And Just Like That, Everyone Was a Social Media Manager.
Sarah Sadler - Red Shoe Makeovers.
Once upon a time, making marketing content required an entourage.
A photographer. A designer. Someone who could write. Someone who understood video. Editing software so baffling you needed a 47-minute YouTube tutorial and a large glass of something just to find the export button. And, ideally, one sensible person in the room who knew what any of it was actually for.
Then AI walked into the bar. And honey, it bought everyone a drink.
Now, before your first coffee has had the decency to cool, you can ask AI for 30 social media ideas, write the captions, generate the images, make a video, remove the background, write a blog, turn the blog into a LinkedIn post, turn the LinkedIn post into seven Instagram posts, and probably commission a jaunty little song about your quarterly sales figures.
Marketing has never been so easy to get into bed with.
And I think that's brilliant. I use AI. A lot. We're not exclusive, but we're definitely seeing each other.
But lately, sitting at my laptop and staring out of the window, I couldn't help but wonder…
If everyone can create content, what makes yours worth consuming?
Everyone's invited to the party
AI isn't coming for marketing. It's already here. It's unpacked. It's left its toothbrush in the bathroom.
Marketing teams are using generative AI for content, research, brainstorming, reporting and analysis. McKinsey's 2026 research suggests some organisations are already seeing creative productivity jump by two to five times. That's not a glow-up. That's a full makeover montage.
And it's not just the big brands. Simply Business's 2026 SME Insights Report found that 47% of UK small businesses now use AI tools… more than double the 22% of a year earlier! and creating content is the number-one thing they use it for.
For small businesses, this could be transformative. You don't necessarily need a copywriter every time you send an email. You don't need a graphic designer for every Instagram Story. You don't need an agency to hand you a spreadsheet of 30 inspirational quotes and a solemn vow to post three times a week.
The gap between having an idea and publishing it has practically vanished.
Which should make marketing better.
Except… I'm not entirely sure it has.
Welcome to the age of perfectly adequate content
Open Instagram. Then LinkedIn. Then Facebook. You'll start seeing it.
The beautifully formatted carousel. The motivational business post. The immaculate photo of a suspiciously gorgeous office. The founder gazing meaningfully out of a window, accompanied by a caption about resilience.
The same hooks. The same structures. The same five lessons. The same strangely enthusiastic punctuation!!!
It's the content equivalent of a first date with someone who has lovely teeth, a decent job and absolutely nothing to say. Everything is technically correct. Everyone is perfectly pleasant. And somehow… nothing happened.
Nobody stopped. Nobody felt anything. Nobody remembered who posted it.
The numbers back up the bad date. Gartner reported in June 2026 that 49% of US consumers believed generative AI had actually made content worse … rising to 57% among Gen Z and millennials. Further Gartner research found 65% of consumers think brands are churning out too much AI-generated marketing, and 57% said it has made them trust brand messaging less.
Closer to home, it's the same story. Optimizely's September 2026 research found that 62% of UK consumers trust marketing content less since brands started using AI. Two-thirds believe brands are choosing quantity over quality, and 59% say marketing content has got worse in recent years. More than half reckon they can usually spot AI content … and 67% find AI-generated images of people in ads creepy.
Creepy. Not a word you want on your brand's dating profile.
So perhaps the problem isn't that AI makes bad content. Perhaps it's that AI makes acceptable content ridiculously easy.
And when acceptable becomes infinite, acceptable stops being enough.
The beigeification of the internet
AI works with what already exists. That's part of its charm. It can spot patterns, organise information, analyse data, find connections and explore ideas faster than any human could dream of.
But here's the catch. When everybody walks up to broadly the same technology and says, "Write me five Instagram posts for my estate agency" or salon, gym, accountancy practice, photography business, restaurant, marketing company … the machine isn't going to produce something terrible.
Quite the opposite. It'll produce something perfectly competent.
And your competitor can ask it the exact same question five minutes later.
It's like turning up to the party in the dress everyone else bought from the same window display. You look lovely. So does she. And her. And her.
British consumers have noticed the wardrobe malfunction. In Canva's 2026 research, seven in ten UK consumers said AI-generated adverts are missing their soul, 64% said they're so obvious they're laughable, and 76% expect the future of advertising to look and feel like the same AI output.
This is one of the stranger consequences of AI. The cost of creating content is collapsing. The value of having something distinctive to say is going up.
And the industry is starting to clock it. McKinsey's State of Marketing Europe 2026 found European CMOs ranked branding as their number-one priority, pointing to distinctiveness, clear value propositions and creativity as the things that set them apart.
I don't think that's happening despite AI. I suspect it's happening partly because of it.
When everyone owns the printing press, owning the printing press isn't particularly impressive any more. The interesting bit is what you print.
And this is where humans become inconveniently useful again
Sprout Social surveyed more than 2,300 consumers across the UK, US and Australia for its 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report. Their number-one priority for brands?
Human-generated content.
Here's the delicious irony. In the UK specifically, Sprout found marketers were making AI-generated content their number-one priority for 2026 …while consumers wanted human-generated content prioritised.
It's the classic couple who want completely different things and are both too busy to notice. We all know how that one ends.
YouGov and Meltwater add another twist: more than two in three consumers say they'd be less likely to engage with creator content if they knew AI had made it.
That doesn't mean we throw AI dramatically into the Thames. It means we might be using the most powerful creative technology we've ever had for the least interesting part of the job.
Because the difficult question was never "Can we make a post?"
The difficult questions are:
Why are we making it?
Who actually needs to hear it?
What does this business know that its competitors don't?
What do its customers misunderstand?
What does its founder believe?
What's happening inside the business that nobody has thought to show?
What stories are sitting right under everybody's noses?
What are customers actually responding to?
What shouldn't we say?
And, most importantly of all: what can this business say that nobody else could convincingly say?
AI can help answer those questions. But somebody still has to ask them.
Maybe AI shouldn't be your content creator
Maybe it should be your research assistant. Your analyst. Your brainstorming partner. Your enormous, slightly unnerving second brain … the friend who's read absolutely everything and will happily stay up till 3am talking through your options.
Give it your customer reviews and ask it to find the recurring frustrations. Have it analyse six months of social performance and spot the patterns. Research what people are actually searching for. Challenge an idea. Find the holes in an argument. Generate twenty directions so a human can recognise the interesting twenty-first.
Let it take the boring, repetitive, time-consuming parts of marketing and make them faster.
Because that's where this gets exciting. The goal isn't to remove humans from the creative process. It's to remove enough stuff from the creative process that humans have more time to think.
And thinking may well become the expensive bit. The designer shoes of the marketing world.
So what happens to the Social Media Manager?
I don't think the job disappears. But I do think it's changing its outfit.
For years, businesses have paid social media managers and agencies to produce and distribute content. Twelve posts. Four Reels. Eight graphics. Three platforms. One monthly report nobody particularly wants to open.
Content measured by quantity, because quantity was expensive to produce.
AI changes that equation. If I can generate 100 posts this afternoon, selling you 20 posts a month suddenly becomes a rather strange proposition.
The value has to move somewhere. And I think it's moving upstream.
From "What shall we post this week?" to "What are we actually trying to achieve?"
From content calendars to content strategy. From posting to positioning. From production to ideas. From managing social media to understanding the business behind it.
Perhaps the future isn't businesses hiring somebody to "do their social media". Perhaps it's businesses working with people who understand them deeply enough to recognise the ideas, stories, expertise and personalities worth turning into content.
A strategist. A producer. A photographer. A writer. A researcher. A creative partner.
And, increasingly, AI sitting quietly beside all of them like a very well-read plus-one.
The irony of the AI revolution
For years, marketing technology has promised to make everything faster. Now it finally can.
We can create more. Publish more. Automate more. Personalise more. Analyse more.
And marketing leaders expect plenty more to come. Gartner's 2026 research found CMOs expect AI-driven automation of marketing work to rise from 16% in 2026 to 36% by 2028.
So we're about to be swimming in content. Which makes me wonder whether more is about to become the least attractive thing a brand can offer.
Because when everybody has the same cameras, templates, editing tools and artificial intelligence, the competitive advantage isn't the tool any more.
It's taste. Judgement. Curiosity. Experience. Context. A point of view.
Knowing when the AI-generated idea is good. Knowing when it's bollocks.
Knowing that the slightly wonky video of the founder explaining something they genuinely care about might be infinitely more valuable than the immaculate piece of content you could manufacture instead.
It's the difference between the one who's perfect on paper and the one who actually makes you laugh.
Perhaps that's the strange place we're heading. The more sophisticated our machines become, the more valuable genuinely human thinking becomes.
So no, I don't think businesses should stop using AI. Quite the opposite. Learn it. Use it. Flirt with it. Let it do some of the heavy lifting.
But don't mistake having the tools to create content for knowing what's worth creating. Because your competitors have the tools too.
And in a world where everyone can create everything…
I couldn't help but wonder: is having something worth saying the sexiest marketing advantage of all?
Sources
New UK research added in this version:
Simply Business, 2026 SME Insights Report — 1,842 UK small business owners, July–August 2026
Optimizely UK consumer research — 1,000 UK consumers and 100 UK marketers, September 2026
Canva marketing research (via IT Brief UK) — UK sample of 200 marketing leaders and 509 consumers, May 2026
From the original draft: McKinsey & Company (2026 research; State of Marketing Europe 2026), Gartner (June 2026 consumer research; 2026 CMO research), Sprout Social (2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report).
