There’s a strange thing that can happen when you work with a brand long enough: you start to get tired of it. You’ve used the same colours, fonts and visual elements in your graphic design for years. You’ve said the same things and posted variations of the same ideas, over and over.

So you start thinking that maybe you should change things up. Before you do, consider how your audience feels. They’re seeing far less of your brand than you are.

I've started to see a growing trend in ministries. More and more senior leaders are using AI to produce internal materials, and they're genuinely pleased with the results. The documents look polished and professional, but anyone familiar with AI-generated writing can spot the signs.

One of the hardest things about social media is accepting that people probably aren’t paying as much attention to your brand as you think they are.

You can spend hours creating a post and writing the perfect caption. Then you publish it… and move on.

Your audience does too.

I recently walked into a sandwich shop and saw a six-foot-tall poster of a sandwich on the wall. Something about it was deeply wrong. The bread did not look like bread; the fillings looked unnatural — to the point where I felt uneasy looking at the image. The image was clearly generated by AI, and I learned that day that I don’t want artificial intelligence anywhere near my food.

Walk into almost any Costco and you’ll see the same thing: packed aisles, long checkout lines and people leaving with carts full of products they probably didn’t plan on buying. On paper, this scenario sounds like a personal nightmare. Yet I, along with millions of people, happily pay for a Costco membership every year.

Why? 

A lot of ads sound the same. Have you noticed?

Messaging like this is everywhere:

"Our product helps teams boost productivity.""Quality you can trust.""A dining experience you'll never forget."

While these things might be true, they don't tell people what makes them different.

Every year, I see the same pattern play out with ministries. 

Spring gets busy, summer sneaks up faster than expected, and before long, the calendar is full of vacations and all the normal demands of life. Then September arrives, and everyone suddenly realizes the fall communications plan is not quite as ready as they hoped. The website still needs work, the donor calendar is only partially mapped out, social media has lost momentum and the year-end campaign is still more of an idea than a plan. 

Over the past year or so, I’ve noticed something funny happening in organizations. People who never would have opened Photoshop, written a campaign brief or drafted a customer-facing sales piece are now creating “marketing materials” in AI tools and sending them to the marketing team to be cleaned up, branded or finalized.

John Deere had a problem. Their equipment was top-teir, their brand was trusted, and their message was clear. Yet sales to homeowners stayed flat while competitors gained ground.

The issue wasn't the product. It was the assumption that everyone buying a lawn tractor wanted the same thing.