When I started my career in advertising, you could still spot the Don Draper types pacing the corridors, selling bold ideas with nothing more than a marker pen and a bit of swagger. It was London in the late ’80s and early ’90s: Nike’s Just Do It, the Guinness surfer, and Levi’s were turning advertising into pop culture.
I was young and inexperienced, but the first thing I learnt was that every great campaign is built on brutal simplicity — one distinctive idea, hammered home everywhere, consistently.
Fast forward 15 years and performance marketing took to the stage. It’s played a major role in my professional life, and I’m a big believer in its power and accountability. But somewhere along the way, we got seduced. The work got sharper, but some of the magic faded.
Then, last week, something unexpected happened.
A colleague threw a report under my nose. “Look!” he exclaimed. “When you ask ChatGPT for the best hotels in Scotland, one of our clients consistently comes up top.”
At first, I shrugged. “And…?” But here’s the kicker: the hotel in question was outperforming larger rivals with far bigger marketing budgets. And it wasn’t luck. AI was surfacing them repeatedly because it detected the one thing they were doing that too many brands have forgotten - a brutally simple brand strategy, delivered consistently across multiple channels.
Intrigued by this, we carried out similar AI searches for some of the most iconic hotel brands around the world, they didn’t even appear. Why? Because their positioning was vague, overcomplicated, or fragmented. AI didn’t know what they stood for, because neither did they.
Here's the lesson:
- Noise is higher than ever. AI lets anyone pump out a million ads, posts, and emails. If you don’t have brutal simplicity, you’re wallpaper.
- Consistency beats novelty. AI makes it easy to shape-shift, but customers don’t remember shape-shifters. They remember brands that hammer home the same idea relentlessly.
- AI scales clarity. Feed it a vague positioning and you get amplified vagueness. Feed it a crystal-clear promise and it becomes a bloody megaphone!
AI scales clarity. Feed it a vague positioning and you get amplified vagueness. Feed it a crystal-clear promise and it becomes a bloody megaphone!
David Gardner, 80 DAYS
So, what should your hotel do with this insight? Here are three things to get you started:
- Define your ‘brutally simple’ positioning. Strip your brand down to one clear idea. If you can’t say it in a sentence (or better, a single word), neither can AI.
- Hammer the message home. From your website to Instagram, from TripAdvisor replies to Google ads, from PMax to PR, everything should echo the same promise in the same language. Repetition builds recognition.
- Build campaigns, not content. Instead of scattering posts and offers, develop one big campaign idea and execute it across channels. A campaign gives AI a consistent story to latch onto.
Hotels that do this won’t just show up higher in AI search. They’ll show up higher in your customers’ memory. And in the end, that’s what drives bookings.
So here we are: Brutal simplicity isn’t "old-fashioned." It’s survival. AI hasn’t changed the rules - it’s just exposed who’s been playing without a strategy.
--
Image created with Midjourney