AI is changing everything, but how? Mark Terry-Lush of Hey Honey spoke with three leading marketing minds to gauge the shifts underway.
Struck with wonderpanic and/or drenched in synthetic sludge?
AI is everywhere, and as it changes the game, winners and losers will inevitably emerge. To get a sense of how things are shaking out for the marketing industry, I chatted with three leading creative thinkers.
Lars Bastholm, former chief creative officer of Ogilvy, Yates Buckley, co-founder of creative studio Unit9, and William Reed, executive creative director at Hey Honey, all gave a clear-eyed view on what brands stand to lose with AI, while broadly agreeing that personality is key to maintaining a competitive edge on the brand landscape.
Bastholm coined a term for the cocktail of emotion gripping marketers today: “wonderpanic.” Defined as “a sudden, electrifying blend of awe and dread,” it captures the thrill of AI’s potential alongside deep anxiety about what it could replace.
What concerns Bastholm most is the creative flattening already underway. “When you’re the sum of all human knowledge,” he warns, “you’re not the outlier. You’re the middle of the road.” As it optimizes for averages, AI may produce technically sound content but strips away the originality that defines successful brands.
Bastholm points to the rise of ‘Adam voice’ – that bland, AI-generated American accent now default for tutorials and explainers – as a symptom of our slide into synthetic sameness. At the same time, the overuse of ‘TikTok voice’ – all exaggerated emotion and hyperactive delivery – has also leaked into daily life.
“I sometimes have to remind my son that reality isn’t YouTube,” Bastholm says. “People don’t yell everything at the top of their lungs.”
In other words, AI is no longer just a tool; it is reshaping human behavior. And as we use it more, we begin to imitate it.
Buckley, whose work at Unit9 bridges technology and storytelling, agrees that the embrace of AI has blurred the line between progress and peril. “The easier something is to generate, the less value it holds,” he notes. “Marketing science distilled humans into triggers. Now we’re all playing the same game.”
Buckley argues that AI’s abilities present a creative paradox. Brands are trading distinctiveness for speed, and in doing so, flooding the market with “synthetically competent sludge.” The end result? Generic creative that neither inspires nor connects.
Bastholm shares that sentiment. “We’re seeing companies fire humans because AI can do the job faster, but just because it’s faster, doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s a race to the bottom.” He adds: “Time and materials is the dumbest model for measuring creative work. It’s like saying Stephen King’s book should be worth less than Donna Tartt’s because it took him less time to write.”
Despite concerns that AI will dilute creativity, Reed is more optimistic. “AI is an accelerator; its value is enhancing human intelligence, so we can explore more ideas, refine concepts faster, and create work that resonates,” he says.
When it comes to brand purpose, all three urge caution. “If you’re asking AI to help you find your brand purpose, you probably don’t have one,” says Bastholm. He is sharply critical of what he terms “purpose-washing,” where brands co-opt social causes to appear relevant without any real alignment.
Buckley agrees that consistency between internal values and external messaging becomes more critical in an AI-saturated environment. “If your internal values don’t match your external voice, AI will expose that faster than ever.” In his view, congruence, the alignment between what a company says and how it behaves, is the new currency in a world of infinite content.
At the heart of their shared philosophy lies one unifying idea: brand personality is now the most irreplaceable asset. Bastholm sees a future in which brand interactions will increasingly be voice-led, delivered through agents, assistants, and smart interfaces. That means tone, not just message, becomes the differentiator.
“If your brand responds in a robotic, standardized AI voice, it’s dead on arrival,” he warns. “You need to define your brand personality the way you’d define a character in a film – what it says, what it never says, what it believes in.”
He echoes Buckley in supporting the need for a unique selling personality. “Features can be copied. Personality can’t,” says Bastholm. “A true personality takes time to grow. It’s forged through context, contradiction, and experience.”
He adds: “You can’t generate my memory. Or that floor tile that I see a face in. That’s human context. That’s what makes us laugh.” AI, for all its linguistic brilliance, lacks lived experience. It can simulate tone and mimic sentiment, but it cannot create real emotional context.
Our challenge isn’t to compete with AI; it’s to collaborate with it to elevate our uniquely human contributions, such as empathy, originality, and the indefinable ‘soul’ that connects with audiences.
The message is clear: brand value no longer lies in having the best offer or fastest content pipeline. It lies in a distinctive, contradictory, fully human identity. And in the age of AI, defending brand personality may be the only thing that sets you apart.
Hey Honey
Hey Honey, we're a global social-first creative agency built for the future, putting culture, community, and the planet first. From our headquarters in Amsterdam,...
