Speaking of brand character.

For the last yada yada years, give or take the bulk of my frolic through the advertising industry, it's taken just as much effort to produce crap as it has to make something good.

Nothing to do with intent, mind you.

Frankly, I don’t know a decent creative who ever starts out with anything but a fierce desire to end up with worthwhile, and always with a side-eye looking out for great.

But evil forces do come to bear, changes do get shoved down throats, ideas do get piss-watered-down, and no amount of wailing, tears, or gnashing of teeth can prevent the baby from emerging sad and stillborn.

As a former colleague was fond of saying: “The only difference between a hubcap and a turd is that you can’t polish a turd.”

Parenthetically, the same guy also once dismissed another adland casualty by saying “the difference between her and a hubcap is that if you polish a hubcap, it gets brighter.”

Don’t ask me.  Maybe he had a thing for hubcaps. Or polishing.

In event, over all that time, the harsh reality was that producing a creative gift to the world and producing something smelly took exactly the same time and energy. All because the steps in the process — investigate, explore, present, refine, produce — were exactly the same for good, mediocre, or flagrant and fragrant.

Now, of course, we have faux-magic of technology that can stink up the joint, and everyone’s screens, in precisely the time it takes to type a prompt and watch AI spit out the lame.

No pain, definitely no gain. For anyone involved. Including, if the data is to be believed, for any brand.

The sole exception: those who take either smug satisfaction or sheer self-preservation relief in keeping the insatiable content maw fed for a day without having their souls entirely devoured.

For them, I’m sure good enough is more than good enough.

All of which sets up an interesting dichotomy in the world of brands between those that care and those that truly don’t.

If you think your audience, consumer, or b2b customer doesn’t pick up on your choice well, friend, you haven’t looked at reality.

I asked Perplexity to dive into the relationship between advertising quality and positive brand perceptions, and this is what came back:  “MacInnis & colleagues in ‘Brand Equity & Advertising’ show that strong advertising claims and execution quality increase perceived brand quality and make consumers more willing to extend their positive evaluations to brand extensions. In other words, when the advertising itself feels high quality, consumers infer the brand itself is strong.”

What AI didn’t mention, but I will, is that the quality of the advertising also reflects something else. The integrity of the brand behind it.