For over a decade, digital marketing has been defined by the pursuit of accountability. From A/B testing and scroll-depth analysis to the relentless optimisation of Click-Through Rates (CTR), the industry has prioritised the dashboard over the drawing board.
However, Nicole Glover, Executive Creative Director – Digital at Penquin, warns that this obsession with metrics has led to a “homogeneity crisis” that is eroding the very essence of brand connection.
Glover argues that the rise of bland, interchangeable digital marketing cannot simply be blamed on artificial intelligence. Instead, she believes the industry began losing its creative edge long before AI entered the mainstream.
“The homogeneity crisis didn’t start with AI,” says Glover. “It started the moment we decided a metric was more trustworthy than a creative’s instinct. We called it ‘accountability,’ but what we were actually doing was training a generation of creatives to make work that performs in the short term, instead of work that stays in the consumer’s memory.”
According to Glover, the industry’s obsession with optimisation has created a landscape where brands increasingly look and sound the same. It’s a sentiment backed by global research. Kantar reports that nearly two-thirds of consumers believe most brands are indistinguishable from one another, while long-standing IPA research has consistently shown emotionally led campaigns outperform rational campaigns by a factor of two. Separate industry studies have also found that award-winning creative work is significantly more effective and commercially efficient over time.
For Glover, these findings simply validate what many creatives already feel instinctively. “The numbers don’t tell us anything the industry doesn’t already know deep down,” she explains. “Every creative has felt that moment in a meeting when the dashboard takes over the conversation and suddenly the safest option wins. Somewhere along the line, we stopped asking whether work would move people and only asked whether it would convert.”
She believes AI has merely inherited an ecosystem already conditioned for sameness. “AI didn’t corrupt the well,” Glover continues. “It inherited one we’d already poisoned. If every campaign is built from the same best-performing references, optimised against the same metrics and approved through the same risk filters, then of course everything starts to feel identical.”
Rather than rejecting data entirely, Glover argues that the future of effective digital marketing lies in restoring balance between analytics and instinct. In a content-saturated environment where consumers scroll past thousands of messages daily, she believes the work that truly cuts through increasingly feels less manufactured and more human.
“The irony is that the most effective digital work right now often looks like it wasn’t made by an agency at all,” she says. “People are craving texture, imperfection, personality and emotional honesty again. Brands that understand this are the ones creating work people actually remember.”
As AI tools become more embedded across the creative industry, Glover believes agencies and brands face a defining challenge: whether to continue chasing efficiency at the expense of distinctiveness, or to rediscover the emotional storytelling that made advertising powerful in the first place.
“Technology should enhance creativity, not flatten it,” Glover concludes. “The brands that will win in the next era of digital won’t necessarily be the most optimised. They’ll be the ones brave enough to feel human again.”