Why AI ad copy all sounds the same - and what to do about it
Generated marketing text has a house style: balanced, enthusiastic, and completely interchangeable. That is a positioning problem, not a writing problem.
The tell
You can spot it without reading closely. Three-part lists everywhere. Sentences that set up a contrast and resolve it politely. Adjectives doing the work that a number should do. Nothing anyone could disagree with.
It is fluent, which is exactly why it fails. Fluent and forgettable is worse for an event than clumsy and specific, because the specific version at least tells someone whether the night is for them.
Where the sameness comes from
A model asked for "engaging copy about our festival" has nothing to work with but the average of everything ever written about festivals. It returns the average. The output is not wrong, it is unowned.
The fix is not a better prompt in the abstract. It is feeding in what only you know: the actual line-up, the actual capacity, the actual reason someone bought last year.
What we put in the brief instead
One concrete fact per ad. A name, a number, a place, a date. "Doors at 22:00, 800 capacity, sold out twice last season" beats "an unforgettable night" every time, because it can be checked.
A voice that can say no. Brands that only ever affirm sound generated even when a person wrote them. Being willing to say who an event is not for is the fastest way to sound human.
A test before it goes live
Replace your event name with a competitor's. If the line still works, it was never about your event, and it will not persuade anyone to choose you over them.
The second test: could this sentence be disagreed with? Copy that nobody could argue with is copy nobody remembers.
Where the model actually helps
Volume and structure. Twenty subject lines, five ways to order the same three facts, a first draft that gets a blank page moving. All useful.
Then the edit does the work: cut everything generic, put a number back in, and read it aloud. If it sounds like a brochure, it will perform like one.
Should we stop using AI for ad copy?
No. Use it for volume and variation, then cut everything that could describe any other event. What survives is usually the part you supplied.
What makes ad copy sound like a person wrote it?
Concrete facts and a point of view. Names, numbers, places, and a willingness to exclude the wrong audience.