What Would the Industrial Revolution Think of Us? 🤦
Every technological revolution created room for groundbreaking leaps. Marketing seems to be using AI’s gain to produce more sameness.
A Short Pencils opinion on what marketing has chosen to do with the time AI gave back, and why the bigger opportunity is not more content, but better work.
A large part of the conversation around AI focused on efficiency.
Faster production. Faster adaptation. Faster versioning. Faster output.
All of that is useful. It saves time, reduces cost and removes a lot of repetitive effort.
But every technological leap gave people something more important than efficiency. It gave them room to improve what they were making.
That is what keeps bothering me about the way marketing is using AI.
Where is the marketing equivalent of R&D?
If AI gives teams back time, part of that time should go into better thinking, better experimentation and better work.
It should create more room for testing something unusual or trying something the budget did not allow before.
Instead, much of the gain seems to be going into producing more content.
More posts.
More cutdowns.
More formats.
More assets.
More versions of the same thing.
And most of it looks and feels exactly like that.
Routine.
Formulaic.
Forgettable.
People became extremely good at ignoring it.
That should worry us.
Because if AI only helps us fill feeds faster with things people already scroll past, then a large part of the value is being wasted.
The bigger opportunity is somewhere else.
It is in making work that people actually want to spend time with.
Work that makes them feel something.
Work that makes them smile.
Work that makes them think.
Work that stays with them.
That kind of work has always been harder.
It still is.
But AI should have made more room for it, not less.
Routine work may increasingly move in-house. The agency should earn its place through the work that requires real creative value.
That is where the value should be.
Not in producing more sameness at scale, but in using the saved time and lower production pressure to create work that stands out and means something.
Make work people want to spend time with
Take a moment and think of a few ads you still remember.
Why do you remember them?
Now think of the hundreds of paid posts and digital ads you saw recently.
How many of them stayed with you?
Is your output earning attention, or filling space?
Short Pencils reviews what your brand and communications are producing, what people actually notice, and where the time and budget should go instead.
Habib Rihana is the founder of Short Pencils, an independent marcom advisory helping leadership teams, CMOs, founders, boards, and agencies make stronger marketing and communications decisions across the Levant and GCC.
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