There’s a peculiar kind of sadness to watching a brand post something on social media simply because it feels it must. Not because it has a point. Not because there’s a useful idea in there somewhere, a pithy observation, a story worth telling, or even a half-decent joke. Just because it’s a Tuesday and the content calendar demands feeding.
The sheer scale of the resultant bloat is starting to change the creative economy itself. We’re no longer just living in an attention economy. We’re living in a content glut. Every brand is a publisher, every founder is a “thought leader,” every intern has been gently encouraged to “just try something on TikTok”, and every marketing team is being handed AI tools that can turn a half-formed thought into 30 variations before anyone has had time to ask whether the thought was worth having in the first place.
The result is certainly no golden age of creativity. It’s a golden age of output. And those two things are not the same.
The data tell us that audiences are now spread across streaming, gaming, social video and creator-led platforms, with media habits becoming more fragmented and competitive for attention. There’s also been a definite normalisation of AI in content creation in recent years, with marketers using it for everything from idea generation to content drafting and repurposing.
Of course, none of this is inherently bad. More tools can mean more access, more experimentation and more creative possibility. But it can also mean more sludge.
That’s the paradox. When everyone can make more, “more” stops being impressive and starts feeling frankly frustrating and overwhelming. When everyone can show up everywhere at one, presence stops feeling like commitment and starts feeling like noise. When everything looks polished, polish stops being a signal of quality. The premium shifts somewhere else: towards taste, judgment, restraint, originality and, perhaps most importantly, intent.
As Daniel Binns, Global CEO at Elmwood, puts it: “Abundance was supposed to be the goal. More channels, more formats, more touchpoints, more content. The brands that won were the ones that showed up everywhere, all the time, at volume. And for a while, that logic held.
“It doesn't anymore.”
That’s the shift. For the past decade, the dominant content strategy has been built on multiplication. More formats. More platforms. More edits. More assets. More posts. More newsletters. More reels. More thought leadership. More always-on everything. The logic was simple enough: if audiences were scattered across channels, brands had to scatter themselves too.
But now the feed is full. The creative challenge is no longer whether a brand can produce enough content to be visible. It’s whether anything it produces is meaningful enough to be remembered.
The End of More for More’s Sake
White Bear Studio
There was a time when content abundance felt like a strategic breakthrough. Brands didn’t have to wait for a television campaign, a quarterly brochure or a big PR moment. They could publish constantly, respond quickly, build communities, test ideas and learn in public. The old gatekeepers didn’t disappear, but they lost their monopoly. That mattered.
For smaller businesses, creators and independent studios, the content explosion opened doors that had previously been welded shut. A designer could build a following without waiting for an industry magazine. A founder could explain their business directly. A musician could find an audience without a label. An agency could turn its thinking into a lead generation engine. A niche brand could behave like a media company.
So, let’s not pretend abundance was all bad. It democratised access. It gave creative people routes around old systems. It made marketing less dependent on a few expensive moments. It rewarded speed, usefulness and cultural fluency.
The problem is that every advantage eventually becomes a baseline. Once every brand can publish, publishing is no longer the point. Once every business has a content calendar, the existence of a calendar isn’t strategic. It’s admin. Once every competitor is pumping out articles, social posts, video clips, email sequences, founder updates and “five things we learned” carousels, the market doesn’t reward the act of production. It rewards the rare thing production is supposed to carry: a point of view.
That’s where many brands have lost the plot. They’ve mistaken distribution for distinction. They’ve confused frequency with presence. They’ve treated consistency as a matter of volume rather than meaning. They’ve asked “what can we post?” when the better question is “why would anyone care?”
Binns cuts straight to the heart of it: “When everything is everywhere, presence stops being an advantage. The feed is full. The formats are saturated. Audiences have developed a finely tuned instinct for brands that are creating because they have something to say versus brands that are creating because they have a calendar to fill. They can feel the difference, even when they can't name it.”
Audiences don’t always articulate creative fatigue in the language marketers use. They don’t say, “This brand appears to be suffering from an undifferentiated asset production strategy.” They just scroll past. They feel the deadness. They sense when something exists because Monday needed a LinkedIn post. They know when a brand is talking because it has something to say, and when it’s talking because silence makes the marketing department nervous.
The cruel thing about content abundance is that it punishes mediocrity quietly. Bad work can still be criticised. Average work simply disappears.
AI Has Made Average Output Practically Infinite
Dusted
Generative AI has poured rocket fuel on this problem. It has made it easier than ever to produce competent, passable, acceptable content. Not necessarily good content, and certainly not necessarily original content, but content that looks enough like content to satisfy a dashboard.
That’s both useful and dangerous. Used well, AI can support creative workflows, speed up research, generate rough options, help with localisation, adapt assets, summarise information, structure thinking and remove some of the drudge from production. For stretched teams, that’s not trivial. The fantasy that every creative person wants to spend their life resizing assets and rewriting the same paragraph for five platforms is one of the more insulting myths of modern marketing.
But the danger is obvious. If AI makes average content faster and cheaper, there will be more average content. A lot more. The internet already had a quantity problem before every brand, publisher, agency and opportunistic affiliate site discovered a machine that can produce “SEO-friendly” copy at the speed of mild panic.
Most marketers are already using generative AI, but the challenge is moving beyond efficiency towards actual effectiveness. That distinction is everything. Productivity is not the same as originality. A faster route to blandness is still blandness. A more efficient content machine can still be pointing in the wrong direction.
The brands most at risk are not the ones using AI. They’re the ones using AI to avoid thinking. They’re the ones asking tools to generate posts before they’ve worked out their position. They’re the ones automating the middle. They’re the ones mistaking language-shaped output for insight.
This is why originality becomes more valuable in an AI-saturated landscape. Not because AI can’t produce novelty. It often can. Not because human work is automatically better. It isn’t. But because originality, in a commercial context, is not just the production of something that hasn’t existed before. It’s the expression of a distinctive perspective, shaped by judgment, context, risk, experience and intent.
AI can help articulate a position. It can’t decide whether the position is worth taking. It can remix signals. It can’t give a brand courage. It can produce a line that sounds like a campaign. It can’t make the organisation behind it mean it.
That’s where creative value is moving.
Originality Is Not Weirdness for Its Own Sake
Pearlfisher
One of the lazier misunderstandings of originality is that it means being strange. Louder colours. Odder copy. More surreal visuals. A mascot with unresolved childhood issues. A brand tone of voice that sounds like a stag do discovered behavioural economics.
Originality can involve all of that, though ideally not at once. But originality isn’t just weirdness. It’s distinctiveness with purpose.
A truly original brand idea doesn’t have to be eccentric. It can be simple, direct and almost painfully obvious once someone has had it. The originality lies in the clarity of the decision, the truth of the observation, the sharpness of the positioning or the unexpectedness of the execution.
In a content-abundant world, originality often looks like restraint. It’s the brand that doesn’t jump on every trend. The studio that doesn’t publish a take on every news story. The agency that doesn’t turn every internal meeting into thought leadership. The business that knows which platforms matter and which ones are just there to make the board feel modern.
This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, because many content strategies are built less around audience need than organisational anxiety. We post because competitors post. We publish because the calendar says so. We make videos because video is “important”. We launch a podcast because someone senior listens to podcasts. We write about AI because everyone is writing about AI. We join TikTok because the deck says Gen Z, even though the brand has all the native energy of a laminated expense policy.
Originality begins by refusing that reflex. It asks what the brand can genuinely add. It asks what the audience actually needs. It asks whether the format fits the message. It asks whether the work expresses a position or merely occupies a slot.
Binns puts it plainly: “The new competitive advantage isn't output. It's intent.”
That’s not a soft idea. It’s a strategic one. Intent is what stops content becoming compost. It’s what gives creative work a reason to exist beyond the mechanics of distribution.
Intent Is the New Creative Filter
Critical Mass
Intent sounds obvious until you look at how much content appears to have been made without it. The internet is filled with brand activity that answers the question “can we?” but not “should we?” It’s a museum of possible formats with no real editorial judgment.
Intentionality changes the order of operations. It means the “why” comes before the “what”. It means a brand doesn’t start with “we need three LinkedIn posts, two reels and a blog.” It starts with “what are we trying to make people understand, feel, question, trust or do?”
Binns expands on this beautifully: “Intentionality means knowing why you're making something before you make it. What it's for, who it's genuinely for, and what it adds to the world beyond occupying space in a feed. It means being strategically selective: choosing the platform that actually fits rather than colonising every one, making fewer things that mean more rather than more things that mean nothing.”
That phrase, “beyond occupying space in a feed”, should probably be taped above every content team’s desk. Because occupying space has become too easy. Meaning something is harder.
The best content strategies now behave more like editorial strategies. They have judgment. They have exclusions. They know what they don’t cover. They understand cadence, but they don’t worship it. They build memory over time. They repeat important ideas without becoming repetitive. They create a recognisable world around the brand.
This is where the old distinction between brand and content starts to collapse. Content is not a separate activity that sits underneath the brand. It’s one of the most visible ways the brand proves what it believes. Every post, article, video, campaign, collaboration and comment either strengthens the brand’s meaning or dilutes it.
That’s why originality is not the job of the “creative bit” at the end. It has to come from strategy. A brand that doesn’t know what it stands for will struggle to make original content because it has nothing to be original about. It can borrow formats, mimic competitors, polish language and generate assets, but it won’t have a centre of gravity.
And audiences can feel that. They might not express it in brand strategy terms, but they know when a company’s content is all surface. They know when a brand has a tone but no conviction. They know when a campaign is pretending to care about something the business hasn’t earned the right to discuss.
The Audience Has Developed Better Filters
Prospekt Agency
One of the great marketing delusions is that audiences are passive recipients of brand output. They’re not. They’re editors. Ruthless ones.
People filter constantly. They skip pre-rolls, mute accounts, ignore newsletters, swipe through stories, reject obvious AI slop, avoid search results that look mass-produced and mentally blacklist brands that waste their time. They might not be consciously evaluating originality, but they are constantly deciding what feels worth attention.
Edelman’s Trust Barometer work has repeatedly shown the connection between trust, culture and business credibility, with recent research pointing to the importance of companies engaging with social and cultural realities in ways that feel authentic rather than opportunistic. That’s the trap. Cultural relevance is powerful, but only when it’s earned. Otherwise, it’s just a brand wearing someone else’s clothes.
The same is true of creator partnerships. The rise of creator-led media has trained audiences to expect specificity, personality and honesty. A creator doesn’t usually win attention by sounding like a committee. They win because their presence is recognisable. Their judgment is part of the product. Their taste is the filter.
Brands often want that effect but struggle with the vulnerability required to achieve it. Originality requires edges, and edges create risk. If a brand stands for something clearly, some people won’t like it. If it develops a distinctive voice, some people will find it annoying. If it chooses one platform over another, it might miss a trend. If it publishes less, someone will ask whether “engagement is down”.
This is where leadership matters. Originality is not produced by asking everyone in the organisation to approve everything until all danger has been removed. That process doesn’t create brand safety. It creates brand beige. It creates the kind of content that has technically passed through all stakeholders but spiritually died around comment 47.
The brands that cut through tend to have a clearer sense of what they’re willing to be. That doesn’t mean reckless. It means decided.
As Binns says: “The brands pulling away from the pack right now aren't the loudest. They're the most intentional. They've decided what they stand for, and everything they create is in service of that decision. Intentionality isn't a creative virtue. It's a strategic one.”
Content Abundance Makes Brand Memory Harder
Fourmeta LTD
The great irony of abundant content is that it can make brands less memorable. A company can publish every day and still leave no trace.
That’s because memory is built through coherence, not sheer volume. If every piece of content looks and sounds different because the brand is chasing formats, trends and platform conventions, the audience may see a lot of activity without forming a clear impression. The brand becomes present but blurry.
This is especially dangerous in social media, where platform logic rewards adaptation. A brand is told to behave one way on LinkedIn, another on TikTok, another on Instagram, another on YouTube Shorts, another in email, another in search. Some adaptation is obviously necessary. A 2,000-word essay doesn’t belong in an Instagram caption unless the goal is to ruin someone’s lunch break. But when adaptation becomes fragmentation, the brand loses itself.
Originality helps because it creates recognisable patterns. Not rigid templates, but creative consistency. A way of seeing. A way of speaking. A set of themes. A visual or verbal rhythm. A point of view that survives format changes.
This is why distinctiveness matters more in a high-output world. If the audience encounters ten pieces of content from a brand in ten places, those pieces need to add up to something. They don’t all need to repeat the same message, but they should feel like they come from the same mind.
Too much content marketing is built around isolated assets. One article here. One campaign there. One trend post. One founder video. One awareness push. One SEO cluster. One case study. Each might be fine on its own, but together they create no cumulative meaning. It’s like listening to someone speak in complete sentences that never become a conversation.
The brands that win are not necessarily making less content in absolute terms. They’re making more deliberate content. They know which ideas deserve repetition. They know which stories build the brand. They know the difference between a campaign asset and a contribution to long-term memory.
AI Slop Is Making Human Taste More Valuable
Tim Devine
“AI slop” is an ugly phrase, but then it’s describing an ugly phenomenon: low-effort, mass-produced content generated to fill feeds, game search, harvest attention or simulate creativity. It’s not that AI-assisted work is automatically bad. Some of it is excellent. The problem is content made without taste, care or accountability.
As synthetic media becomes more common, audiences are beginning to ask different questions. Is this real? Who made it? Why does it exist? Is this useful, or was it generated because the marginal cost was basically nothing? Is there a human being with judgment behind this, or has a brand simply connected a tool to a calendar and wandered off?
Even AI-generated influencers and synthetic brand characters are becoming mainstream enough to provoke serious questions about transparency, trust and authenticity. Recent reporting has shown brands experimenting with AI-generated personas and virtual influencers, but also highlighted concerns about disclosure and audience perception.
In that environment, human taste becomes a premium skill. Taste is not just aesthetic preference. It’s the ability to choose. To know what to leave out. To sense when something is over-explained, undercooked, derivative, hollow or just not quite alive. Taste is what prevents a brand from publishing something simply because the tool produced it.
This is particularly important for agencies and creative teams. Their value can’t just be production anymore, because production is becoming easier to automate. Their value has to move upstream into judgment: defining the idea, shaping the system, choosing the right references, understanding the audience, setting the creative standard, knowing when an AI output is useful and when it’s just plausible nonsense wearing nice shoes.
For creative talent, this is both threatening and liberating. The average middle of the market will get squeezed. That’s already happening. If a task is purely about producing acceptable variations of familiar things, AI will compete aggressively. But if the work requires taste, originality, cultural intelligence, strategic thinking, emotional precision, craft or a genuinely distinctive voice, the human role becomes more important, not less.
The future creative professional is not just someone who can make. It’s someone who can decide what’s worth making.
Fewer, Better Things Is Not a Retreat
9inchideas
Whenever someone argues for making fewer things, someone else hears defeat. Less content? Less visibility? Less reach? Less growth? What is this, a monastery?
But “fewer, better things” is not a retreat from ambition. It’s a rejection of waste. It’s an admission that attention is finite, teams are finite, budgets are finite and audience patience is very definitely finite. The question isn’t whether brands should create content. Of course they should. The question is whether the work is compounding or evaporating.
A high-quality flagship piece can generate more value than 30 filler posts if it gives the brand something real to build around. A distinctive campaign idea can travel across platforms more effectively than a pile of disconnected assets. A sharp point of view can do more for brand authority than a dozen generic “insights” articles whose main insight is that trends continue to trend.
That doesn’t mean every piece of content has to be a masterpiece. This is marketing, not the Sistine Chapel. Some content is functional. Some answers practical questions. Some supports sales. Some helps customers. Some improves search visibility. Some explains products. That’s fine. Usefulness has its own dignity.
But even functional content benefits from originality. A how-to guide can have a point of view. A product page can express brand character. A case study can tell a real story rather than embalming a project in jargon. A recruitment post can sound like a human workplace instead of a values deck with Wi-Fi.
Originality doesn’t always mean making something spectacular. Sometimes it means refusing to sound like everyone else when answering the same question.
What This Means for Brands
Lively Green Strategic Brand Consultancy
For brands, the lesson is not to stop creating. It’s to stop confusing activity with strategy.
The first step is ruthless clarity. What does the brand believe? What does it know better than others? What conversations does it have permission to enter? What should it avoid? What do audiences come to it for? What would be missing if it stopped publishing tomorrow?
That last question is brutal but useful. If the honest answer is “not much”, the content strategy needs work.
Brands should also audit their output for sameness. How much of it could be published by a competitor with the logo changed? How much is driven by internal priorities rather than audience value? How much is original thinking, and how much is recycled category language? How much exists because it matters, and how much exists because a slot needed filling?
Then comes platform discipline. A brand doesn’t need to colonise every channel. It needs to understand where its audience is, how they behave there, what the brand can credibly add, and whether the format supports the message. Being everywhere badly is not a strategy. It’s a cry for help with scheduling software.
Finally, brands need to protect creative standards from the pressure of volume. If AI tools make production faster, don’t spend the entire efficiency gain on making more. Spend some of it on thinking better. More time on the brief. More time on the idea. More time on editing. More time on craft. More time on asking whether the work deserves to exist.
What This Means for Agencies
Nuttersons
For agencies, content abundance is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is obvious: clients are under pressure to produce more with less, and AI tools make some production tasks look easier to bring in-house. If an agency’s value is simply “we can make assets”, it’s going to have a rough few years.
The opportunity is better. Agencies can become the guardians of originality, coherence and intent. They can help brands decide what not to make. They can build creative systems that scale without becoming bland. They can connect content to brand strategy, audience insight and commercial outcomes. They can bring taste to the machine.
This may require a shift in how agencies sell themselves. Less emphasis on volume. More emphasis on judgment. Less “we can produce 200 assets”. More “we can make sure the 40 assets you actually need add up to something people remember.”
It also means agencies need to get better at integrating AI without becoming defined by it. The client doesn’t need another breathless AI demo. They need better work. If AI helps get there, great. If it creates more noise, don’t use it. The tool is not the strategy. The strategy is the strategy.
The agencies that thrive will be the ones that can hold two ideas at once: production will become faster, but originality will become harder. The answer is not nostalgia. It’s better thinking.
What This Means for Creative Talent
MullenLowe London
For individual creatives, content abundance can feel demoralising. There’s so much work out there. So many posts. So many portfolios. So many people building personal brands. So many AI tools generating images, lines, layouts, videos and concepts. It’s easy to feel like originality has been flattened by the sheer volume of everything.
But abundance also makes genuine originality more visible when it appears. A distinctive voice stands out faster in a sea of sameness. A designer with taste cuts through a wall of templates. A writer with an actual point of view feels different from generated competence. A strategist who can make sense of chaos becomes more valuable as chaos multiplies.
The key is to stop competing with machines on the things machines do cheaply. Don’t build a career around being mildly faster at average. Build around judgment, taste, experience, emotional intelligence, conceptual thinking, craft depth, cultural literacy and the ability to make work that feels specific.
Creative professionals should also become more intentional about their own output. Personal branding has become its own content treadmill. Not every thought needs to be posted. Not every project needs to become a carousel. Not every coffee needs to become a lesson in resilience. The best creative reputations are built through clarity, not constant noise.
In a content-abundant world, restraint can be a career strategy too.
Originality Needs Bravery, Not Just Ideas
The reason originality is scarce is not because people lack ideas. It’s because original ideas create discomfort.
They require someone to say no. No to the obvious format. No to the borrowed trend. No to the safe line. No to the overstuffed calendar. No to the stakeholder who wants the campaign to say six things at once. No to the platform that doesn’t fit. No to work that’s technically fine but spiritually empty.
Originality also requires a tolerance for not being universally liked. Distinctive brands are easier to recognise because they’ve made choices. Choices create preference, and preference creates rejection. Some people won’t get it. Some people won’t care. Some people will actively dislike it. That’s not always failure. Sometimes that’s the cost of meaning something.
The content abundance era has made many brands strangely timid. Because everything is measurable, everything is optimised. Because everything is public, everything is smoothed. Because audiences can react instantly, brands pre-emptively sand off the edges. The result is a lot of work designed to avoid criticism rather than earn attention.
But safe work is not always safe. In a saturated environment, invisibility is a risk too. Blandness is a risk. Forgettability is a risk. Looking like everyone else is a risk. Publishing endlessly without building meaning is a risk.
Originality is not reckless. It is disciplined bravery.
How Creativepool Can Help Brands Find Original Creative Partners
Content Creatures
This is where the creative talent economy becomes central. If originality is becoming more valuable, brands need better ways to find the people and partners capable of delivering it.
Creativepool exists precisely in that space between ambition and execution: helping brands, agencies and creative businesses discover the talent, studios and specialists whose work has a point of view. In a market flooded with content, the advantage often comes from finding collaborators who don’t just make more assets but ask better questions.
The strategist who can sharpen the brief. The designer who can build a distinctive world. The copywriter who can give a brand a voice worth hearing. The agency that can turn scattered activity into a coherent creative platform.
That matters because originality is rarely a solo miracle. It usually comes from the right combination of people, trust, experience and creative tension. The best work happens when brands stop shopping for output and start looking for partners who can help them make stronger decisions.
In the old content economy, the question was often “who can make this quickly?” In the new one, the better question is “who can make this matter?”
The Future Belongs to Brands with Something to Say
Content abundance isn’t going away. If anything, we’re still early. AI will make production faster. Platforms will keep multiplying formats. Search will keep changing. Audiences will keep fragmenting. The pressure to publish will not politely excuse itself and leave the room.
But the brands that win the next phase won’t be the ones that respond by simply producing more. They’ll be the ones that develop a stronger filter. They’ll know what they stand for. They’ll understand what their audience values. They’ll use AI intelligently without outsourcing their judgment. They’ll make fewer empty things and more meaningful ones. They’ll treat originality not as a decorative flourish, but as a commercial advantage.
Because when content is abundant, attention becomes harder to earn. When production is cheap, taste becomes more valuable. When formats are saturated, intent becomes the differentiator. When everyone can sound polished, the brands with something real to say will feel different.
That’s the irony of the content age. The more stuff there is, the more we notice the work that doesn’t feel like stuff. The more the feed fills up, the more powerful it becomes to make something with a pulse. The more brands talk, the rarer it is to hear one that actually means it.
Originality isn’t dead. It’s just no longer optional.
