How to stand out from AI slop
When everyone's output looks professional, professional stops meaning anything.
Perfection is forgettable.
Punk rock happened because music got too polished to mean anything.
The musicians were often technically fine. The production was impeccable. But it had stopped feeling like anyone actually made it and nobody was saying anything that hadn’t already been approved.
Marketing is there now.
AI gives everyone access to professional grade output. Clean copy, tight structure, confident tone. The problem is everyone has access to the same thing. So professional grade is the mew floor now, not the differentiator
A few years ago I ran a billboard campaign with an intentional typo on it. Deliberate. A gamble. An underdog brand competing against companies with 10 times our budget. People noticed. They argued about whether it was a mistake. The brand became a conversation in a category that had none.
You can’t prompt your way to that. The decision to put a typo on a billboard, in that market, for that audience, required knowing exactly how they’d read it. That knowledge came from years of paying attention. The tool just ran the print job.
Punk worked the same way.
The Clash knew exactly what they were reacting against. The rawness was a choice. The safety pins were packaging. The point of view was the product.
AI is the roadie. You’re still the one who has to perform.
The brands that stand out won’t have the best prompts. They’ll have the clearest perspective and opinions on their category. What’s broken. What they see that nobody else is saying yet.
That doesn’t come from a tool. It comes from experience, watching enough things go wrong, and being honest about what you actually saw.
See you out there
Martin