Love isn’t efficient
Think about the relationships that matter to you – your partner, your friends, your family. None of those relationships are built through efficiencies and cost-saving. Nobody has ever felt loved because someone found a quicker way to spend time with them.
Love grows through time invested and effort you can see. That effort says you’re worth it.
Brands work the same way. We talk a lot at KISS about love being the most commercial thing a brand can own, and effort is how that love gets built.
When a brand puts visible effort in, it shows the brand believes in what it’s doing as much as it wants its audience to. That’s a commitment to them, and commitment is where trust starts.
Put two pieces of work side by side – a piece of OOH, for example. Same brief, same idea, same results in market. One was made by a team of people over a few weeks. The other was generated in an afternoon. Tell people which is which, and most will value the human one more, simply because someone cared enough to spend the time.
That isn’t just a hunch. Psychologists call it the effort heuristic. Back in 2004, researchers found people rated the same poem and the same painting higher when they were told it had taken longer to make. We’ve always judged quality partly by how much effort we think went in.
Why effort is getting turned up on the attention dial
For most of history, effort has been a given – it was simply the cost of making anything. AI has changed that. Output is now close to free, so the difference between something made and something generated is often the first thing people pick up on.
Gold works in a similar way. It isn’t valuable because it’s useful; it’s valuable because it’s rare and hard to get out of the ground. When everything can be produced instantly, work that clearly took time becomes a declaration in and of itself. It costs something to make, and that cost is exactly what people value.
AI is amplifying the effort heuristic.
Building up an intolerance
We’re flooded with instant slop, and people are getting quicker to reject it. Younger audiences especially – anything that looks remotely AI gets dismissed as “AI slop,” often regardless of whether it’s any good. That can be harsh, and sometimes unfair. It’s still the market that marketing directors and CEOs are now working in. The first judgement a piece of work gets is “did anyone actually make this?”
A declaration of care
Games Workshop is a brand I reference a lot. Back in January, CEO Kevin Rountree used the half-year report to outline an internal policy that keeps generative AI out of its design and creative processes – designing miniatures, writing lore, creating artwork. They aren’t cutting creative jobs either. Rountree says the company is hiring more creatives across concepting, art, writing and sculpting. And this came alongside record half-year results for a business that has been in the FTSE 100 since the end of 2024.
Games Workshop is making a declaration to a fanbase that spends hundreds of hours painting armies by hand: the effort you put in will be matched by the effort we put in.
Now that’s a love-building stance.
Compare that with Coca-Cola leaning on AI for its Christmas ad again last year, or Google’s “Dear Sydney” Olympics spot, which suggested a child let AI write her fan letter and was pulled within days. Both brands reached for the machine in exactly the place where their emotional relationship with people lives. Christmas is Coke’s heartland. A child’s letter to her hero is about as personal as it gets.
Trust is at a premium right now. Saying you care has always been cheap and now the words are literally free to generate. Effort is the proof.
Where it’s worth doubling down
So for marketing leads and CEOs, the question isn’t whether to use AI, it’s when the world is rushing to get more done with AI, where is it worth doubling down on effort?
My answer is wherever the relationship with your customer is being built. That includes the ideas and identity at the heart of the brand, because that’s where your soul lives and it shouldn’t be averaged out by a tool trained on everyone else’s.
It includes the moments customers actually touch, like a reply from a real person, packaging someone obviously sweated over, or a service experience that goes a step further than it needed to. And it includes the stuff your own team sees.
We hold ourselves to the same line at KISS. AI is integrated into our processes but it’s never the final output.
Let the machines handle the admin. Spend the effort where it can be seen.
Welcome to the high-effort era. I suspect it will separate the brands that say they care from the ones that can prove it.
