🍷 Something funkier

About a year ago, in a small wine bar in Zurich, I asked the sommelier to make my evening a little more interesting.

He asked what we liked and poured two local wines. Both were nice. Halfway through the second, I asked, “Got anything a bit funkier?”

He smiled, and came back with the bottle he’d probably wanted to pour all along: a natural amber wine, a white made like a red, left on its skins longer. It was far more complex than the grape had any right to be. It was cloudy and faintly orange, catching the light as if through a mist. It gripped your tongue, then opened into something juicy and floral and full of fruit. Strange, a little wild, and beautiful all over.

A year later I can still name it, “Free your mind,” and I’ve recommended it to friends more than once. The other two wines have blurred into every well-balanced glass I’ve had since.

No shade, those first two were good. Well-made, easy to drink, professional. And that is more or less why I don’t remember them. I keep noticing the same pattern in content, and it’s gotten more serious since AI learned to write.

Polished is the new bland

Polish used to set you apart. Clean writing, a decent structure, and you were ahead of most in the field. AI raised the floor, so that edge is mostly gone. The perfectly professional kind of writing that offends no one slides out of memory by the time the reader closes the tab.

And what they can’t remember can’t compound into a brand.

Louis Grenier recently scored a hundred B2B brands on how distinctive they really are. Eighty percent came back generic or invisible. His verdict, and I’m quoting, was “beige as f*ck.” The reason is brands are so polished they’ve slipped into the sea of sameness.

Louis was scoring logos, color, and taglines, the visible furniture of a brand. Words are harder to score that way, but the same trend is easy to catch: open ten company blogs, cover the logos, and count how many you could still tell apart. That confusion, mistaking polished for distinctive, has settled into the writing too, now that a machine will hand you a clean paragraph on demand.

Character isn’t a garnish

I don’t want you to get the wrong lesson here. People hear “be distinctive” and reach for decoration: a quirky sign-off, a spicy take, a pun dropped into an otherwise bland paragraph.

In his research, Louis warned against exactly this: a distinctive asset on top of vague positioning just makes you “famously generic.”

The amber wine’s character is structural. It comes from a decision made early, to leave the juice on the skins, which changes the whole chemistry of the glass. The grip and texture are built in, not sprinkled on.

So the order matters. What you believe about the work becomes your point of view, and that point of view is what gives your writing a voice people recognize. Character grows out of a real opinion, which is why no amount of decoration can fake it.

First, know who’s across the bar

There’s a detail from my wine story I skipped, and it might be the most important one.

The sommelier didn’t open with the funky bottle. He started safe, and only reached for the amber once I’d said what I liked. Pour something strange for the wrong person and you’ve wasted a lovely bottle on a baffled guest. Without a read on the table, the safe pour is the rational one.

Safe content is the same move. When you don’t know who you’re writing for, the safest thing you can pour is something bland enough to lose no one, writing that’s mostly trying not to be disliked.

Which is why the bold call and knowing your audience go hand in hand. You should risk something a little too weird once you know the person sitting across the bar well enough to trust they’ll enjoy it, and you’ve accepted this wine isn’t for everyone.

Using AI without losing your edges

None of this is an argument against AI. The risk lives at the other end of the process, in the polishing. Left alone, an AI edit pass smooths a piece toward the safe average of everything it has read, sanding off the very edges that made the writing yours, and calling that better.

Which is why the two things we’ve just talked about have to be settled before you open the draft. Your positioning, so you know what you actually stand for. Your audience, so you know which kind of strange they’ll come back for. Neither is quick (positioning is the work plenty of teams never finish), but without them the edit has no reference point.

With them in hand, the edit changes character. It’s about deciding, bit by bit, what stays.

Most of that decision runs through a single question: is this edge mine (or “ours”, as in “our brand’s”), and is it right for the person I’m writing for? If it is, it stays, even when the tool flags it. If it’s just unclear or self-indulgent, it goes. That’s the line between a characterful edge and a genuine flaw.

Here’s one of mine. AI loves to sound certain; ask for a recommendation and it hands you one confident answer. But most marketing questions don’t have a single right answer, and I don’t want to pretend it does. I keep the language that names the doubt: “here are two or three directions, here’s how I’d weigh them.”

To an AI editor it reads like hedging, so the tool edits the line into a bolder claim every time. It’s mine, and it’s right for marketers who know the work is rarely that clean, so I put it back every time.

Guard the two or three things the machine keeps trying to smooth away. Those are usually the parts that sound most like you.

***

Back in Zurich, the amber wine stayed with me because someone read the table, and offered something real that was distinctive in a way we’d appreciate.

AI hands you a pleasant crowd-pleaser straight away. The piece still remembered next year needs a person deciding who it’s for, then keeping the few parts that make it worth it.

The edges matter,

👌 Handpicked stories for you

Here are some interesting things I stumbled upon this week while reading, writing, researching, and being a generally curious marketing person on the internet:

💼 Three for work

Why a Story Budget Is the New-and-Improved Content Calendar You Need Now | Robert Rose argues that when nothing sits upstream of it, your content calendar becomes your strategy by default, and, in his words, “a wood chipper.” His fix, borrowed from newsrooms, is a “story budget”: every idea earns its slot by proving a sharp point of view first.

Podcast Repurposing: How to Expand the Reach and Impact of Each Episode | This is essentially a guide to getting more out of every episode, turning one recording into blog posts, clips, social, and email. The stat that stuck with me: YouTube now drives 39% of podcast listening, nearly double Spotify’s share, so an audio-only show is invisible to a big chunk of the audience.

LLMs Misunderstand Luxury Brands. Here’s How to Optimize Your Marketing Strategy for AI. | As LLMs start shaping what buyers believe about brands, HBR flags a new problem: models routinely flatten and misread premium positioning. This piece provides specific ways to solidify your brand’s place in the market in terms AI can recognize.

👀 Two for fun

This museum of forgotten interfaces | If you’ve gotten online through a screeching dial-up modem, this gallery of computer interfaces will hit you right in the nostalgia.

This look at Tour de France cuisine | The Tour de France is one of the few sports events I watch, and it’s fueled by a lot of food. Here’s how team chefs feed the peloton.

🐈 Weekly cat

An important security check.