The AI marketing paradox: More content, less connection
22 Jul 2026
By Roland Glass, Chief Commercial Officer
Two weeks ago, it was a pleasure to join the cream of London and Johannesburg’s B2B and B2C marketing leaders at our CMO Roundtable. It’s been sobering to note that in just a couple of years the conversation has completely changed direction, from focusing on marketing talent and teams to emerging tech, especially artificial intelligence.
As has been the case since that conversation changed, the topic of AI dominated the conversation. Several participants noted that we’re engaged in an AI arms race, where “Drop the ball for 30 seconds and you’ll lose money” is practically a mantra and the pressure to be always on is… well, always on. Perhaps belatedly, some companies are becoming wary of adopting AI for its own sake – but many marketers are still being asked to do more difficult tasks with smaller teams because “AI can do it for you”.
One question that came up repeatedly was: “How do I, in a considered way, leverage AI to support me while still being authentic?” There’s a tension in marketing between how AI makes everything faster and more efficient on the one hand, and whether that has any worth when it comes to meaningfully engaging clients on the other. There’s something slightly clinical about the “speed and efficiency” conversation that overlooks the more important question of actual engagement. So how to navigate this when the important thing is connecting brands with customers, especially when any resource ask of the higher-ups is met with “see if AI can do it first, then we’ll talk”?
When are we going to start breaking up with AI?
We humans are in a complicated situationship with AI. Its usefulness is in no doubt – no one can deny that AI has proved enormously valuable to content marketing from an SEO perspective, for example – but Luddites and techno-optimists alike voice concerns. These range from the erosion of critical-thinking facilities already being reported among regular users of LLMs, to the leadership deficit that happens when we become dependent on ChatGPT to tell us what to do next. We’re frequently told to consider AI another member of the team, but many people don’t trust AI – and who would put their faith in a colleague they didn’t trust? It’s not surprising, given the overload of AI-generated “slop” and waning public trust, that creatives may seek to avoid using it for fear of over-using it.
Is less content the answer?
Content, the saying goes, is king, but we’re awash in a glut of it. The proliferation of channels plus the power of AI presents a major challenge for marketing – and a strong temptation to respond by creating as many assets as possible to throw at the social media feed, in the hopes that something will stick.
Trust is at an all-time low – 31% of consumers say that visible AI-generated marketing content makes them trust a brand less, associating it with lower perceived effort, lower authenticity, falsity and perceived manipulation. When prompted to name the best AI-generated content on the internet, the assembled guests struggled to name any at all. The only stand-out example was Coca-Cola’s 2024 Christmas ad, which leveraged the brand’s classic imagery of polar bears and trucks delivering the beverage in the snow – and even that proved divisive and controversial.
Authenticity is such a rare commodity that even the word “authentic” is starting to sound hackneyed. And even more worryingly for marketers dependent on social media algorithms for engagement, AI-generated content isn’t proving as sticky as expected. The tech has certainly made us more productive, but has it made our brands more valuable? Some might say that it devalues them – in the case of the Coke ad, there’s an argument to be made that the brand has squandered two core assets it’s spent decades building.
Are we measuring the right thing?
The attention economy, born of social media scrolling, means that we’ve become obsessed with eyeballs, talking about the “epidemic of distraction”. We’re not wrong, either: people now have a median attention span of only 40 seconds – 75% down over the last 20 years. The average length of active attention for an Instagram story is 0.9 seconds. The 14-second average active attention paid to television ads is considered exceptional.
Inevitably, we’ve thus placed a high value on views, but what if we’re measuring the wrong thing? Can a mere “view” – counted as anything three seconds or longer – really be called “engagement”? If your target audience is watching only three seconds of a 20-second narrative your brand shares, has it really had any impact – and if your reel is only three seconds long, how meaningful can it possibly be?
In the days of traditional media, we know from research that most advertising received very little attention. Yet no one worried that advertising wasn’t worth investing in. Because getting people to notice shouldn’t be the goal: keeping their attention should be. Even if 80% of people scroll past your brand’s post, within the remaining few sits a lot of rich, valuable data. Don’t make the mistake of confusing “someone stopped scrolling on this for three seconds” with “someone cared about this” – they may have been scratching their nose – rather tier different types of engagement from least to most impactful:
- View – minimal engagement; could mean just three seconds
- Like – low engagement, but the post has been noticed and evoked a response
- Comment or click-through – medium engagement; the post has been noticed and evoked a response strong enough for the user to express an opinion or seek to learn more
- Share – the ultimate prize: high engagement; the content has moved from “noticed” to “engaged with” to “endorsed”
We should be measuring – and paying attention to – this progressively deeper engagement. Three-second views can make weak content look successful simply because it technically appeared in front of people for long enough to count, whereas likes, comments and shares constitute more than attention – they constitute traction.
What makes people stop and care
One roundtable speaker suggested powerfully that “The issue isn’t attention, it’s what earns it. The answer isn’t to make more slop. It’s to make something worth stopping for.” AI won’t make mediocre storytellers better, they argued; it’ll just make it easier for them to be mediocre on a bigger scale. Thus, AI needs curation by good storytellers, people with the creative judgement to know which content will resonate with their audience on a human level. And the greater the volume of content, the more control we must exert, not less.
That, they said, is where agencies’ future lies: in demonstrating taste and judgement. To prove their worth amid the proliferation of easily-generatable AI content, creatives must leverage their taste – and they must be decisive about their taste and able to express it, because “a good idea badly told is a bad idea.” To assert these strengths and leverage AI effectively in our workflows, apply the 4-D framework:
- Delegation – AI can automate tasks and help to us ramp up production, but it can only do part of the job – not the whole job
- Discernment – AI can’t replicate a human’s taste, curation or judgement of what the audience will respond to
- Description – whether you’re prompting an AI or selling a vision to a client, clarity of expression overwhelmingly influences the quality of execution
- Diligence – we must be ever vigilant that our work is hallucination- and slop-free
At the CMO roundtable, we saw in action the value of having peers in this uncertain time, when professional loneliness seems to be on the rise. As we focus more and more intently on the AI-driven future, could it be that we’re leaving people behind? It’s more important than ever to keep our content and our ideation human, now that our creativity can so easily be mimicked. The edge we have lies in qualities that are so difficult to quantify – taste, discernment, a good eye – maybe it’s time to appropriately measure that other ineffable human trait: attention.
Further reading
Explore more perspectives on AI, creativity and the future of marketing:
