Everyone Can Create Marketing Now. Almost Nobody Can Edit It.
The most dangerous phrase in modern marketing isn't "we don't have the budget." It's "why don't we also..."
Also run TikTok. Also try email. Also launch a podcast. Also create a lead magnet. Also test that new AI tool. Also add another campaign type. The modern marketing landscape gives every business access to more channels, more creative tools, and more data than a Fortune 500 company had ten years ago. And most businesses are responding by doing everything at once, badly.
Here's what the data actually says: global ad spend exceeded $1 trillion in 2026, and marketing effectiveness is declining. Not plateauing. Declining. More money. More content. More campaigns. Worse results. The creation problem has been solved. The curation problem is eating businesses alive.
The Briefing Gap That Costs You a Third of Everything
Before a single ad runs, most marketing is already broken.
The IPA BetterBriefs study surveyed over 1,700 marketers and agency staff across 70+ countries and found a staggering disconnect. 80% of marketers believe they write good briefs. Only 10% of agencies agree. That's not a gap. That's a chasm.
And it's expensive. Respondents estimated that 33% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor briefs and misdirected work. For an Australian SME spending $5,000 a month on marketing, that's $1,650 every month going nowhere. Not because the ads were bad. Not because the targeting was off. Because nobody was clear enough about what they were trying to achieve in the first place.
The numbers get worse when you dig in. 78% of marketers think their briefs provide clear strategic direction. Only 5% of the agencies executing the work agree. And 89% of both sides admitted that personal opinion, not strategic criteria, drives most creative decisions.
This isn't a communication problem. It's a curation problem. When everything sounds like a priority, nothing is.
The Infinite Library Problem
Dan Koe, writing about the future of creative work, describes what he calls the infinite library problem: if a library contained every possible book with every permutation of characters, it would contain all truths, all falsehoods, and all gibberish. The library would be effectively useless because finding meaningful text would be statistically impossible.
That's what AI has done to marketing.
Any business can now generate 50 ad variations in an hour. Any business can create a month of social content in an afternoon. Any business can produce landing pages, email sequences, and blog posts at a pace that would have required a full team three years ago. We've written before about how AI made marketing faster, cheaper, and identical to everyone else's. The deeper problem is more basic than sameness: speed of creation without quality of curation produces noise, not signal.
Sam Tomlinson, in his essay "Taste is a Competitive Advantage," argues that the absence of taste in marketing produces three things: incoherence, mundacity, and interchangeability. His point is sharp: taste isn't some aesthetic luxury reserved for luxury brands. It's the ability to look at ten options and know which three to keep and which seven to kill. It's developed the same way a palate is: over hundreds of deliberate evaluations. And it is, Tomlinson argues, the one skill that separates forgettable marketing from marketing that actually builds a brand.In practical terms, taste is what separates a business running three focused campaigns with conviction from one running twelve campaigns that all sound vaguely similar.
| Marketing with curation | Marketing without curation |
|---|---|
| 3 campaigns, each with a distinct angle and clear CTA | 12 campaigns, all variations of the same message |
| Creative refreshed monthly based on performance data | Creative unchanged for 6 months, then all replaced at once |
| One primary channel done exceptionally well | Five channels done at 40% capacity each |
| Brief that fits on one page | Brief that runs 14 pages and still isn't clear |
| Team can articulate the strategy in one sentence | Team disagrees about what the strategy actually is |
The left column wins. Not because those businesses are smarter or better funded. Because they've done the harder work of choosing.
Why Consistency Beats Novelty (And the Data to Prove It)
There's a reason most marketing feels forgettable: it IS forgettable. System1's research, analysing thousands of ads using their Test Your Ad database, found that over 80% of ads don't clear the 3-star threshold for measurable business impact. Below three stars, an ad generates minimal or zero long-term brand growth. The distribution is brutal: roughly 40-45% of tested ads score between 1 and 1.9 stars (no measurable effect), another 30-35% land at 2 to 2.9 stars (not enough to offset media cost), and fewer than 2% reach the 5-star level where real long-term impact begins.
But here's where it gets interesting. System1 and the IPA studied the relationship between creative consistency and brand strength. The most creatively consistent brands averaged a Star Rating of 3.3, predicting good long-term brand-building potential. The least consistent brands? 2.6 stars. Same budgets. Same platforms. Different results entirely.
This is Byron Sharp's research playing out in ad performance data. Sharp's work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, analysing over 130 brands across 13+ product categories, established that brands grow by being easy to think of and easy to buy. Not by being differentiated or deeply loved. The mechanism is distinctive brand assets: the specific colours, shapes, fonts, characters, and taglines that make your brand recognisable before anyone reads the logo.
Distinctiveness requires commitment. You pick your assets. You use them relentlessly. You resist the urge to "refresh" every quarter because someone on the team is bored. You let the repetition do its work, even when it stops feeling exciting internally. Your marketing doesn't need to be brilliant. It needs to be relentless. The creative consistency data from System1 and the IPA explains exactly why: the brain doesn't store individual ads. It stores patterns. And patterns require repetition, not reinvention.
The Trivial Things That Actually Matter
If curation means doing fewer things with more conviction, Rory Sutherland's work explains why the things worth keeping are often the ones that look insignificant.
Sutherland's most cited case study involves what became known as the $300 million button. An ecommerce site changed one button label from "Register" to "Continue" and added a single line of reassuring text. Annual revenue increased by $300 million. No new campaign. No redesign. No new channel. One word.
His rule number ten in Alchemy is "Dare to be trivial." The smallest change in context can have immense effects on behaviour. The London Underground's greatest improvement in passenger satisfaction per pound spent wasn't faster trains. It was dot-matrix display boards showing when the next train would arrive. The wait didn't change. The uncertainty did.
This principle applies directly to marketing. Most businesses, when results dip, reach for big, expensive interventions: new campaigns, new platforms, total brand refreshes. Sutherland's research suggests the highest-impact changes are more often small, psychology-driven adjustments that reduce friction, increase clarity, or change perception.
A better CTA label. A testimonial placed next to the enquiry form instead of buried at the bottom. A headline rewritten from feature language to outcome language. A phone number made clickable on mobile.
These changes look trivial on a strategy slide. But they work because they operate on System 1, the fast, automatic processing mode that Daniel Kahneman's research shows drives the vast majority of buying decisions. Your buyer isn't deliberating. They're scanning. And small signals of clarity and confidence compound faster than big campaigns that confuse.
The Logic Trap
Sutherland's third rule is the one most businesses will find hardest to accept: "It doesn't pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical."
Logic gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. If every plumber in Adelaide runs the same Google Ads targeting the same keywords with the same "quality service, affordable prices" messaging, they've all arrived at the logical answer. And they're all invisible.
The businesses that stand out have made decisions that look slightly irrational from the outside. They've committed to an unusual colour palette. They've picked one channel and gone deep instead of spreading thin. They've chosen a provocative positioning that excludes some potential customers. They've said no to obvious opportunities because those opportunities would dilute what makes them distinctive.
This is exactly how following every marketing rule makes your business invisible. Best practice is what everyone does. And what everyone does is, by definition, unremarkable.
Dan Koe frames the same insight differently. He proposes what he calls the Swap Test: if you could swap the creator and the creation would be just as valuable, then it can be automated. If the creation only works because you made it, that's your edge. Applied to marketing: look at your latest ad, your homepage, your email newsletter. If you swapped your brand name for a competitor's, would anyone notice the difference? If not, you haven't curated hard enough. Your marketing needs a point of view, not just a presence.
What This Means for Your Business
If you're an Australian SME spending $3,000 to $10,000 a month on marketing, here's the uncomfortable truth: you probably don't need more marketing activity. You need less of it, done with more conviction.
The practical test: Can every person involved in your marketing articulate your strategy in one sentence? If not, you have a curation problem.Here's what doing less, better, actually looks like:
1. Audit for elimination, not addition. List every active marketing channel, campaign, and content stream. For each one, ask: "If we stopped this tomorrow, would anyone notice?" If the answer is no, stop it. Redirect the budget and attention to what's actually working. 2. Write a brief that fits on one page. If your marketing brief is longer than one page, it's too complicated. One target audience. One primary message. One desired action. One success metric. Everything else is noise. 3. Commit to your distinctive assets for 12 months minimum. Pick your colours, your tone, your visual style, your core message. Then use them everywhere, for a full year, before you even consider changing them. Sharp's research is unambiguous: consistency builds the memory structures that drive growth. 4. Test small things before big things. Before launching a new campaign, test a new CTA label. Before redesigning your website, move your phone number above the fold. Before adding a channel, improve your conversion rate on the channels you already have. The trivial changes often produce the disproportionate returns. 5. Apply the Swap Test. Pull up your latest ad creative. Replace your logo with a competitor's. Does it still make sense? If yes, your marketing lacks a point of view. Go back to step one.The irony of marketing in 2026 is this: the businesses with the best results aren't the ones doing everything AI makes possible. They're the ones with the taste to know what not to do.
And that can't be automated.
Further Reading
- Taste is a Competitive Advantage - Sam Tomlinson on why curation is the critical marketing skill in the AI era
- IPA BetterBriefs Study - The data on brief quality and the 33% budget waste figure
- More Budget, Less Impact: The Marketing Creativity Crisis - System1 and IPA data on declining ad effectiveness despite rising spend
- Compound Creativity - System1 and IPA research on why creative consistency outperforms creative novelty
- The 11 Rules of Alchemy - Rory Sutherland's counterintuitive rules of effective marketing
Dream Outcome is an Australian digital marketing agency helping SMEs grow through Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Email Marketing.