How to stand out in a crowded space is one of those questions that seems almost impossible to answer. One camp says volume. Another says consistency: do your reps, but bring quality into the mix, not just volume. And now there’s a new camp: automate everything with AI, with automation and agentic workflows running your creative and your content. This one preaches volume, speed and, wait for it, quality.
We’ve all seen that the quality isn’t there yet. That’s why we keep hearing about “AI slop”. Think about your own feed. You’ve probably started to notice what’s been made with AI and what hasn’t. You’re not alone: a company that sells AI-powered advertising asked 500 marketers, and 68% agreed that AI creative “makes ads all start to look and feel exactly the same” (Smartly, The Agentic Era, 2026).
So the question remains. How do you stand out?
Helping companies work through this, here’s where we seem to be landing. The first ingredient is taking a stand on the problem you solve. Have a strong opinion on why it matters, what you do about it, how it solves someone’s problem, and why people should care. If it’s what you believe, it has a far better chance of coming across as authentic to your buyers.
Then that stand has to travel. You need to work out how to carry it to each of your buyer personas, and across every channel and format you use to spread the word, consistently and over time. That way buyers start to recognise you, and when they’re in market, you’re one of the companies they’d consider.
In the agentic world we’re heading into, I think this is the part to keep a human in the driver’s seat: your angle, your voice, the stand you take on the problem and how you talk about your solution and of course the creative direction (don’t leave this to AI at the start). Depending on your set-up, I’d probably use AI for about 60% of the production (my own estimate, from what we’re seeing at BlueMelon), the documentation and running the process. Once things start getting made, you need a person checking it’s all OK, and making sure the message and the creative don’t get lost in translation.
Even with all the new tech, someone still has to be responsible for what goes out. They approve the work and make sure the concept and direction hold. AI doesn’t make that job smaller. It fills it with micro decisions: which version, which line, which image, what to fix, what to cut. That’s a lot for one person or a small team, and it may be a reason to get some help to get things out the door.
Is AI why everything looks the same?
Maybe not on its own. B2B sameness was there before AI, but AI isn’t helping.
LinkedIn’s B2B Institute ran an eye-tracking study of 109 B2B ads in 2024. 81% failed to get enough attention or drive recall. B2B taglines were credited to the right brand just 5% of the time. (LinkedIn B2B Institute, Better, Bolder B2B Branding) It’s LinkedIn’s own research, so read it with that in mind. It’s also about B2B ads in general, not AI ones. Sameness isn’t new in B2B, and we know it.
Kantar looked at 356 AI-made ads. Their results spread about the same as traditionally made ads. Where AI ads tended to be a little weaker was branding. (Research Live, Dec 2025)
So my read is something along these lines: AI didn’t bring sameness into B2B. It makes more of it, faster. When everyone uses similar tools on similar briefs, the work drifts to the middle. Smartly’s survey, from the start of this post, suggests marketers are feeling it too: 68% of the 500 marketers it asked said AI creative makes ads look and feel the same. It measures what marketers think, not the ads themselves.
What makes people stop?
Emotion keeps coming up. Lynne Deason, head of creative excellence at Kantar, put it simply: “Emotion is key to effectiveness.” Her point: we notice what makes us feel something, and that shapes what we remember. (Research Live, Dec 2025)
Another report says B2B videos that use emotion are 13% more likely to generate leads, yet fewer than 1 in 10 B2B ads use it (LinkedIn, The State of Startups, 2026). We keep seeing companies talk about their product and its features, not how it feels when the problem is solved.
Memory matters too. NIQ tested AI-generated ads with EEG in 2024. Even the ones viewers rated high quality produced weaker memory activation than traditional ads. (NIQ, Dec 2024) That’s consumer research, not B2B. But being remembered is the whole point of brand work. Your brand needs to speak for you when you are not in the room. If you’re not remembered, you can’t be considered.
Carilu Dietrich, who led marketing at Atlassian through its IPO and is now an operating partner at a16z, calls the answer edutainment: “B2B marketers still need to educate, but education alone isn’t enough to earn attention.” Just look at all the people on LinkedIn now making their own videos, trying to educate, build an audience and, well, stand out.
So education still matters. People stop for something that helps them do their job better or see their problem differently. As Dietrich puts it, edutainment “is about making useful information interesting enough that people want to engage with it.” Useful comes first. The creative is what gets it noticed.
So where should the money go?
Dietrich also says: “Even in the AI era, growth starts with building something people genuinely love, and then finding creative ways to make people remember and share it.”
If making is cheap, here’s where I’d start:
- Be clear on your position. Know where you stand on the problem you solve.
- Take creative risks. Having a stand means not doing what everyone else is doing. Find your voice and style.
- Test bold ideas early. Don’t wait for an idea to be perfect. It never is.
- Build simple ways to test your message and creative. If you’re not testing, you’re playing it safe, not looking for your voice.
- Use brand cues. Colour, shape, voice, a format you repeat, a mascot or a brand character. Things people link to you without seeing the logo. (More in Are your assets distinctive? and 5 Ways to Build Brand Recognition.)
- Get AI to do the boring parts. Once the thinking is done, use it for the versions, the reports and the tests, and to pull insights from the data you have.
- Build a system. Something that keeps track of your tests, your rules and what’s working, so your creative gets sharper over time.
There’s no line item I know of that ties good creative directly to ROI. But I think most of us know that creativity, and believing in what you’re doing, is the path to standing out, and don’t get me started on ROAS.
What I don’t know yet
I’m still trying to find the right balance. What do we do ourselves, where should we help our clients, and how much AI belongs in creative work? Whether that’s helping a company stand out or, more often, helping it tell its story in a way that feels authentic to it.
I don’t know yet whether AI will eventually take over most of the process, or whether its output will become truly creative and consistent across every brand touchpoint.
And there’s a bigger question that keeps coming back to me: even if you could, are there parts of creative work that just shouldn’t be handed to a machine? I don’t know.
Six questions before you sign off your next piece of creative
Before you sign off: six questions
- Where do we stand on the problem we solve, and would a buyer know it?
- Are we carrying that stand to every persona, channel and format, the same way, over time?
- Would anyone know it’s ours with the logo covered?
- Where does it teach something useful, and/or make someone feel something?
- What are we testing this quarter, and where do we keep track of what works?
- Who owns the creative direction and the final call, and what are we handing to AI?
I’m still working this out, so I’d like to hear from you. What’s one piece your team made this year that only you could have made?
