Anthropic could have used AI to create its first major ad campaign. They build artificial intelligence for a living. Instead, they spent millions hiring humans. An ad agency called Mother. Film crews. Actors. They shot traditional TV spots and bought space in The New York Times.

OpenAI did the same thing. Shot their ChatGPT campaign on 35mm film. Bought NFL primetime slots. Hired real directors and photographers.

It poses a serious question: do the companies building AI trust the technology to build a brand?

And if they’re not betting on automated, performance-driven marketing, why are you?

An uncomfortable truth

AI is fundamentally reshaping how customers discover and choose businesses, and the rules keep changing.

Over the past year, Google has repeatedly shifted where AI-generated summaries appear in search results. First at the top, bypassing everything. Then below paid ads. Now buried in an ‘AI mode’ toggle. Search habits are evolving in real time as users adapt to AI chatbots, AI-powered browsers, and recommendation engines.

This instability is causing real problems for brands. When the platform changes the rules every few weeks, performance marketing strategies that worked last quarter break this quarter. Australian businesses report dramatic swings in organic traffic as AI features roll out, roll back, and relocate.

You might like

Opinion

My kids played with contaminated sand in Adelaide – here’s what I want you to know

Opinion

Your Views: Letters to the Editor

The data shows the scale of disruption: Some businesses have lost 80 per cent of their search clicks. One site tracked a 95 per cent drop when AI started answering queries directly. Google’s share of open web advertising fell from 40 per cent in 2019 to just 11 per cent today.

The paid advertising picture is equally challenging. Research shows 81 per cent of B2B ads fail to register in people’s memory. Bland advertising now costs 2.6 times more to achieve the same sales as distinctive creative.

Your legacy SEO strategy isn’t just being systematically dismantled. It’s being dismantled unpredictably. And that unpredictability is the real problem.

You might like

Opinion

My kids played with contaminated sand in Adelaide – here’s what I want you to know

Opinion

Your Views: Letters to the Editor

What the research actually shows

Byron Sharp’s research at the University of South Australia’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (the world’s largest centre for marketing science) is unambiguous: 98 per cent of advertising’s impact is long-term. Not the click you got yesterday. Not this quarter’s conversion rate. Long-term memory and brand equity.

The financial evidence is compelling:

• Brands that built equity between 2019 and 2021 grew their value by 72 per cent. Brands that didn’t? Twenty per cent.
• Emotional brand campaigns beat rational performance campaigns by 2X in driving market share growth.
• High-attention brand advertising delivers up to 65 per cent increases in profitability.

When you then layer Dr Karen Nelson-Field’s attention research it adds critical insight: advertising exposures of five-plus seconds yield 40 per cent higher recall than one-second exposures. Your performance ads get scrolled past. Brand campaigns get remembered.

Even AI-powered search proves the point. AI-driven visitors are 4.4 times more valuable than regular search traffic. And which sites do they visit? The brands they already know. The ones with equity.

The Airbnb case study

When the pandemic forced budget cuts in 2020, Airbnb made a decision that seemed reckless: they slashed over 500 million dollars from performance marketing. Paid search went to nearly zero.

The result? They discovered 90 per cent of their traffic was already direct or organic. Brand recognition was doing the work. Performance ads were expensive decoration.

So they doubled down on brand. Launched their first major campaign in five years. The outcome:

• 20 per cent traffic increase in campaign markets
• Profits up 213 per cent versus pre-pandemic
• Two-thirds of margin expansion attributed to the marketing shift

Airbnb’s CFO was explicit: the company will continue investing more in brand and less in search engine marketing. This isn’t theory. It’s a multi-billion-dollar company that tested both approaches and chose brand.

What this means for your business

The strategic implications are clear. Stop pretending your performance channels are stable. They’re not. In a lot of cases they are performative.

Rebalance your investment. The 60:40 split between brand building and short-term activation isn’t just best practice. It’s survival. When that 40 percent is under attack from AI disruption, you need a strong 60 per cent to sustain growth.

Build distinctive brand assets. Invest in elements people recognise instantly: colours, logos, sounds, visual style, tone, characters and fluent devices. Research proves that even 1.5 seconds of exposure can encode brand memory when assets are truly distinctive.

Capture real attention. Create campaigns that people actually notice and remember. High-attention creative on high-attention platforms delivers measurably better business outcomes than generic content people scroll past. That’s a message/story with emotional tension, with human insight that captures attention.

Use AI strategically. Deploy it for efficiency, testing, and production speed. But if you’re using AI to replace human strategy and creativity, you’re building a brand indistinguishable from every competitor. Distinctiveness dies in automation.

The choice ahead

You can continue optimising channels that are breaking. Keep chasing cheaper clicks while your competitors build brands that people actually remember when it matters.

Or you can follow the signal from the companies that see the future first.

Anthropic and OpenAI are spending millions on human creativity and traditional brand building. Airbnb proved performance marketing was delivering a fraction of what brand recognition delivered. Australian research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute consistently demonstrates that brand equity drives sustainable growth.

In a world where AI increasingly mediates discovery and recommendation, your brand is what ensures customers choose you deliberately. Performance marketing might get you today’s conversion. Brand building gets you tomorrow’s loyal customer base.

Sam Talbot is an advertising leader with over 10 years’ experience working across local, national and global brands. After building his career in Sydney at leading agencies including VML, Isobar and MercerBell, he relocated with his family to South Australia in 2023 to join KWP+Partners.

As Executive Director, Sam leads the Advertising division with a hands-on, collaborative approach and a strong belief in work that both cuts through and delivers commercially.