If Everyone's Marketing Looks the Same, What's the Bloody Point?

I've been keeping an eye on the conversations surrounding AI-generated promotional imagery for a while now, partly because I work in marketing and partly because I'm an inherently nosy person who likes to understand why people do what they do. And there's been a fair amount of discussion recently about the increasingly recognisable style of AI-generated posters, particularly those promoting events, entertainment and experiences.

You probably know exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Huge lettering, dramatic lighting, electric blue and orange colour schemes, impossibly enthusiastic people and a background so busy you need a lie down after looking at it. Everything is apparently going to be the most spectacular experience of your entire existence, whether you're buying tickets for a music festival or attending a quiz night in a village hall.

Now, I'm not having a pop at people for using AI. That would be spectacularly hypocritical considering how much I use it myself. Between running a movement business and a consultancy, AI has become a genuinely useful part of my working day. I use it to research, organise information, explore ideas and occasionally help untangle whatever nonsense is currently ricocheting around my head. It's particularly handy when you've got seventeen thoughts competing for attention and absolutely no intention of dealing with them in a sensible order.

And I can completely understand why small business owners have embraced it for their promotional material. If you've spent years trying to make something vaguely presentable in Canva, or paying somebody every time you need a poster for an event, suddenly being able to describe what you want and receive something that looks professionally produced is rather exciting. It removes barriers, saves money and opens up creative possibilities that weren't necessarily accessible before.

But I think there's a rather important distinction between being able to create something that looks impressive and creating something that actually works as marketing.

Because the more of these posters I see, the more I'm struck by how similar so many of them are. Not necessarily identical, obviously, but similar enough that you start recognising the style before you've even registered what the event is. The same dramatic typography, the same colour combinations, the same exaggerated atmosphere and often the same enormous blocks of information squeezed into every available corner. Individually, some of them look fantastic. Put half a dozen next to each other, though, and they start to blend into one great big neon-coloured blur.

Which is a bit unfortunate when the whole point of promoting your business is to give people a reason to notice you rather than somebody else.

I don't think this is exclusively an AI problem, either. Businesses have been copying each other's marketing for as long as marketing has existed. Somebody comes up with something that works, everybody else decides they'd quite like a bit of that success, and before long an entire industry has developed a remarkably similar visual identity. AI has simply made it quicker and easier to do, because now we can all produce something polished in a fraction of the time.

The irony is that we've got access to technology capable of generating almost anything we can imagine, and an awful lot of us appear to be imagining exactly the same thing.

I've also been curious about how people actually respond to this kind of imagery, rather than just what those of us working in marketing think about it. There have been suggestions that social media platforms deliberately reduce the reach of AI-generated content, although I haven't found convincing evidence of a blanket rule that automatically penalises an image simply because AI was involved. And, frankly, I think we sometimes give algorithms rather too much credit for our marketing problems. It's entirely possible that people scroll past certain types of content because they've seen so much of it that it no longer registers.

I had a little look at my own Facebook insights recently, more out of curiosity than any grand scientific ambition. My personal account is a mixture of business observations, dance, general life and occasional updates about two dogs who appear to regard me as an unpaid member of their domestic staff, so it's hardly a carefully controlled marketing environment. But I found two posts that were reasonably comparable in format. Both contained quite a lot of written content, and both were accompanied by an image of my face. One was an AI-generated illustration of me, while the other was an ordinary photograph.

The illustrated post had received 650 views from 348 unique viewers, with 37 engagements. The photograph had 918 views from 508 unique viewers, with 58 engagements. In other words, the photograph had approximately 41% more views and 57% more engagement.

Before anyone gets terribly excited, I'm not suggesting this proves that real photographs outperform AI-generated illustrations. The posts were about different things, published at different times and had different opportunities to accumulate views. There are far too many variables to make that claim, and I'd be a pretty dreadful consultant if I pretended otherwise. But it was enough to make me curious about whether the polished, imaginative imagery we can now produce so easily is necessarily what our audiences find most appealing.

The AI illustration was actually rather good. It looked like me, suited the subject and had a lovely hand-drawn quality. The photograph, on the other hand, was just me in a dressing gown, looking like somebody who'd recently had a conversation with her dogs and wasn't entirely convinced she'd won. There was nothing particularly impressive about it, and yet that was the post that reached more people and generated more interaction.

So I started looking at some of the wider research, and it seems I'm not the only person questioning the relationship between AI-generated imagery and audience response.

Canva's 2026 State of Marketing & AI Report, conducted with The Harris Poll, found that 78% of surveyed consumers would rather see advertising created by people, even if AI could produce something better. Seventy per cent felt that AI-generated advertising often seemed to be missing something, although 68% also said they didn't mind AI being used when it made advertising more useful or relevant to them.

That last finding is particularly important, because it suggests the issue isn't necessarily the technology. People aren't universally opposed to businesses using AI, but they do seem to have opinions about what those businesses are producing with it. Research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau has also highlighted a gap between how positively advertising executives believe younger consumers view AI-generated advertising and how those consumers actually feel about it. It's a useful reminder that being enthusiastic about something inside your own industry doesn't automatically mean your customers share that enthusiasm.

There's also research published in the International Journal of Information Management looking at consumer responses to AI-generated versus real imagery in hospitality advertising. It found a preference for genuine photographs, particularly when people were considering enjoyable experiences or purchases involving greater personal consideration. Credibility mattered, as did confidence that the imagery represented what they were actually going to receive.

And I think that's where this becomes particularly relevant for businesses selling experiences, because there's a difference between creating an attractive promotional image and helping somebody imagine what it would genuinely be like to become your customer.

If I'm looking at booking a restaurant, attending an event or visiting a venue, I want to get a sense of the place. I want to understand the atmosphere, the people and what makes it worth choosing. An AI-generated image of an impossibly glamorous crowd having the most extraordinary night of their lives might look fabulous, but if the actual event is taking place in a function room above a pub, I'm not sure it's telling me anything particularly useful.

And before anyone thinks I'm being snobby about function rooms above pubs, some of the best nights of my life have happened in places with questionable carpets, slightly sticky floors and a bar that only takes cash. There's absolutely nothing wrong with those places. Quite the opposite, actually. They often have bags of character, and that character is precisely what I'd want to see in the marketing.

I don't need somebody to manufacture a completely different experience to persuade me that the real one is worth attending.

Of course, there's a distinction between using AI to illustrate a concept and using it to create an apparently realistic representation of something that doesn't exist. Nobody reasonably expects a Halloween dance class to feature actual ghosts just because somebody has put them on a poster, although I've taught a few routines where participants have briefly looked as though their souls have left their bodies. But if you're using synthetic imagery to show facilities, crowds or experiences that customers might reasonably assume are genuine, you need to think carefully about the expectations you're creating.

Even putting that question of accuracy to one side, though, I keep coming back to the same commercial issue. What is your promotional material actually doing for your business?

I think we've become rather good at confusing professional-looking marketing with effective marketing. We see a beautiful graphic, a perfectly coordinated social media feed or a website full of impressive imagery and assume somebody must be doing a brilliant job. Sometimes they are. But looking the part and persuading somebody to choose your business are not automatically the same thing.

I've seen promotional materials created by people with absolutely no formal design experience that have been far more memorable than some very expensive campaigns. Not because they're deliberately amateurish, but because they communicate something distinctive. There's personality in them, a sense of the people behind the business and an understanding of who they're trying to reach. Sometimes they're a little imperfect, but they're recognisable.

And I think that's worth remembering when we're talking about AI, because the technology itself isn't preventing anyone from creating something distinctive. It can be an extraordinary creative resource when it's used with a clear understanding of the business, its audience and what it's trying to communicate. The difficulty comes when the starting point is simply asking for something that looks amazing, without having given much thought to what amazing is supposed to achieve.

If you're promoting a business, you should be able to explain why somebody might choose you rather than the alternatives. Not necessarily because you're better at everything, or cheaper, or louder, or more glamorous, but because there's something about what you offer that matters to the people you're trying to reach.

Maybe it's your atmosphere, your approach, your personality, your experience or the way you make customers feel. Perhaps it's something very practical that makes dealing with you easier than dealing with somebody else. Whatever it is, surely that's the material your marketing should be built around?

And it doesn't have to be outrageous to be distinctive. Not every business needs to be shouting at people in fluorescent orange letters. Some businesses are reassuring, understated, elegant or wonderfully ordinary, and those qualities can be just as valuable when they're relevant to the customer. The important thing is that the marketing actually reflects the business rather than borrowing an identity that happens to be fashionable.

Because if you take your latest promotional graphic, remove your business name and replace it with that of a competitor, would anybody notice? Would the imagery, language and overall impression still make perfect sense for somebody else offering broadly the same thing?

If the answer is yes, I'd be asking whether that piece of marketing is doing enough to distinguish you in the first place.

I'm certainly not suggesting we should all abandon AI and return to the heady days of Microsoft Publisher, clip art and WordArt, although there was something gloriously lawless about early homemade promotional materials. Nor do I think every business needs to employ a professional designer to produce something effective. A good designer can be enormously valuable, but professional design and distinctive marketing aren't mutually dependent, and neither guarantees the other.

What matters is having a clear idea of what you want people to understand, feel or do when they encounter your business, and making sure the material you produce helps achieve that.

AI can absolutely be part of that process. It can help develop ideas, explore creative directions, produce imagery and save enormous amounts of time. But it still needs somebody making decisions about whether the result is appropriate, recognisable and commercially useful.

That responsibility doesn't disappear because the technology has become easier to use.

In fact, I'd argue it becomes more important.

Because when everybody has access to the tools needed to create something that looks impressive, the competitive advantage isn't simply being able to produce an impressive-looking thing anymore. It's knowing what to create, why you're creating it and how it helps your business stand apart from the alternatives.

So use AI. Experiment with it, have fun with it and take advantage of what it can do. Just don't let the convenience of producing something beautiful distract you from the reason you're producing it in the first place.

Your marketing doesn't have to look like everybody else's to be taken seriously. It doesn't have to be perfect, and it certainly doesn't have to involve an explosion of neon lighting and typography large enough to be visible from space.

It does, however, need to give people some reason to notice you.

Because I don't think the biggest danger of using AI in your marketing is that somebody will recognise the image as AI-generated. I think it's that they'll scroll straight past it without remembering your business at all.

And don't even get me started on estate agents using AI to show me what a room could look like instead of what it actually looks like. I have an entirely separate rant brewing about that one.

But that's a conversation for another day…

Vector & Verse - helping businesses communicate what makes them worth choosing.

Research and further reading

Canva / The Harris Poll (2026) - State of Marketing & AI Report
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/marketing-ai-report-2026/

Interactive Advertising Bureau (2026) - The AI Ad Gap Widens
https://www.iab.com/insights/the-ai-gap-widens/

Belanche et al. (2025) - Customer reactions to generative AI vs. real images in high-involvement and hedonic services, International Journal of Information Management.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2025.102954