Greetings from LHC HQ, where our après-Cann’t hangover is finally subsiding (more on that later) and we can move on to more pressing, sporting matters — like watching soccer in the middle of the day and realizing that Wimbledon’s strawberries and cream aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Now on to the #content:
Undifferentiated solutions
What happens when everyone is using the same tools? Give a bunch of artists linear perspective and oil-based pigments, and you might just get the Renaissance. Give some creatives a tool that’s been trained on the stolen cultural capital of millennia, and apparently you get a lot of em-dashes and large serif typefaces. Not all tools, it would seem, are created equal.
So pity the contemporary creative who relies upon the seemingly god-like creative spark provided by AI. Turns out that the qualities that drive memorability are often at odds with the tools that make our job — and lives — easier (and cheaper).
According to a July report from Adobe, only 17% of consumers are confident they can recall the names of the last three ads they saw after just 24 hours. The same survey found that 56% of respondents remember ads for the same reasons they always have: something is entertaining, funny, or, put simply, unique. And most of the time, that ain’t made by AI.
Take Claude Design, for instance. It (he?) can help you build sharp slide decks and sleek landing pages in seconds. Sick. For some work, though, the risk can be bigger than the reward. One designer recounted that two unrelated clients’ pitch decks came back looking exactly the same, save for a different logo. Even Anthropic’s own documentation admits the model defaults to a consistent house style.
What, then, is the new KPI? Volume is easy now. Polish is child’s play. That leaves one thing a model can’t spit out on command: a memorable vibe. Some work can survive being optimized to death. Some need to be a little unorthodox. Knowing which is which remains a real differentiator.
Thirst traps
The World Cup is beautiful. Nations come together to exchange binge drinking tactics, rapt audiences look on at era-defining upsets, and good old-fashioned corruption exists in plain sight.
Plus, there are ads.
And as of this year, the introduction of the controversial hydration break — a three-minute pause smack in the middle of each 45-minute half — has made the commercial stakes higher than ever. While sensible viewers decry them as unconscionable interruptions of the beautiful game, advertisers see hydration breaks as a prime (albeit expensive) testing ground to overcome the aforementioned memorability crisis.
When Mexico and England faced off in the round of 16, nearly 45 million people in the U.S. alone tuned in. Recent analysis showed that Fox only lost between 1 and 3 percent of its active viewership during those hydration breaks. How are brands making their mark and ensuring each 30-second spot doesn’t fall flat?
Rick Rubin narrates a meditation on predictions and curiosity to make betting feel a little more ~cerebral~. Nike stages a six-minute, blockbuster-level football drama with seemingly every star making an appearance. Billy Bob Thornton is… more present than you’d expect, in general. David Beckham is somehow even more present than you’d expect (and we were expecting a lot).
What these have in common is that the ads are spun out of longer productions meant to make you explore them outside traditional TV advertising. A 30-second spot isn’t necessarily the final product. Instead, it’s just a cut of a larger narrative designed to be watched in full. Creating these is probably a job better left to humans than AI.
All this writing is making us thirsty. Let’s smooth things over with a Michelob Ultra.
The latest and greatest from LHC HQ
Cann’t 2026 celebrated the best — and worst — of advertising right here in New York City. We laughed, we blew up countless inflatable palm trees, we persuaded police officers not to ticket our Pontiac Grand Prix of questionable origin. Check out some of the highlights and join us next year.
We made Digiday’s top workplaces list for 2026! Explore the full list here.
Until next time,
The LHC crew