Brand or beige.

Marketing today is caught between two extremes: sweat every detail of an ad, or spit out a thousand and care about none. Both can make even the strongest brands fade into beige.

Tom Goodwin named it in a post just recently. For years, marketers agonised over every detail in their ads. Five hours on a single voice-over, weeks on the exact grey of a t-shirt — because the asset would be seen millions of times and getting it wrong was expensive. Then production got cheap. Now we hand a thousand AI-generated variations to the algorithm, lean back and watch what sticks. He called it setting fire to money at scale. (Bob Hoffman would probably agree with that or say something even worse.)

Tom makes the meaningful point so many conversations miss right now. The answer is in the space between the extremes — craft where it counts, automation where it doesn’t, judgement above both. As he put it: it’s not our job to try, it’s our job to know.

I agree with all of it. I’d just keep pulling on that last line.

Knowing was enough when a few senior people made a few big calls a year, with the judgement held in their heads, some alibi brand-guideline PDFs, and the work slow enough to carry it. That’s not the shape of the work anymore.

Now that judgement has to survive a junior marketer with ChatGPT open at 7pm. A thousand auto-generated variants no one will review. An agency in another timezone that has never met your founder. A brand voice the model invented because nobody ever gave it the right instructions to sound like yours.

Having good judgement is rare and hard enough on its own. But the real challenge right now is getting it out of people’s heads and brand books and into something humans and machines can both read and act on — so everything built with and without AI, and every interaction it touches, still carries the brand’s identity and edge.

This goes way beyond the walls of the marketing organisation behind the brand. It’s happening out where people actually meet you. Brand used to arrive head-on — an ad, a shop, a product in your hand. Now it comes increasingly pre-digested: compressed into an AI search answer, lost in a feed where everything is machine-made and looks alike, mediated by a bot at the moment someone decides to buy. If your brand isn’t legible to those systems, they’ll render a version of you anyway — flatter, blander, closer to the category than to you.

Which is why we’re overdue a different conversation. About what brand even is now, where it lives, and who, or what, carries it when half the touchpoints are run by a model.

The role of brand is shifting under us, on both sides: how it’s built, and how it’s felt. It’s time we rethought it — and reinvented how brand actually lives, in people’s reality and inside the company.

That’s the exciting work to do right now: building a brand the machines amplify instead of blur. So people recognize it among an army of copycats and AI slop and buy from it.

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First published on LinkedIn, 04.06.2026.