How to Prevent Your Brand from Sounding Like Everyone Elses

I’ve watched AI make things I couldn’t have built myself a year ago, and there’s no doubt I’m going to keep using it.

But I also think it has made an astonishing amount of advertising and business writing worse than it’s ever been (you know exactly what I’m talking about).

My hot take: Too many posts arrive “perfectly polished,” and completely devoid of meaning. I’m sick of it.

LinkedIn is tired of this stuff too. It says generic, repetitive AI content is less likely to travel beyond someone’s immediate network. 

Keep in mind, many of these kinds of stats come from small, self-reported tests or vendor analyses, but they all point in the same direction -- humans are less inclined to read vague, commoditized crap.

At Freddy Media, we write a lot of B2B and B2B2C copy for our clients. So I asked Anna del Villar, our lead copywriter, to send me her thoughts on how we should use/are using AI. Seven pages later, I had enough material to ruin a perfectly good weekend. I cut it down to the rules below.

A writer starting a client campaign may have a sales deck, product documentation, interview transcripts, old ads, customer questions, and a competitor’s website open at once. Before writing, somebody has to sort through all of it.

AI can help us gather sources, organize notes, pull out recurring questions, and show where two documents make conflicting claims. We can ask it to lay out several possible structures for a piece, or to point out that the proof for a promising headline is missing from the materials we have. That gets us to the questions we need to ask the client sooner.

It can also handle the tedious production checks that come with publishing across channels, including: 

AI can flag those things for us to check.

Notice I said flag** An LLM can spot two different prices. It cannot tell us which price the client approved. It can find a statistic in a source and still misunderstand what was measured. Every factual claim that reaches a reader needs a person to verify it against the original material.

The other reason to use AI here is speed. We can spend less time sorting a transcript or checking twenty versions against a list of requirements. But faster production increases the risks of losing context, misstating an offer, or publishing a claim nobody fact-checked. If our output increases, our editorial QA has to increase with it.

Our writers decide what the copy should say, and they write the final words. That starts well before anyone opens a blank page.

Imagine a client selling software to car dealerships. AI can summarize its features and produce a respectable paragraph about efficiency. Anna needs to know who is being asked to buy it. 

Is it a dealer principal worried about wasted payroll, a service manager trying to reach customers, or a marketing director defending a budget? What problem does the product actually solve for that person? 

Those answers inform the campaign better than almost anything else. If the software helps stores recover missed service calls and the client has credible results, we may have a useful claim. If all we have is a list of features, we need more reporting before we promise a business outcome. A smoother sentence will not fix the missing evidence.

The same judgment governs voice and style. A founder can be blunt. A family brand might need warmth. Neither should sound like the other, and neither should sound like the mediocre average of a thousand marketing websites. Our writers learn how a client speaks, what its customers understand, and which words would make the client wince. AI can flag misalignment from a style guide. But a person needs to decide how the copy should sound.

Then comes the decision that often gets skipped… should we publish this at all? A technically correct ad can still make the wrong promise to the wrong buyer. Anna and the team have to make those calls and explain them.

That’s the manifesto. AI can help us gather, organize, and poke holes in our copy. The experience, the opinion, the final judgment, and the responsibility for publishing belong to us.

My fraternity brother Shea, his wife Carly, and their two toddlers had to leave their home after discovering extensive mold hidden behind the walls, floors, and ceilings. They’ve been living with family while working to make their home safe again.

Their youngest son developed severe eczema as a baby, and Carly spent more than a year searching for answers while dealing with health issues herself. The family says that within weeks of leaving the house, their son’s skin began to heal and he was finally able to enjoy being a toddler.

Now, Carly and Shea are facing the cost of mold remediation, home repairs, and replacing nearly everything they owned, including mattresses, furniture, and their children’s belongings. According to the family, insurance isn’t covering those expenses.

Here are some products we find useful and would encourage you to implement in your company.