If the floor is raised for everyone, what's making you stand out? Your competitors have access to everything you have access to, so what is actually making your marketing better than theirs?
By Dan Bradfield
17/06/26
A new era for marketing teams
The last few years have handed marketing teams AI-assisted copy, Canva, accessible design tools, automation that handles the mundane and repetitive. The ability to produce more content, more quickly, with less resource than ever before.
And so the floor has risen. Let’s say idea generation that once took days now takes minutes. Assets that needed a designer can now be pulled together in-house. Campaigns that required significant budget can be assembled for a fraction of the cost.
But the problem is your competitors aren’t sleeping on it either. The same tools, templates, AI copy patterns and visual language. Because the methods of production have become universal, the outputs converge. And in a crowded, noisy market, convergence is just a route to being ignored. Bad news for brands and businesses.
In a market where everyone operates at the same floor, where can you find competitive advantage?
View Avocor Case Study
Don’t look and sound like everyone else
Creative work should earn attention, not blend in. Great campaigns are built on a genuine understanding of what makes a business interesting (The ‘Naked Truth’), what audiences respond to, and how to bring that to life in a way that moves people.
Take a look at what we did recently for Avocor, Animed or Direct ATPI. These campaigns aren't something a prompt produces (not easily anyway!). It's a skill set developed across years, hundreds of briefs, different sectors, different audiences. Thinks strategically, executes with craft, and understands the difference between content that exists and content that works.
This is what a good creative agency actually sells. The ability to think differently, connect ideas in unexpected ways, and produce work that behaves differently in a market. And delivers commercially because of it.
View Animed Case Study
The pressure is real. So is the opportunity.
For those responsible for marketing, there is a constant pressure to justify spend, demonstrate results, manage upward, and deliver work that holds up to scrutiny from non-marketing people.
A strong creative partner doesn't just improve the work. It improves your position. Senior thinking in your corner. Ideas you can sell in with confidence and executions that make the business look like the best version of itself.
Everyone has the tools now. The businesses that pull ahead will be the ones who invest in what the tools don't provide – the thinking, craft and creative edge that turns marketing spend into competitive advantage.
The business case is simpler than it looks
For any discretionary external spend, the justification has to be commercial. Better creative lasts longer in the memory. It gets more attention. More attention generates more interest. More interest converts. The ROI on quality creative isn't a soft or unprovable argument, it's just often unmeasured because it is more difficult to measure. But unmeasured doesn’t mean ineffective.
Rory Sutherland recently, in conversation with Camille Moore said:
“The biggest problem (in branding right now) is the false God of perfect ROI calculation and prediction in advance... The treasury or the finance function is extremely unwilling to invest in anything which has the slightest degree of speculative value. And so we end up, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, with an efficiency-driven race to the bottom rather than an opportunity-driven race to the top.” (Source)
Can you produce marketing without external support. Yes – most teams can and do. But the better question is whether what you produce on your own will actually outperform what your competitors produce on theirs when you're both working with the same set of tools.
