AI Slop DESTROYED Trust in Ads | Here's How to Get It Back in 2026

Evan Lee So without further ado, I would love, love, love to welcome our next speaker to the stage, Ashley from Stuff About Advertising, who's probably your favorite follow on social. So everybody, let's welcome Ashley to the stage and let's show some love in the chat.

Evan Lee Ashley, welcome to the party. I'm so happy to have you here.

Ashley Rutstein Thank you for having me. The chat is blowing up. I love it.

Evan Lee Super popping. But Ashley, I'm gonna pop out, do your thing, and I'll see you at the end, okay?

Ashley Rutstein Amazing.

Ashley Rutstein All right. So I am going to share. Okay, so I have like a little thesis for you today that I'm very excited about. Um, just a little about me. I am a creative director and copywriter. Been working in the traditional ad agency world for 14 years now. Um, but I'm also a content creator. I make stuff on Stuff About Advertising where I just talk about the industry. So I have kind of a foot in both the big creative traditional campaign world and the content social world. So the thing I want to talk about today is a little of both. It can apply to both of those worlds. And when I was picking what I wanted to talk about today, I was thinking of something that I personally am really craving from brands. And my cat is going to join us in a second. She has to be involved in every single meeting I have. Um, but yeah, so this is something that I have personally been craving and I think the brands that embrace it next year will be the ones that stand out from the pack.

Ashley Rutstein So I would love to see some love in the chat for this old phrase. I might be dating myself here, but who remembers saying, "do it for the gram"? I know I've definitely said it. But "do it for the gram" was all about doing things in real life so that you can go talk about it online. You were doing things that you wanted to go share later on. It was like, we have to have this experience so that we can go talk about it with our friends, family, and community, whether that's in person or online.

Ashley Rutstein But over time, we have kind of shifted to doing things on the gram. Everything is done on social now. So instead of documenting real life experiences on social media, we are now only experiencing social media. It's just a very different world. And because of that, all of marketing has turned into this social-first need. And because of that, all of our feed, all of the whole internet feels kind of like a simulation now. Like it doesn't really feel real all the time. And I think that has been driving so much fatigue and desire to just escape the internet and get out of all of that. And then add on top of that AI, which we are all so familiar with now. So that has just led to this deluge of content and even less humanity in it. So I think the brands that will stand out from all of this, from this like simulated and disposable feeling world of social, are the ones who will put effort into what they're doing and show the elbow grease and the humanity that goes into what they're putting online.

Ashley Rutstein And I'm calling this the effort signal because I'm a copywriter, I have to have a name, a fun name for something. But this is all about showing that your content and your ads and whatever you're putting out there were put together with thought and intention by humans who actually care about what they're doing.

Ashley Rutstein And I think this can come to life in a few different ways. So I want to talk about these different sort of pillars of how this can manifest. But it's effort in the process, so showing how your ads or your products get made. It's effort in understanding, which is proving that you actually know your audience on a human to human level. And then also putting effort in the form that you choose. So you're choosing formats that require work and intention, whether that's something physical or handmade or just deliberately, deliberately not optimized for the algorithm.

Ashley Rutstein So first we'll talk about effort in the process. This is showing your human hand that you actually made something because obviously people are so skeptical about AI. They are actively trying to spot it in everything they look at, of course. Like I'm doing it too. So brands need to be very clear on their stance on AI or showing their work for whatever they're putting out there.

Ashley Rutstein And you can do this in a couple different ways. Like Dove just put their stance on AI out there. They said, we are not going to use it to replace real people. So you can do that. You can make your stance on AI known so that then whatever you put out there, people just know like, oh, they don't use AI.

Ashley Rutstein But you can also show the making of whatever you're doing. So like Chamberlain Coffee made this really fun stop motion short video, but they also posted this making of video where you can see the people actually painting these characters, setting up the scenes, doing all of the behind the scenes process to tell people like, hey, we did this by hand. This was not AI. And the caption even says, handcrafted just like our coffee. So this process is the proof of the effort that they put into this.

Ashley Rutstein And behind the scenes doesn't just have to mean the making of the ad or the content itself. It can also mean the making of your product. Because a lot of companies hide the manufacturing process for a bunch of different reasons. But if you can take pride in that, you can give people a glimpse into the human hands, like literal hands in this case, um, and thought and care that goes into the process of making this product. So this was just a very simple video from Cocokind and they showed a couple different clips of hands putting these products together and the conveyor belts and things and how people are involved in this process.

Ashley Rutstein Um, and another example from Cocokind as well is to show there's a behind the scenes of the team itself too. This was a product launch that they were excited about and they just took a screenshot of Slack messages with the team talking about how excited they are. That shows that there are real humans behind this launch and it's not just like this faceless corporation pushing out a product. So that's effort in the process is just visible intention in how you're making something, whether it's your ad or your product or whatever it is.

Ashley Rutstein And then there's effort in understanding. So this is just proof that you actually care enough to get to know your audience. It's crazy with all of the targeting that we have, still half of US consumers feel ignored by marketers. And then 70% of them say that they are more likely to buy from brands that engage in the hobbies and communities that they care about. So you need to prove to your audience that you are putting in the time and effort to understand them and their hobbies.

Ashley Rutstein And you can do this in a lot of different ways. There are some brands who are putting in the work to actually learn about their audience with things like Facebook groups. Like Lodge Cast Iron has a Facebook group. No Reception Club, which they make the best diaper bag ever, highly recommend, they have a Facebook group where they are constantly talking to their customers. Brands are getting involved in things like Facebook groups and subreddits, Discords, WhatsApp groups, just finding these two-way spaces to interact with your people. And then whatever you learn from them, you can use to better communicate to them both in organic and paid content. And then even if you don't want to or can't for whatever reason host your own space like this, you can still get involved in your audience's niche communities and micro communities that they're involved in. Like Jack in the Box, the example on the right, Jack in the Box found this network of Fortnite related Discord servers and sponsored them. So they're not hosting this community, but they found something that their audience cares about and it shows that they took the time and effort to truly understand them.

Ashley Rutstein An example on a much larger scale is Spotify's data-driven campaigns that they've been running for years. This entire campaign is built on a very niche and specific understanding of their audience and their music preferences. And while this is on a very large scale, when you see yourself in one of these little stats or pieces of niche preferences, it feels like you are seen. Like you feel like you found your people. It's like you're in on this inside joke. And while this is a large scale and Spotify obviously has access to an immense amount of data that most of us don't have, you can still try to tap into some of this by just learning about the specific preferences and quirks of your customers and using those as hooks or captions or ways to just talk to them human to human.

Ashley Rutstein And my last example for this is showing at a more granular level. You can show effort of knowing your audience in tiny little things like hooks and captions. Like this first example, the fact that this brand pulled out a review that said, "those poops are curplunkin'", like that is so specific and so human. You know a person behind the brand picked that out and said, yes, this is it. This is how we want to talk to people. That's so good. And the second example with "good soup", that's such an inside joke internet meme that you know a human who also loved that meme put this ad together. So it's the true mentality of the ones that get it, get it. Like the brands who take time to get their audience and put the effort in to get them will get the reward.

Ashley Rutstein And then last is effort in the form. So obviously people are really craving those tangible analog offline experiences. It's just booming right now with stationery, magazines, vinyl records, pen pal handwritten letters, like it is blowing up. I just got a record player myself just a few weeks ago. People are just dying for tangible things. And with this has come this resurgence of print marketing. I saw this coming a year or two ago, but now with AI, it is just really booming. Brands like J.Crew and Walmart have brought back their physical printed catalogs. And these printed physical things signal that effort and intention from the brand that cares enough to print these things or physically make something.

Ashley Rutstein Like Red Wing Shoes just made this campaign where they built billboards out of literal lumber and leather saying "made the hard way". The form of this is the message here.

Ashley Rutstein A24 to promote the new movie coming with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson put this fake engagement announcement in a real newspaper. Like they are committing to the bit with a traditional form of media with how engagement announcements are typically put out there. It's unexpected and that effort really shows.

Ashley Rutstein And then like I said with brands bringing back their catalogs, like The Onion went back into print with their satirical newspaper and they brought in 50,000 new subscribers with that print newspaper. It's insane. But when you have this physical object, you can do so much content with it. You can literally just flip through the catalog on a flat lay. You can have people sitting on a couch reading it. You can tear pages out of it and put it on a wall. If you have a physical object, you can do so much with it.

Ashley Rutstein This fragrance brand called Ffern has built an entire content strategy around physical creations. Every quarter or every season, they release a new scent. And with that scent, they create so many different physical and visual representations of that scent, which they then turn into social ads. So they make Rube Goldberg machines, flower arrangements, paper art, they made this giant accordion. They make real things and then film them and turn them into ads, which are so eye-catching.

Ashley Rutstein And sometimes it can be even simpler than that. You don't have to make some giant accordion to do this. Like this first example, they literally just printed an infographic and taped their product onto the wall. But for some reason, it sticks out because it's like, wow, they took the time to print something out. That's more effort than most brands are making right now. The middle example was just showing how the product is used on some different fruit. Like they're literally just cutting up pieces of fruit and putting the product on it. That shows more effort than most brands are putting in. And then the last example is a almost four minute video of the owner of DedCool, a fragrance brand, just talking about her brand and why she made it and the products. But it shows so much effort because it's almost four minutes long. There's all kinds of fun, silly stuff in there. There's lots of cool editing. It doesn't look like a traditionally polished ad, but you can tell they put a lot of thought and intention into it. So there's a lot you can do here.

Ashley Rutstein But overall, effort is going to be your edge in this world of AI where content is just so easy to make and everyone is so skeptical of everything they're seeing. So with every piece of content you make, just ask yourself, how can we show effort? Even if it's in a very, very small way. What signals can you add in there that help people understand there was a human being that gives a shit who put this together? It is harder. It takes more time. But that's exactly why you will stand out for doing it.

Ashley Rutstein So that's me. That's my thought. That's what I want to see from brands. I hope more people do that. Um, this is where you can find me if you want to talk more about it. But yeah, that's me.

Evan Lee Ashley, you freaking crushed it. You talked about the now, you talked about the future, and you gave us so much nostalgia along the way. Absolutely incredible. Everybody, you have to show love in the chat. And Ashley, you for sure have to go check out the chat after. It's going crazy. It's going crazy.

Ashley Rutstein Thanks a ton.

Evan Lee You're the best. You're the best. I'm gonna talk to you soon, okay?

Ashley Rutstein Bye. Thank you.