AI made content nearly free and nearly worthless. The brands that win will be the ones that still have a story worth believing.

Last month, I stood in a breakout room at a franchise conference and played three videos for a small group of brand leaders. The first was an AI-generated ad: a woman with perfect abs, a glowing bottle of juice, four flavor names and nothing else. The second was an AI avatar reciting a consulting firm’s 18 years of experience. The third was a real franchisee. She had left health care burned out, and later kept her late husband’s business running in his memory.

I asked how the first two made them feel. One man said, “It had no emotional impact on me at all.” I told him we should put that on a shirt.

Then I asked who liked the third video. Every hand went up. One woman said she was smiling the whole time and could not explain why.

Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 word of the year, a word for the flood of low-quality digital content AI produces. The first two videos were slop. The third was a story. The gap between them is where your brand’s trust lives.

You can now make a talking-head video in 20 seconds for the price of a monthly subscription.

The mistake I see is confusing a view with belief. Research reported by eMarketer found that visible AI in marketing is about four times more likely to cost a brand trust than to build it.

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