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Stop the Slop: The Hidden Crisis Behind Exhibition Marketing’s AI Obsession | How to Develop Creative Marketing Briefs
- Natalie Gurney
- Aug 21, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 12, 2025
In the fast-moving world of exhibition and conference marketing, a new normal has taken hold. Every LinkedIn feed now brims with promises of data-driven insight and AI-fueled intelligence. Yet, beneath the glossy veneer, a quiet sameness runs through it all. Campaigns sound alike, strategies blur into one another, and despite the new vocabulary, the outcomes feel oddly familiar. Shaping the future of [Insert Sector here].
AI has not made marketing worse. But it is making every marketing campaign sound the same.
The issue is not AI itself but the absence of leadership clarity and disciplined briefing. Without those, technology simply accelerates confusion.
The Leadership and Briefing Void
Across exhibitions and conferences, a familiar disconnect appears. The SMT wants growth. Marketing teams chase activity output and volume metrics. Agencies lack the market and audience understanding essential for producing gold. Somewhere between these worlds, the strategy evaporates.
McKinsey & Company’s State of Organisations identifies a structural weakness that explains much of this. Around 40 per cent of respondents cite inefficiency caused by unclear roles and structures. When no one owns the strategic direction, waste multiplies.
This is what I call triple slop.
Automation slop: outputs generated from vague inputs, focused entirely for that piece of collateral and lacking any cohesion with the broader campaign or original strategy.
Agency slop: work that dazzles but adds little commercial value.
Leadership slop: silence where intent should be most visible.
The pattern is now well established. Teams prioritise speed tools without first defining quality. Confusion scales at speed.
At the MarTech Conference 2025, one finding stood out from the coverage and out-takes. The best performing campaigns were those where humans set the strategy and automation optimised it. The human was the conductor, not the passenger.
What the Data Actually Supports
Across B2B industries, credible research draws the same distinction. Automation is excellent for volume. Intelligence, however, demands context.
McKinsey’s 2025 analysis of generative AI in B2B marketing found that leaders use these tools to increase revenue, improve sales productivity, and streamline operations. Yet the advantage appears only when AI is integrated thoughtfully into buyer and seller journeys.
The lesson is sober. Technology is an amplifier, not a strategist. Its impact depends entirely on the discipline of its users.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 predicts a profound skills shift by 2030, with employers expecting to reskill large parts of their workforce. Strategic thinking, data literacy and creative problem solving will become core business capabilities. Leaders will need to redefine what good looks like.
This same pragmatic tone shaped the agenda at MAICON 2025. Speakers emphasised not experimentation for its own sake but the layering of AI tools onto clear processes. Success, they agreed, depends less on models or features and more on the logic of the system they serve.
The Brief as a Leadership Tool for Creative Marketing Briefs
The creative marketing brief remains the quiet determinant of marketing success. Done well, it converts commercial ambition into creative direction. Done badly, it becomes a foghorn for vagueness.
A strong brief operates as a control system. It tells both humans and machines where to go. It sets the tone, names the audience, defines the boundaries, and explains what the business is trying to achieve.
The best briefs rest on four pillars:
Direction. Replace adjectives with outcomes. Do not say “build awareness”. Say “increase qualified delegate registrations by fifteen per cent”.
Audience intelligence. Understand who you are speaking to, what motivates them, and what outcome they seek. Who are they, and what do you want them to think, feel and do.
Constraints. Define tone, ethics and non-negotiables. Boundaries enable creativity.
Iteration. Build a feedback loop. Test, learn and refine.
This is not theory. The Marketing AI Institute’s State of Marketing AI Report 2025 found that 82 per cent of marketers use AI primarily to save time. Yet those that combined automation with human creative direction saw the greatest improvement in quality and coherence.
The brief, in other words, is not administration. It is leadership written down.
The Human Advantage
AI can generate options and detect patterns faster than any human ever will. What they lack is the ability to prioritise, contextualise, or judge. People remain better at nuance, empathy and story.
As Jessica Apotheker observed in her TED Talk, “AI does not replace creative judgement; it tests it.” The test is whether leaders still have one.
The World Economic Forum underscores that by 2030, the most valued skills will be analytical thinking, creativity and resilience. That is not a world where AI erase thought, but one where leaders must define the new boundaries of human value.
The marketers who thrive will not be those who produce the most content, but those who think hardest about what is worth producing.
How to Develop Creative Marketing Briefs
Start with clear intent. Write one sentence that defines your audience, your promise and the outcome you seek. The BetterBriefs and IPA study shows that around one third of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor briefing. Clarity saves cost.
Use human judgement wisely. Let machines optimise and iterate. Keep promise, message and proposition under human control. MarTech’s 2025 findings confirm that campaigns with human strategy and automated optimisation consistently outperform both extremes.
Design for organisational clarity. If McKinsey’s forty per cent inefficiency statistic tells us anything, it is this: tidy your structure before your tech stack.
The goal is not more output but more intent. A poor brief cannot be rescued by AI. A vague one cannot be redeemed by an agency. But a precise, accountable brief can turn both into genuine partners.
Work With Marketing Alchemist
If this article feels familiar, the problem is not your AI but your translation layer. That is where Marketing Alchemist operates.
We work with C-suite and leadership teams to bridge the gap between strategic ambition and delivery. We bring alignment between business intent, marketing execution and the teams that connect them.
Clear communication. We translate commercial objectives into concise, actionable creative direction so that every marketer, designer and agency partner understands the mission.
Strategic briefing. We craft briefs that are commercially sound, measurable and unambiguous, turning documents into decision systems.
Human oversight. We provide the context, market fluency and exhibition experience that agencies and AI cannot replicate, ensuring leadership intent survives contact with the process.
Custom solutions. Whether you need a one-off strategic brief, a fractional marketing director or complete campaign orchestration, we build the connective tissue between ambition and execution.
Better briefs. Smarter collaboration. Measurable outcomes.
Start the conversation now or email hello@marketing-alchemist.co. Let us turn intent into impact.