketing… 

What “risk” actually means here

When you think about ‘risk’ what comes to mind? 

> running a campaign that you don’t know will perform

> making a stand not everyone will like

> creative formats that build brand rather than paid campaigns that are $ in $$ out

The obvious objection is that risk costs money, and most brands don’t think they have a war chest for it. They focus on the quarterly and annual budgets and invest in what pays back in those periods… but none of the brands we know and love have built with that mindset!

They invested in creating a brand people recognise and trust, that probably wasn’t through generic ‘buy this’ ads! 

Creative risk, in this context, means making a choice someone could reasonably disagree with. It means holding a point of view specific enough that a competitor genuinely couldn’t run the same campaign, because the campaign is built from something only your brand actually believes. That’s a cost of nerve, not a cost of budget.

The diluted, committee-approved version, is exactly what AI already does well and cheaply. That’s not a criticism of AI. It’s genuinely expanding what smaller brands can produce, putting production values once reserved for the largest players within reach of businesses that could never have afforded them before. 

But production value was never the differentiator. 

The idea underneath it always had to come from somewhere human: a read on culture, an emotional judgement, a willingness to say the specific thing instead of the safe thing.

That’s human and it’s what builds connection with your brand.

The authenticity premium

Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer named innovation itself as a new risk factor for trust, with people increasingly wary of change they can’t see the human judgement behind. That wariness extends naturally to brand communication that reads as generated rather than considered. Audiences don’t need to be told when there’s nothing behind the message. They can tell.

Trust, at scale, gets built the same way it always has: by saying something specific, taking a position, and backing it up in the work. Not by being present everywhere with content that could have been written for anyone. Research on brand trust consistently finds a meaningful share of consumers willing to pay more for brands they actually trust. That premium isn’t purchased with reach. It’s earned with distinctiveness.

A counterargument…

As we touched on before, short-term budget cycles punish long-term brand investment. Economic pressure has pushed marketing dollars toward search and retail media, channels that report immediate, measurable returns, and away from brand-building that pays out on a longer horizon. 

Most organisations’ incentive structures reward the safe, measurable activation over the harder-to-prove long game, and that isn’t a failure of individual marketers. It’s the system they’re operating inside.

So we ask you, how can we redefine how we incentivise good marketing, for our sake as marketers who want to be creative and for the sakes of consumers who have to see 100s of bland sloppy ads that don’t mean much.

It’s also true that risk can genuinely damage a brand but if you take a stand that is genuinely married to your values as a company (assuming they’re positive values) then it’s likely to unite your people rather than turn them against you. 

And the case for data-driven decision-making, taken seriously, now argues for creative risk rather than against it. The data is in front of us: caution underperforms.

What can you do now? 

Incentivise creativity! Don’t micromanage your creative teams, your agencies – in fact encourage out of the box thinking by nailing what you stand for confidently and letting them run with it. 

If your business is united around your position then you’ll be aligned around where you want the brand to go, what risks are aligned with that direction and which ones are not. 

AND use this blog or any of the reports we mentioned to help decision makers to understand that creative ‘risk’ is necessary for success, you can set a quota of experimentation for the quarter and measure long term impact… not direct sales. 

Nobody’s being asked to throw caution out entirely. The ask is smaller and harder: recognise that caution now carries its own price tag, and that the cost of being forgotten has quietly overtaken the cost of being bold.

The easy option is never the most effective one, in life and in marketing – a wise proverb for you. 

Rant over:

The brands that outperform over the next five years won’t be the ones with access to the best tools, everyone has access to them. It will be the ones with a clear point of view, and the nerve champion it creatively.

The most dangerous thing a brand can do right now isn’t take a creative risk. It’s mistake efficiency for strategy, and disappear into ‘the feed’ alongside everyone else who makes the same mistake.

This is the territory Milkman works in: helping brands work out what they actually stand for, then working out how to say it creatively.