Drowning in the Sea of Sameness
Wander any mall or scroll through any social platform. Notice anything?
Every brand looks eerily alike.
The skincare brand, the coffee company, the fashion label. The same aesthetic. Same formula. In your local mall and elsewhere all over the World.
Welcome to "The Age of Average."
From San Fran to Sydney, cafés are converging
How We Got Here
Alex Murrell's viral essay Age of Average showed how everything converged: Airbnb interiors (white walls, raw wood), coffee shops (exposed brick, industrial nods), car designs (indistinguishable blob-shapes sculpted by aerodynamics).
One specific aesthetic came to dominate every industry.
The hyper aesthetic Millennial brand
The Millennial Brand
Think: Muted pastel palettes on every product (Dusty rose. Sage green. Terracotta). Aspirational but approachable, design (Sans-serif fonts. Minimalist layouts. Lowercase copy). What worked for skincare start-ups, also worked for coffee brands. Then hotels. Then banks. Then car insurance. Even McDonalds went for a more ‘Aesthetically Minimal’ approach.
What was distinctive in 2016 became invisible by 2020.
Designer Michael Bierut called it "blanding”. Optimization for Instagram feeds. Safe choices that wouldn't alienate anyone.
While the ‘Millennial Brand’ aesthetic has all but died (RIP🪦), the punkier ‘Post-Millennial Branding’ continues the same cycle.
Bolder, messier, punkier ‘Post Millennial Branding’
Then AI Automated The Thinking
DIY tools like Canva, Figma templates, and AI design platforms promise to "democratize creativity." They deliver speed. They deliver polish. They also deliver sameness, codified into templates - mostly to untrained designers. Canva's most-used templates? Muted pastels, sans-serif fonts, minimalist layouts. The distinctive choice of 2016 is now Button #3 in a dropdown menu.
Distinctiveness is disappearing, and now it's accelerating. With AI advances, internal marketing teams can generate 50 variations instantly. Just prompts and templates. No agency. No creative directors. Short term, this looks like a win. Long term, it's a crisis. Your teams aren't just automating production. They're automating their thinking.
AI tools train on "successful" content. Successful content already converged. Everyone uses the same tools, trained on the same data, optimising toward the same aesthetic. Industries pumping out infinite variations of the same thing? Not a win.
This intentionally ‘bad’ AD did huge numbers on social recently… Why? Because it dared to be different.
What Breaks The Pattern
Not more tools or better prompts. More thinking. Better Judgment.
You can't optimize your way to distinctive. Tools are commodities. Everyone has Midjourney.
The difference isn't what AI can make. It's what humans choose to show.
The courage to reject 90% of what AI produces because it's convergent.
The Speed of AI. A love of craft. The courage to be different.
Tired of the Age of Average? Let’s talk.