AI Is Making Brands More Intelligent. And More Cringe.

My niece introduced me to the concept of “cringe”.

Or, more accurately, she introduced me to the uncomfortable realisation that I was cringe.

We were in the car and I was playing music. I had deliberately chosen a few songs I thought might impress her.

It didn''t work.

“Cringe.”

Apparently, trying too hard is a major component of cringe. Which also explains why my subsequent attempts to casually insert “six seven” into conversations with every ten-year-old I meet haven''t exactly improved my standing.

There is something particularly brutal about children. They can smell when you''re trying to be cool.

Unfortunately for brands, so can the rest of us.

And AI may be about to make the problem considerably worse.

Every brand wants to be in culture

I used to work at a communications agency that described itself as “in-culture”.

It was actually a clever proposition.

Because being “in culture” is something brands desperately want to buy.

They don''t just want awareness. They want relevance. They want to be part of whatever people are watching, sharing, laughing about or arguing over right now.

There is an entire corner of the communications industry dedicated to making that happen.

Reactive social is part of it.

If something suddenly captures people''s attention, a football match, a television moment, a meme, a celebrity mishap or some inexplicable TikTok phenomenon, the brand reacts while the conversation is still alive.

Get it right and the brand can suddenly feel surprisingly human.

Get it wrong and you get the corporate equivalent of me saying “six seven”.

And then we gave that industry AI.

AI can see everything

This is where things get interesting.

AI gives social teams capabilities they could only have dreamed about a few years ago.

It can monitor enormous volumes of conversation. Spot emerging trends. Analyse sentiment. Generate jokes. Write captions. Create images. Localise content. Suggest replies.

And it can do most of that before you''ve finished your first coffee.

Which sounds like a superpower.

Except everyone has it.

Suddenly every bank, supermarket, airline, pharmaceutical company and mayonnaise brand can identify the same cultural moment at roughly the same time and ask an AI:

*How can our brand join this conversation?*

You can probably see where this is going.

We''re about to industrialise cringe.

IKEA does something more interesting

Which is why IKEA''s approach caught my attention.

In an interview with Rachel Karten, IKEA described something it calls its Responsive Project Team.

The team regularly looks at what is happening in culture and considers whether there is genuinely an IKEA-shaped way into the conversation.

That''s an important distinction.

They''re not simply asking:

*What''s trending?*

They''re asking:

*Does this make sense coming from us?*

That sounds almost trivial. It isn''t.

Because the technology is increasingly brilliant at answering the first question.

The second requires something much harder.

Taste.

Judgement.

An understanding of why people like your brand in the first place.

And perhaps enough self-awareness to realise that nobody was waiting for your insurance company to make a joke about the latest TikTok trend.

Check it. 👇

The more AI lowers the cost of joining cultural conversations, the more valuable it becomes to know which conversations actually belong to you.

Consumers can smell it too

There is evidence that people are already getting tired of brands trying too hard.

Sprout Social reported that a third of consumers think brands jumping on viral trends is embarrassing.

There it is.

Cringe.

The interesting thing is that this isn''t really an argument against reactive social.

Good reactive social can be brilliant. It can make a huge organisation suddenly feel observant, funny and surprisingly human.

The problem is confusing being aware of culture with belonging in it.

AI makes that confusion easier.

A machine can tell you that millions of people are suddenly talking about something.

It can analyse the joke.

It can explain the meme.

It can generate 25 possible responses in your tone of voice.

It might even tell you which one is most likely to perform.

None of that necessarily means you should post it.

Intelligence isn''t taste

This may turn out to be one of the stranger consequences of generative AI in marketing.

We assumed more intelligence would make brands smarter.

It probably will.

But it will also give them vastly more opportunities to demonstrate that they don''t quite understand the room.

When everyone can react instantly, speed becomes less interesting.

When everyone can generate a joke, generating a joke becomes less impressive.

When everyone knows what''s trending, knowing what''s trending stops being an advantage.

What becomes scarce is taste.

Knowing when something genuinely fits your brand.

Knowing when you have something worth adding.

Knowing when you''re trying too hard.

And knowing when to shut up.

AI can give a brand better eyes, faster hands and an almost infinite supply of words. It still can''t give it taste.

Maybe my niece accidentally taught me more about AI branding than she realised.

The problem wasn''t that I didn''t know the songs.

I did.

The problem was that she could tell why I was playing them.

That''s cringe.

AI is about to give brands an extraordinary ability to know what''s happening in culture.

But knowing what''s happening doesn''t mean you belong there.

Sometimes the most culturally intelligent thing a brand can do is nothing at all.

Clock it.

Or slay.

I''m still learning.