Start with Garbage, End with Garbage: Why AI Shouldn’t Be the First Step in Your Content Strategy

Start with Garbage, End with Garbage: Why AI Shouldn’t Be the First Step in Your Content Strategy

The Role of AI in Content Creation

Let me preface this by saying: I like AI. I really do. It’s clever. It’s helpful. It’s here to stay. But, and it’s a big but, AI has no soul.

And that’s fine, unless you’re in the business of creating content that’s supposed to connect with actual human beings.

The Rise of AI-Driven Content and Its Risks

Lately, I’ve been seeing a surge of AI-driven companies promising brands quick, easy, affordable content, served in every format you could possibly want, ready to splash across every channel you can think of. Tempting, right? Fast, cheap, scalable. A marketer’s dream.

But also a marketer’s nightmare.

What Happens When Content Lacks a Human Pulse

When I was at Coke, I used to say that great ideas often died somewhere between rounds 14 and 23 of internal approvals. By the time Legal, PR (yes, guilty), and everyone else had weighed in, a brilliant idea that once sparked excitement was so watered down it barely made a ripple. It had no pulse.

Now imagine if that idea didn’t even start with a pulse. Imagine it was generated by a bot. A bot that, by definition, has no human experience. No emotion. No life.

Scalable Soullessness Isn’t Strategy

So when an idea that began soulless gets chopped up and reformatted into dozens of assets for different platforms, what you end up with is a highly efficient distribution of soullessness.

Why Real Insights Must Come First

Here’s the thing, if your goal is to connect your brand with real people, who have real needs, real preferences, and real brains, then you need to start with real insights.

The Power of Real Experts at The Desire Company

At The Desire Company, we start with an actual human. Not just any human, a verified, credentialed expert. Someone who has spent years mastering their craft, who’s tried and tested countless products in real-world conditions, and who only recommends the products that truly earn their stamp of approval. They don’t just use the product; they understand it. They can speak to its effectiveness not only from personal experience, but from a place of informed authority. This is the kind of credibility AI can’t fake and the kind that shoppers actually trust.

What Happens When You Start With Human Insight

And here’s what happens when you start by working with real humans to connect with other humans:

• The content works harder.

• It performs better.

• Shoppers lean in instead of scrolling past.

• And it converts, because it connects.

Use AI to Scale, Not to Start

Do we use AI? Of course. We use it to scale the right things, once we’ve got that real, authentic foundation. We turn high-quality content into tailored edits for ecommerce, connected TV, in-store QR codes, social - the whole ecosystem. But we never start with AI. Because if you start with garbage, repurpose that garbage, and distribute that garbage widely, what you get is… a lot of garbage.

In the End, Marketing Is Still Human

So, yes, use AI in your content strategy. But use it at the end of the process, not the beginning. Because while bots can format content, only real people can feel it.

And in marketing, feeling still matters.

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