Brands are at their most memorable when they’re distinctive - says Smoking Gun Chief Storyteller Carl Stroud
With the latest brand battleground happening inside Large Language Models - the machines are now deciding which brands are worth mentioning at all.
And the advice? Feed them what they like: rational messaging, trusted citations, neat little proof points that answer every conceivable use case.
All very sensible. All very beige.
Because in the rush to please the machines, we risk sanding down the rough edges that make a brand interesting in the first place.
The immovable element of great PR has never been data - it’s creativity. And that, of course, is something LLMs fundamentally can’t grasp.
They don’t understand meaning. They don’t think; they predict. They’re the world’s most efficient copywriters - and the least interesting ones.
Ask an AI to describe five British beer brands and you’ll get the same adjectives every time: crafted, authentic, refreshing. You’d think every pint in Britain was poured by a bearded man called Tom in a converted railway arch.
Type in “beauty brand mission” and you’ll get the usual sermon: empowering confidence and committed to innovation.
The biggest danger ahead is that we create a giant feedback loop - where EVERYTHING sounds exactly the same.
It’s brand language written by a spreadsheet.
And in the process, we risk losing the very thing PR exists to protect: distinctiveness.
Yes, of course, we need to feed LLMs the right information to increase brand visibility and discoverability to increase brand visibility and discoverability. But we risk sliding back onto the same slippery slope that defined the SEO era - where rational messaging takes the front seat and creative storytelling gets shoved in the boot.
In our rush to be AI-ready, we risk becoming creatively sterile.
Because great PR has never been about rational messaging alone. It’s about the alchemy that transforms proof points into something emotionally charged, unexpected and unforgettable.
Our role isn’t to echo what the algorithm expects - it’s to surprise it. To keep stories human, messy, funny, moving, and unpredictable.
At Smoking Gun, we’ve made that our creative north star. While the industry races to optimise content for AI, we’re continuing to find new ways to keep brand work unpredictable, emotionally intelligent and unmistakably human.
Brands that sound like someone, not something are the ones that audiences remember.
And the brands that win the next decade won’t be those who use AI best, but those who sound least like it.
To learn how creativity can boost your brand visit https://smokinggun.agency/what-we-do/communications-strategy/
