There’s a phenomenon happening in advertising and marketing . If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve experienced it in the endless scroll of bland thought leadership posts. Your inbox is filled with decks and documents that your coworkers and vendors are churning out, expecting you to decipher.
The verbose, garishly-designed, and ultimately meaningless content you now have to wade through daily has a name: “enslopification.”
It’s a variation on Cory Doctorow’s coined term “ enshittification .” He used it to describe the inevitable decay of a digital platform (in his example, TikTok ) as it abandons user experience in a relentless pursuit to squeeze out as much profit as possible. “Enslopification” is what happens when content trends toward the same AI -flattened, meaningless mush, because generating content has suddenly become frictionless, homogenized, and free (for now).
THE AI EFFECTS
We are now seeing the effects. Instead of sharing unique insights, marketers are pushing cheap, identical noise into the market. Audiences can feel the difference between real opinions and AI slop, even when they can’t put a finger on it.
To hone the Quantious team’s “slop detectors,” we recently hosted a workshop pitting producer-written copy and original visuals against AI drafts. Everyone was able to spot the AI giveaways, agreeing that while the synthetic text and images were functional, they completely lacked soul, character, and depth. There was just something “icky” about them.
This is the biggest threat to B2B marketing, and dare I say small agencies. We leverage AI to work faster with fewer resources, pushing to hold onto our margins, and to land that next dream client. But if we let the slop slip by, we risk sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.
5 WAYS TO CHANGE COURSE
As an industry, we need to change course, fast. These five principles are our only defense.
1. Share a clear point of view that can only come from you
At their core, LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are probability engines built to anticipate the most likely next word. Without providing deeper context, that results in bland content that tries to appeal to everyone. And if you know anything about marketing, you know most products shouldn’t.
B2B buyers are exhausted from sorting through this slop. They are drowning in information and thirsty for interpretation. The brands cutting through the noise are the ones willing to say something original and relevant. They are telling real, first-hand stories that their audience can relate to.
2. Develop content that actually earns attention
Modern buyers don’t wade through 4,000-word blog posts. They engage with content that is brief, visual, and conversational.
As a small marketing team, we’ve leveraged AI to help with social media content. But in addition to our growing list of ways to ensure more strategic and on-brand output , we’ve developed a simple test. Before publishing, we ask: “Would this content stop me mid-scroll?” If the answer is no, we pull back and look for ways to have a stronger point of view, be instantly relatable, and provide more value.
3. Build trust from the start
Before you ever get a chance to pitch a buyer, they may have seen your website, visited your LinkedIn profile, received a cold email, or read your case studies. If any of that is AI slop content, their trust is eroded instantly.
That means every touchpoint has to do more than fill space. Show your work. Share the details. Let your experts have opinions. Use real examples instead of vague claims about “driving transformation.” Give buyers enough substance to decide you know what you’re talking about and you truly understand their challenges—before you ask for 30 minutes on their calendar.
4. Ensure human judgement behind the machine
Your team might use AI, but do they think with it ? AI can give you 50 headline options, summarize your research, and help you get from concept to implementation in a jiffy. But it can also turn out something that looks impressive and thorough, but is really just 10 pages of word salad.
For example, we recently had a B2B client come to us with an urgent campaign request. They presented us with a detailed project brief, so we dove in. At first glance, it seemed organized. At second glance, we noticed a few AI “tells.” And then we realized that the deliverables list didn’t make sense, the due dates were unreasonable, and creative reference assets didn’t actually exist. We were almost two days in before we could craft and approve a real project brief and get everyone aligned.
It showed us (and our client) just how vital human experience and judgment are, especially when the deadlines are real.
5. Build community, not just a lead list
Connection is the antidote to slop exhaustion: More and more, we want proof there’s a person on the other end.
This can be as formal as a customer advisory board, or as informal as a monthly office hours call with your key customers. We recently put this into practice at a conference, staffing our booth with the marketers who do the work every day (not just salespeople).
We want the first conversation with us to feel like chatting with a future colleague, not a sales pitch. When you build real connection, sales become natural.
And you know what? Our clients LOVE that we are centered on our humanity. They want to work with people who care enough to question a brief and have an honest conversation when something isn’t working.
We all have access to tools that can crank out a month’s worth of marketing in an afternoon. Before we unleash it on everyone, we owe them a little more thought. For the future of our industry, let’s stop the slop.
Lisa Larson-Kelley is CEO of Quantious.
