The Rise of Slop and the Anti-AI Opportunity for B2B Marketing
Winfield Dean-Salyards
Summary
As AI has made content creation effortless, B2B marketing has been flooded with low-quality, indistinguishable “slop.” This has triggered a growing backlash from audiences and even from companies themselves, who are beginning to limit or rethink their use of AI in marketing. The result is a trust and differentiation problem, not a technology problem. This article argues that the real opportunity is not to abandon AI, but to stop using it as a substitute for thinking, judgment, and point of view. In a market saturated with automated sameness, brands that win will be the ones that lead with human insight, clear beliefs, and meaningful content.
By Win Dean-Salyards Opens a new window, Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing
In 2025, “slop” was crowned word of the year. It was not a compliment. It was a cultural acknowledgment that the internet, and especially marketing content, had become flooded with low-quality, derivative, vaguely useful, instantly forgettable material. Content that technically existed, but added no real value. Content that was cheap to produce, easy to scale, and increasingly impossible to distinguish from everything else.
By late 2025, the narrative shifted again. CNN and other outlets began calling 2026 the year of “anti-AI marketing,” a turning point where brands started to realize that more automation did not automatically mean more impact.
This was not a sudden backlash. It was the predictable outcome of how AI had been adopted.
The Slop Era: When Scale Beat Substance
Over the last few years, generative AI made it trivial to produce:
- Blog posts
- Social updates
- Ad copy
- Sales emails
- Website pages
At a massive scale.
For a while, this felt like a competitive advantage. Teams that had been resource-constrained could suddenly keep up. Content calendars are filled. SEO programs expanded. Nurture streams multiplied.
At the same time, something else happened. Everything started to sound the same.
The internet is filled with content that was technically acceptable but emotionally empty. It was correct, polished, and optimized, yet indistinguishable. That is slop.
Audiences noticed.
Recent surveys suggest that nearly 90% of people say they prefer content created by humans. Not edited by humans. Not guided by humans. Created by humans.
More companies are also implementing no-AI or limited-AI policies for their marketing and content teams. This is not because they reject technology. It is because they want to protect differentiation.
When Optimization Starts to Erode Trust
We are now seeing real-world consequences of over-automation.
Pinterest is one of the most visible examples. Reporting has shown growing user backlash tied to its aggressive AI-driven content and recommendation strategies. Users have complained about content quality, relevance, and the overall experience. The platform may be more optimized than ever, but many users feel it is less inspiring, less useful, and less human.
This is the hidden cost of slop. It does not simply fail to persuade. It pushes people away.
Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, captured this tension in a statement this fall:
“It’s important for us to remember, as marketers, that we’re in a very delicate position within a turbulent time, both in America and around the world. Consumers are not just looking for convenience. They’re searching for meaning.”
Meaning is not something that can be reliably manufactured at scale.
The Trust Problem: AI Washing and AI Booing
A September 2025 article from the International Journal of Market Research, Responsible AI in Marketing: AI Booing and AI Washing Cycle of AI Mistrust¹, put a clear lens on what is happening.
It described two reinforcing dynamics:
- AI Washing: When companies exaggerate or overstate their use of AI for marketing advantage, turning “AI-powered” into a hollow buzzword.
- AI Booing: The public backlash that follows when those promises do not match reality. This is driven by disappointment, ethical concerns, lack of transparency, and degraded experiences.
Together, they create a cycle of mistrust. The more brands lean on AI as a marketing claim or as a content factory, the more skeptical and fatigued audiences become.
This is not an argument against AI as a technology. It is an argument for responsible use and clear accountability.
The Deeper Issue: Value Creation and Value Destruction
A paper in Technovation from May 2025, The bright and dark sides of AI innovation for sustainable development², frames the problem more fundamentally. AI introduces a tension between value creation and value destruction.
Some of its key ideas include:
- AI innovation always involves competing objectives and interests.
- It can help reduce big, systemic problems, or it can make them worse.
- Automation and augmentation choices, along with failures across the AI lifecycle, directly shape whether value is created or destroyed.
In marketing terms, this leads to a practical concern. Using AI to reach a goal, such as producing more content or covering more keywords, without rigorously evaluating whether it is the right way to reach that goal often leads to negative outcomes.
Efficiency does not guarantee effectiveness. Scale does not guarantee impact.
The Anti-AI Opportunity (Which Is Really a Human Opportunity)
There is a clear opportunity for B2B marketing over the next few years. It is to become the brand that sounds like it actually believes something.
As more companies flood their channels with AI-generated content that follows the same patterns, the relative value of the following increases:
- A strong point of view
- Clear strategic opinions
- Deep customer understanding
- Original synthesis
- Real-world experience
“Anti-AI marketing” does not mean banning tools. It means being disciplined about how they are used:
- Use AI for research, analysis, summarization, and exploration
- Keep humans responsible for thinking, deciding, and creating
- Treat content as a product of strategy, not as a byproduct of automation
AI should support good marketing. It should not define it.
What This Means Practically for B2B Teams
If you are leading or advising a B2B marketing organization, several implications follow:
- Your voice is now a competitive moat. If your content could be swapped with a competitor’s and no one would notice, you are already at risk.
- Your point of view matters more than your output volume. Fewer, sharper, more opinionated pieces tend to outperform large volumes of safe, generic content.
- Your strategy has to come before your tools. If AI is the starting point instead of a support layer, the work will drift toward sameness.
- Trust sits at the center of the funnel. Low-quality content weakens it. Meaningful content strengthens it.
A Quiet Reversal
After years of marketing chasing scale, automation, and endless production, the next wave of advantage is likely to come from something simpler: restraint.
It will come from being more selective about what gets published. From taking a little more time to think before shipping. From sounding like people with real experience and real conviction, not like another content machine.
The companies that win will not be the ones that used AI the most. They will be the ones who use it with intention, and who never let it replace the thing customers are actually searching for.
That thing is meaning.
Want help managing your marketing strategy in 2026? Reach out to us at acceleration@heinzmarketing.com to connect.
- Ozturkcan, S., & Bozdağ, A. A. (2025). Responsible AI in Marketing: AI Booing and AI Washing Cycle of AI Mistrust. International Journal of Market Research, 67(6), 696-722. https://doi.org/10.1177/14707853251379285 (Original work published 2025)
- Ilaria Mancuso, Antonio Messeni Petruzzelli, Umberto Panniello, Giovanni Vaia (2025). The bright and dark sides of AI innovation for sustainable development: Understanding the paradoxical tension between value creation and value destruction, Technovation, Volume 143, 2025, 103232, 0166-4972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2025.103232
