The good-enough-go culture is hurting premium brands

The sharpest sound at Digiday’s inaugural AI Marketing Strategies event on Sept. 24 wasn’t a keynote statistic. It was a phrase one brand-side marketer used to describe what happens when creative teams stop sweating the details: ‘good enough — go.’

As adland’s AI bubble matures, the early promise of speed is colliding with a less glamorous reality. Job cuts have pushed oversight toward automated workflows and junior staff. The result, several brand marketers argued at the summit co-hosted by Glossy and Modern Retail, is a drop in standards that quietly taxes premium brands.

The 10/80/10 quality squeeze

One premium beauty marketer described the standard AI workflow as a 10/80/10 formula. Ten percent of the effort goes into prompting the platform in the right direction. The middle 80% is the AI’s generation. The final 10% is the human edit that turns a rough draft into work good enough for a luxury audience.

‘The quality control is so bad,’ the participant said, adding that embedding brand standards into AI-driven ad platforms ‘is challenging all of us.’

That final 10% is where the trouble concentrates. Multiple brand-side marketers said agency partners are not as motivated to protect those details, often leaving platforms in the hands of junior employees. The consequences are specific and unglamorous: a logo rendered incorrectly, an off-tone line, a visual inconsistency that would never have shipped a few years ago.

Why ‘good enough’ is a brand tax, not a shortcut

For premium and beauty brands, consistency isn’t a creative preference; it’s the product. A luxury logo or a precise shade carries accumulated meaning. When consumers see variations, the brand feels unmanaged. That is a psychological cost that doesn’t show up in a weekly output dashboard.

Call it satisficing: under pressure to produce, teams accept an adequate version rather than the best one. Automation makes satisficing frictionless. It lowers the effort required to publish, so the bar can fall without anyone making a formal decision to lower it.

From measuring outputs to measuring gaps

DEPT’s global EVP of strategy, Isabel Perry, reframed the problem as one of measurement. ‘We are drowning in measurement,’ she said. ‘Instead of just measuring numbers, we need to measure gaps.’ When marketers measure what is missing—where the customer journey remains human and where content fails to surface—budgets can follow the parts that actually create value rather than chasing semi-generic industry metrics.

Thorne’s VP of digital, Rajiv Ragu, pointed the same logic at content in a zero-click world. Legacy content won’t protect itself; teams need to regularly check what is still being surfaced, update authorship and substance, and treat content libraries as living assets.

What brand teams can do now

The summit’s recurring change-management theme suggests the answer isn’t to reject AI. It is to rebuild the guardrails that automation has quietly removed.

• Codify non-negotiables—logo usage, tone, claims—before AI touches a campaign.
• Keep a human checkpoint for high-stakes assets, especially in premium categories.
• Measure gaps in the customer journey, not just impressions and output volume.
• Audit legacy content so agentic and human search still find you accurately.

The hardest part may be cultural: automation makes speed feel like progress. But for brands built on consistency, the final 10% of human judgment is not overhead. It is the product.

Source: Digiday