Why AI Is Like Standing On Your Tippy Toes
By now, most marketers understand that AI is transformational. It can generate copy, design ads, optimize placement, and personalize messaging at lightning speed. But while the tools are improving, the impact is a paradox: as AI makes it easier to market, it also makes it harder to be noticed.
The Age of Infinite Content
AI doesn’t just help one brand — it helps every brand. That means inboxes, feeds, and search results are now flooded with a torrent of AI-generated content: emails, ads, articles, videos, and more. The barrier to entry has dropped so low that everyone can show up, all the time, everywhere.
Think of it as watching a parade and trying to get a better view. One person at the front of the crowd stands on their tiptoes and everyone else behind follows. Eventually those at the back of the crowd are standing on their tiptoes but have no better view!
More content does not mean better engagement. As content multiplies, attention fragments. Consumers start skimming, skipping, and ignoring. Brand recall drops. Open rates fall. Clicks become accidental.
Why Existing Channels Are Breaking
AI contributes to what's becoming an algorithmic arms race. As brands use AI to generate more content, platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok respond with their own AI to filter, suppress, or prioritize what gets seen. Your content isn’t just competing with other brands — it’s fighting the platforms themselves.
The result? Marketing performance decays, even when budgets rise. Everyone’s shouting. Fewer are listening.
The Power of Undivided Attention
This is where Out-of-Home (OOH) ads, i.e. those in the real world, thrive.
OOH advertising isn’t filtered by an algorithm. It isn’t skipped, scrolled, or swiped. It doesn’t fight for space between notifications. A billboard doesn’t disappear because your email went unread or your Instagram post didn’t catch the algorithm’s mood. It’s there, in the physical world, seen by people moving through real space with real attention. And that real world presence gives credibility.
When someone is waiting at a stoplight, walking past a fence wrap, or using a porta potty, there are no tabs to close. No autoplay video to hijack their gaze. Just the message.
Even AI Companies Know This
That’s why, despite selling the most advanced tech, many AI companies — from OpenAI to Anthropic to Hugging Face — choose billboards to announce major launches.
When you want to announce something important in a world drowning in digital noise, you pick a medium that can’t be ignored.
The Quiet Advantage
As AI makes content easier to create and harder to distinguish, brands can rediscover the value of presence — of being unmissable. Not through tricks, pixels, or optimized subject lines, but by showing up in the physical world with clarity, simplicity, and permanence.
The future of marketing won’t just be defined by how good your AI is — but by how well you can cut through the noise it helped create.
In a world where everyone is yelling online, sometimes the quietest voice — the one on the porta potty wall at the construction site or local fair — is the one people actually remember.
