Content is becoming increasingly average, and most marketing is making it worse

I want to say something that most people in marketing are thinking but not saying out loud.

My feed is filling up with content that nobody needed.

Not bad content, exactly. Competent content. Correctly formatted, properly structured, keyword-optimised, on-brand content that answers the question being asked without saying anything that hasn't been said before. Content that exists because a brief was written, an AI copy tool was used, and a box was ticked.

AI didn't necessarily create the problem. AI is just making content faster, cheaper and easier to produce. But the problem has been around for some time; in the for briefs, the reporting that gives a big green tick to volume of output, the content calendars, the agency models that measure success by the number of pieces delivered rather than the commercial impact of what was said. But visibility and attention aren't the same thing.

AI has simply removed the last remaining barrier to producing unlimited amounts of content that adds absolutely nothing of value.

And social feeds and, well, the internet as a whole, as a result, is becoming increasingly average.

AI isn't replacing marketers. It's exposing them.

Quit asking if AI will replace marketers. It won't. For AI to work correctly and produce results it needs to be run by people with actual opinions, values, and a unique POV.

For years, a significant proportion of marketing work was execution. Writing the brief, producing the content, managing the process, hitting the deadline, filling the calendar. Those tasks required time, skill and resource. They justified agency retainers, in-house teams and content budgets. They were, in many cases, genuinely difficult to do well at scale.

AI has made most of that activity trivially easy.

A tool can now write a first draft faster than me. It can produce ten variations of a headline in seconds. It can generate a month's worth of social content from a single prompt. It can adapt tone, adjust format and optimise for different platforms.

This isn't a threat to good marketing. It is a gift to it, because it frees the people who actually think from the burden of merely producing.

But it is absolutely a threat to marketing that was always just activity dressed up as strategy. To agencies that charged for the hours it took to produce things, rather than the quality of the thinking and planning behind them. To marketers who built careers on the ability to manage production processes rather than generate original ideas.

AI isn't replacing marketers. It's revealing which ones were actually thinking, and which ones were just keeping busy.

The advantage has shifted.

The businesses experiencing the sharpest declines in organic reach and content effectiveness are not the ones that produce the least content. They are the ones that produced the most content with the least original thinking behind it.

This is the reality that most businesses haven't yet fully absorbed.

A year ago, using AI tools in your marketing was a competitive advantage. Early adopters could produce more content faster, test more variations, move more quickly than businesses still running entirely manual processes. The advantage was real. But now, that advantage is gone. Every business has access to the same tools. Every agency can offer AI-assisted content production. Every marketing team can generate a first draft in seconds. The advantage has been completely commoditised, which means it's no longer an advantage at all.

What hasn't been democratised is judgement, the ability to decide what is actually worth saying. The capacity to understand an audience deeply enough to know what will truly move them. The strategic clarity to know which ideas serve the business and which ones just fill the calendar. The confidence to say something original rather than something safe.

Those things come from original thinking; from experience, from years of delving into customer thought processes, from a willingness to have a point of view that not everyone will agree with.

We have a content problem.

The content problem existed long before AI arrived in our ecosystem.

It existed in the briefing culture that valued quantity over specificity. In the agency model that charged for outputs and measured success by deliverables. In the marketing reports that counted posts published and impressions generated rather than trust built and pipeline influenced. In the content strategies that were really just production schedules.

What all of that content had in common was that it was produced to satisfy a process rather than to serve an audience. It existed because the calendar required it. Because the retainer included it. Because the competitor was doing it. Because the SEO strategy said it ranked.

AI has simply made it possible to produce that kind of content at unlimited scale, at negligible cost, and in doing so, it's made this fundamental problem impossible to ignore any longer.

Content was never too slow or too expensive to produce. The problem was that too much of the content being produced wasn't even worth producing in the first place. It wasn't saying anything new, it wasn't built around a genuine understanding of what the audience needed to hear, it wasn't connected to a commercial outcome beyond the vanity metric of visibility.

Is this a credibility crisis?

As the volume of AI-generated content increases, trust in content, all content, is declining.

Not because AI-generated content is inherently bad. Because undifferentiated content is ubiquitous. When everything looks the same, sounds the same and says the same things, people stop believing any of it. The guards go up. The scepticism increases. The threshold for engagement rises. And we filter it all out.

This is the credibility crisis that AI is fuelling, not by producing terrible content, but by producing competent, indistinguishable, unmemorable content at a scale that makes the whole ecosystem feel like noise.

The businesses that will emerge from this crisis with stronger brands, stronger authority and stronger commercial positions are the ones investing now in the thing that AI cannot replicate: original thinking, expressed with genuine conviction, in a voice that is recognisably theirs.

Originality. Originality. ORIGINALTY !!!

Originality in marketing doesn't mean being strange (but we can be), provocative or creative for the sake of it. Brands don't have to suddenly become subversive and unhinged. Being original means saying something that is your own, that comes from a specific perspective, lived experience, an actual point of view about the industry you work in and the people you serve.

It means being willing to name what isn't working rather than producing another piece of content about what is. It means having opinions that not everyone will agree with. It means building a body of work that could only have come from your business, because it reflects your thinking, your philosophy, your understanding of the problems your clients actually face.

This is harder than producing content at volume. It requires more thinking, more honesty and more courage. It can't be delegated entirely to AI. It requires the people who actually understand the business; the founders, the senior team, the people with real experience and genuine expertise, to be present in the content.

As our feeds become increasingly average. The opportunity, for any business willing to think rather than just produce, is clear. I hope. (read the sub-title again).

Where should you invest in marketing

Spending more on content production; more articles, more posts, more videos, more assets, will produce diminishing returns in an environment where AI has made production essentially free. Volume is no longer a competitive position.

The time investment should be spent on thinking. In producing content that doesn't simply sound eloquent, but has something to say. In understanding your audience deeply and developing a point of view about your industry that is specific, credible and consistently expressed.

Treat your founders and senior team as intellectual assets, not just operational ones, because their experience, their perspective and their willingness to say difficult things publicly is one of the few remaining marketing advantages that genuinely can't be commoditised.

The businesses that respond to AI by producing more AI content at higher volume are quickly heading in the wrong direction.

The question isn't what tools to use. It's what you have to say that's worth using them for.

Rachel Lyndon-Jones is Co-Founder and CMO of Ouma, a strategic growth partner helping ambitious UK businesses build connected growth systems. Rachel's work sits at the intersection of marketing psychology, brand trust and commercial strategy, helping businesses understand not just what to do, but why it works.