Blandfill (Transmission #357 Part I)
Brands are meant to be distinct. Marketing is meant to feel like it came from someone. AI works in the opposite direction, outputting a collected voice of everything into something soulless and familiar.
WRITTEN BY: Marc Davison
[Editor's note: Originally published on the 1000watt Blog. In the age of AI slop and being bombarded with generic marketing messages that don't land, it's a message everyone needs to hear. -DM]
Not long ago, the AI music app Suno produced a 1950s 12-bar blues number that was a near-perfect copy of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," right down to the "go, Johnny, go."
AI music tools access the whole recorded inheritance of the human race, created by the most gifted people we have ever produced, and the best they can do is return soulless crap that most of us spot in seconds.
No one likes it.
Curious? Additional examples.
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Blandfill
Like the music industry, real estate has built a gargantuan library of material. Ours was not crafted by the most gifted writers, marketers, and designers of the age. It’s a library filled with reproductions. Fifty-plus years of inbred, recycled copy, photographic styles, and design.
Consider the 8 million postcards a year announcing new and sold listings with the same headlines, copy, and design. Every balcony exists for sipping morning coffee, an activity almost no one does. Websites poured from the same mold. Luxury brands, the same palette and serif monogram.
Templates drive our creative spirit, not originality.
Xeroxing one another has always been a strategy in real estate, which might explain why no one in real estate is talking about this. But outside, in the marketplace, they see it. We asked a sample of 1,000 consumers who bought or sold a home recently why they ignore agent marketing.
Top answer on the board: the industry all looks and sounds alike. The rampant use of AI is only making this worse.
A vice president at a large real estate company emailed me last week. He wrote:
“Feels like the whole industry caught a virus of sameness and can't shake it.”
It feels like it because that’s exactly what it is. Think about it. AI receives tens of thousands of identical prompts a minute from real estate. Everyone is fishing in the same pond with the same bait, pulling up the same fish, cooking it the same way, and serving it on the same plate.
We ship it. AI eats it. Repeat.
Slop in, slop out.
Sameness is only half the problem. Brands are meant to be distinct. Marketing is meant to feel like it came from someone. AI works in the opposite direction. Its output is not yours. It is the collected voice of everything, averaged into something competent, familiar, and soulless.
Use enough of it, and you don’t build a brand. You build blandfill.
Love letters
A newsletter arrived in my inbox last weekend like the 4 train pulling into Union Square station to cart me off to grade school. Mechanical. Cold. (Fond memories.)
The machine fingerprint leapt from the first paragraph in that sickeningly familiar not this, not that, definitely not this, but this framing. It instantly screams AI wrote this. You feel the absence of the person supposedly speaking to you.
That’s the problem.
Marketing is supposed to be personal. It is one of the few places where a business speaks directly to other human beings. There should be intimacy in that exchange. Some sense that the people behind the brand are present.
Instead, we’re advised to treat AI as our partner. It’s not. It’s a grunt. Tasking it to write your thought leadershit, headlines, listing descriptions, and social posts is like asking your housekeeper to design your new home and then wondering why it looks like one giant cleaning closet.
We’re handing one of the most human parts of the business to the least human thing there is.
Imagine using the same voice for pillow talk. Not here. Not there. Definitely not there. But here. That would be insane.
Or letting AI write your kid’s birthday card.
Son,
Turning nine is not about cake. It is not about how many candles you blow out. It is definitely not about presents. It is about growth, a milestone in the ongoing journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. You are not simply my son. You are not simply a kid who loves dinosaurs and knows every one by name. You are a testament to what happens when curiosity meets heart.
Love, Mom
No one uses AI to help them talk to the people they love. Your audience deserves the same consideration. Marketing is you asking something of them. Ask cold, and you tell them exactly what they're worth to you.
Love letters. That’s what marketing is supposed to be. Especially now, when everyone around you is shipping heartless machine-rendered copy and design.
Unmistakable
Give “the grunt” the work no one will pay attention to.
Format this flyer. Draft some boilerplate. Check the grammar. Condense this data into something readable. Do some research. Don’t make shit up.
The work that matters, write yourself.
Mannequins look human, but they are dead behind the eyes. That's AI output. Don’t be that. Be unmistakable.
Ship AI crap, you’re no different from the rest of the mannequins doing the same thing in real estate. Keep doing that, and the only thing the market will have left to compare you to is your fee.