Happy Triple Threat Thursday and Merry Christmas!🎄
Here’s one Signal to notice, one Spark to try, and one Shift to consider.
This week's theme: The competitive advantage isn't producing more, it's staying recognizable.
📡 Signal — What’s Changing
Marketing Spends 75% Faster with AI, But 41% Say It Hurt Brand Distinction
Your marketing team just launched three campaigns in the time it used to take to produce one.
AI wrote the copy. AI generated the creative. AI optimized the targeting. The dashboards show productivity up 44%. Leadership is thrilled.
And nobody can tell your brand apart from the competition.
Recent research shows companies using AI in marketing see campaigns launch 75% faster and productivity gains of 44%. But 72% of marketers report that AI-generated content damages brand differentiation. Another 41% say AI content actively hurt their brand's distinction in market.
The math doesn't add up. More content, delivered faster, with better targeting should win. Except it doesn't. Because everyone else is doing the exact same thing.
Marketing strategist Mark Schaefer calls this "content shock." The thesis is simple economics: when supply of content vastly exceeds demand for consumption, something has to give. The cost to compete goes up. Reach goes down. And eventually, content marketing stops being sustainable for companies that can't afford to outspend the noise.
AI just made content shock exponential.
The amount of content on the web has exploded. AI is about to add another order of magnitude. We're not just competing with more content. We're competing with content that looks, sounds, and reads like ours because it was trained on the same data, optimized by the same algorithms, and deployed through the same channels.
Speed isn't the advantage anymore. Sameness is the cost.
Why it matters now:
Marketing teams that optimize for volume are training themselves out of relevance. AI makes it trivially easy to produce content that checks every box: keyword optimized, persona targeted, CTA included. What it can't do is make that content matter.
Schaefer's insight still holds. Creating great content isn't the finish line. It's the starting line. Business results don't come from content. They come from content that moves, content people choose to share, content that says something only your brand can say.
AI gives you speed. It doesn't give you a point of view.
What to do this week:
Audit your last month of AI-assisted marketing content. Not for performance metrics. For distinctiveness.
Ask: If you stripped the logo off this email, this ad, this post, could your audience tell it came from you? Or does it sound like every other brand in your category saying the same things in the same way?
For B2B: If your thought leadership reads like a competitor's thought leadership, you don't have a voice. You have a content factory producing undifferentiated output.
For B2C: If your brand messaging could work for three other brands in your space by changing one word, you're not building brand equity. You're filling channels.
The advantage isn't how fast you produce. It's whether anyone can tell the difference.
⚡ Spark — What to Try This Week
Brand Voice vs. AI Output Checker
Marketing teams are caught in a strange loop.
Leadership wants more content, faster. AI delivers. Productivity metrics go up. But six months later, campaigns that used to convert stop working. Brand recall drops. Customers say your messaging feels generic.
The problem isn't the AI. It's that nobody's checking whether speed came at the cost of distinctiveness.
This GPT walks you through a practical brand voice audit.
It starts by asking you to describe your brand's actual voice. Not the aspirational version in the brand guidelines nobody reads. The real one. The tone, the cadence, the things you always say and the things you'd never say.
Then it asks you to paste in recent AI-generated content: emails, ads, social posts, landing page copy.
The GPT compares them. Not for quality. For recognizability.
It shows you:
Where AI defaulted to generic phrasing instead of your voice
Which pieces could belong to any brand in your category
Where speed traded distinctiveness for efficiency
What to tighten, rewrite, or scrap entirely
Why it works:
Most teams don't realize they've lost their voice until it's too late. AI output looks fine in isolation. It's grammatically correct, on message, properly formatted. But when you stack it against your brand's real voice, the gaps become obvious.
This isn't about rejecting AI. It's about using it strategically. Let AI handle structure, research, and first drafts. Then make it sound like you.
The brands that win with AI won't be the ones that produce the most. They'll be the ones you can still recognize.
🔄 Shift — How to Rethink It
Default belief: AI lets marketing create campaigns faster, driving more output and better results.
Flip: AI content hurts brand distinction. Speed without strategy doesn't amplify your voice. It buries it under sameness.
A CMO at a mid-market professional services organization showed me her team's Q4 campaign performance.
They'd tripled content output using AI. Blog posts, emails, social, ads. Everything moved faster. The team felt productive. Leadership was happy with the efficiency gains.
Conversion rates dropped 18%.
She couldn't figure out why. The content hit all the marks. It was keyword optimized, persona targeted, properly formatted. Her team was doing everything right.
Except nobody could tell it was them.
I pulled three of their emails and three from competitors. Stripped the logos. Asked her which ones were hers.
She got two out of three wrong.
That's when it clicked. They weren't losing to better competitors. They were losing to noise. Their own AI-generated content sounded exactly like everyone else's AI-generated content because they were all optimizing for the same things: efficiency, volume, speed.
When there's too much supply and fixed demand, the cost to compete goes up and reach goes down. AI didn't break that equation. It accelerated it.
The CMO rebuilt her content strategy around one filter: would this get shared?
Not clicked. Shared. Because the economic value of content that isn't seen and shared is zero. Sharing is advocacy. It's someone saying "I believe this, and I want you to believe this too."
Generic AI content doesn't earn that. It gets skimmed and forgotten.
Why it matters:
Effort increased before the system broke. The team worked harder, produced more, optimized better. But they optimized for the wrong thing. Volume doesn't build brands. Voice does.
When speed becomes the goal, sameness becomes the cost. Every brand in your category has access to the same AI tools, the same training data, the same optimization playbooks. If you're all using the same inputs, you'll all get the same outputs.
The companies pulling ahead aren't producing more. They're producing differently.
How to apply it:
Stop measuring productivity by volume. Track distinctiveness. Can your audience identify your content without your logo? If not, you're producing noise.
Use AI for structure, not voice. Let AI draft outlines, pull research, format copy. Then rewrite it to sound like you. The value isn't in the first draft. It's in what you do with it.
Build a voice filter. Before any AI-generated content ships, ask: Does this sound like us, or does it sound like everyone? If it's the latter, it's not ready.
Producing fast only matters if people notice. And in a world where everyone can produce fast, being recognizable is the only advantage left.
💡 Operator Insight
A marketing director at a law firm told me they ran an experiment.
They published two blog posts in the same week. One was AI-generated, polished, keyword optimized. The other was written by their CEO, rougher around the edges, with a clear point of view.
The AI post got more traffic. The CEO post got more shares, more inbound leads, and three customer conversations.
They stopped measuring clicks. Started measuring signal.
📚 What I’m Reading
Insight: AI makes everyone a competent writer, but flooding the market with more content isn't the same as creating content that moves.
Insight: Companies using AI see 22% higher ROI and 47% better CTR, but only when they maintain brand voice and strategic differentiation.
Insight: Marketers must abandon vanity metrics and generic campaigns to embrace strategic AI that enhances distinctiveness, not just output.
📈 TL;DR
AI accelerates content production 75%, but 72% say it damages brand differentiation.
Content shock explains why: when supply exceeds demand, distinctiveness becomes the only advantage.
Speed without strategy produces sameness. The brands that win will be the ones you can still recognize.
Thanks for reading Triple Threat. See you next Thursday with another Signal, Spark, and Shift.
— Alexandria Ohlinger
p.s. If this helped you think sharper or move faster, share it with someone who builds the way you do. And if you want more practical insight between issues, connect with me on LinkedIn.