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TGIF!!!
Ask any big model for a running-shoe tagline and you get "Run Your Way" or "Run Your World" almost every time. Everyone in your category is asking the same model and getting the same line.
L'Oréal decided to buy the opposite. For a CeraVe campaign aimed at men in Australia and New Zealand, it worked with Springboards, an Australian creative-AI start-up whose model, Flint, is tuned to be less predictable, AdExchanger reports. Springboards finds what it calls "critical tokens," the points in a sentence where the options should explode, and raises the entropy there. In AdExchanger's demo it gave a different running-shoe line every time: "Pave your own path," "Keep on running," "Slay the day, one step at a time."
Springboards was a finalist in L'Oréal's Big Bang Beauty Tech competition, not the winner. L'Oréal deployed it anyway, because it speeds up the moment where a creative team needs a hundred bad ideas to find the good one.
Notice what the brand did not do. It did not ask the AI to make the ad. It asked it to be an unreasonable colleague in the room. A much smaller claim, and the one that keeps surviving contact with real campaigns.
Today’s sponsor:
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TALK ON THE MARKET
Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five and former CMO of Drift, on Saturday, after 400 B2B marketers came to Vermont for his event, an hour from the nearest airport:
The most automated profession in the building still drove somewhere with no direct flights to sit together. Remember that when a vendor tells you what your audience wants.
NUMBERS MATTER
6,900. Jobs lost in US advertising, public relations and related services between August 2025 and August 2026, from 482,900 to 476,000, with 800 of them in August alone, per Bureau of Labor Statistics data reported by eMarketer this week under the headline that AI and consolidation are changing what agencies staff for.
DAILY PROMPT
Generate 5 compelling headline variations for A/B testing. I need headlines that will appeal to [TARGET_AUDIENCE] and drive [PRIMARY_ACTION: clicks/signups/purchases].
Context:
- Product/Service: [PRODUCT_NAME]
- Current headline: [EXISTING_HEADLINE]
- Key benefit or value prop: [KEY_BENEFIT]
- Campaign channel: [CHANNEL: email/social/search/landing page]
- Tone: [TONE: professional/casual/urgent/inspirational]
For each headline variation, provide:
1. The headline text (under 60 characters)
2. The strategy behind it (what psychological trigger or benefit it emphasizes)
3. Best use case (which audience segment would respond best)
Make sure the headlines are:
- Action-oriented or benefit-focused
- Clear and specific (avoid vague claims)
- Different from each other in approach (test different angles)
- Optimized for the channel specified
Format as a numbered list with clear sections for each headline.Use this when the first batch of options all sound alike. L'Oréal paid for a model that disagrees with itself. You can ask a normal one to do the same, on purpose.
CMO CORNER
Make time for the work that removes future work.
An hour with a deliberately strange AI at the start of a brief removes weeks of polite, forgettable options later. So does the boring version: an afternoon writing down what the brand will never say saves every future review from relitigating it. Teams skip both because neither looks like output. Both are the leverage.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three worth your time this Friday, on one theme: variation with taste.
Sudowrite — best for brand storytelling that needs craft rather than volume. Try Sudowrite here →
Quillbot — best for tone shifts and copy variations at scale, with a plagiarism check for the compliance-minded. Try Quillbot here →
Crayo AI — best for DTC brands that need to test short-form video formats faster than a production calendar allows. Try Crayo AI here →
We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
Good ideation starts from something true about the customer, which is where most AI brainstorms go wrong: How to Do Market Research with AI.
It shows how to get real insight out of interviews, reviews, and support logs before you ask a model to be creative about them. For marketers who want the L'Oréal move without the L'Oréal budget.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Emily Oberg built Sporty & Rich out of a moodboard. She knows what a good image is. This season she let AI make the product photos, and this week she said what she thought of them.
E-commerce imagery costs the brand "upwards of" $200,000 for each twice-yearly shoot, she wrote in her newsletter, as Futurism reported. The AI version was far cheaper. It was also, in her words, "flat, the styling is mediocre and the images are too 'perfect' in a bad way. The models look dead in the eyes and don't have any organic movement whatsoever."
She is going back to a full human team. "AI could never achieve the results that my IRL team could." Taste, she says, is "felt, not learned."
Set that beside L'Oréal at the top of this email. One brand hired an AI to be strange in a brainstorm and kept the humans on the shoot. The other let the AI do the shoot and found out why you don't. The machine is welcome in the room. It is not yet welcome in the frame.
Ava is the first AI BDR to run outbound end to end, from finding leads to booking meetings, autonomously or on copilot. She's SOC 2 audited and trusted by companies like DoorDash and Grammarly. Book a demo.