There’s something paradoxical about our times. We are entering an era of unlimited content. AI is generating articles, videos, music, animations (Sora and others are opening up new visual glut/slop – let’s just call it streams). But despite this tidal wave of creativity, we’re seeing a steady rise in boredom. [link]
Odd, right?
You’d expect boredom to drop with more content, more feeds, more videos, more everything. But it turns out that when everything is constantly new, nothing really sticks. In a world where every scroll reveals something fresh, attention spans are shorter and tolerance for repetition is vanishing.
Which brings me to hotels, and marketing in general. We used to run campaigns over three to six months, repeat ads, and slowly build brand familiarity. That era is slowly (or rapidly) vanishing. Audiences now expect something new every time they see you. The idea that you can show the same ad five times and it’ll start working? That’s so 2024 (+a few month). By the third view, they’re bored. By the fifth, they’re annoyed.
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The core problem isn’t lack of content, it’s the speed at which we consume and discard it. AI is only going to accelerate that. For hotels, this means we can’t just produce a set of brand ads and let them run for a season. We’re going to need volume, variety, and velocity.
Yes, branding is still about repetition. But now, the repetition needs to come in the form of a consistent identity shown across different creative executions. Not one billboard repeated. One brand expressed a hundred ways – a brand director’s nightmare.
That means hotel marketing teams (and their agencies) need to get comfortable with a completely new cadence. We’ll need to generate many different ads for the same hotel, not because people want more choice, but because they’ve been trained by their feed to expect something new every time they look.
The good news? With AI, that’s possible. The bad news? With AI, everyone else can do it too.
So while unlimited content might not cure boredom, it’s going to reshape marketing. Whether we like it or not, we’re all in the content business now.
