Machine-gunned AI slop is everywhere – it’s time to fight back with humanity

Phil Treagus-Evans spent years watching what actually works in marketing. The patterns kept pointing in one direction. Now he’s written a book about it — and the timing couldn’t be more apt.

Marketing didn’t lose its humanity all at once. It happened gradually — through relentless optimisation, the slow retreat of real people behind corporate brand facades, and a growing tendency to treat customers as data points rather than human beings with problems, ambitions and lives of their own. And then AI slop arrived. And poured fuel on the fire.

That’s the diagnosis at the heart of Human First Marketing: The Art of Being Seen, Trusted and Remembered — the debut book from Phil Treagus-Evans, co-founder and CEO of Giraffe Social Media, one of the UK’s leading social media agencies. Phil joined me recently on the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast to dig into the thinking behind it, and the conversation covered everything from the root causes of marketing’s trust crisis to the very practical things B2B marketers can do differently starting this week. Phil has spent over a decade watching what actually works in marketing versus what brands convince themselves should work. The patterns he kept seeing pointed in one direction: campaigns with people at their heart consistently outperformed those hiding behind the brand.

The question is: how did we end up so far from that?

The slow drift

Phil’s argument is that the abundance of data has, paradoxically, made marketing less effective. “I think it’s easy to forget that marketing is just one group of people demonstrating the value they want to provide to another group of people,” he told me. “We’ve started to see customers like data points in a spreadsheet rather than real people.”

At the same time, brands leaned further into corporate identity and further away from the individuals behind them — executives became less visible, communications became more polished, and the human dimension quietly disappeared. The result was a kind of mutual anonymisation: brands stopped feeling like people, and customers stopped being treated like them.

For B2B marketers, this drift has had particularly concrete consequences. Phil identifies three symptoms worth watching for: buyers who lurk but don’t convert, rising price sensitivity, and the gradual commoditisation of products and services. “When people are coming from a place of distrust,” he explains, “it becomes more about attrition than belief.” In other words, if you haven’t earned trust, the only lever left is price — and that’s a race nobody wants to win.

The AI paradox

Into this already fragile landscape came AI — and with it, the ability to scale content production to a degree that would have seemed absurd five years ago. The problem isn’t AI itself. Phil is clear on this: he’s not anti-AI. What he’s against is what he calls “lazy AI” — the copy-paste approach where a marketer opens ChatGPT, requests a LinkedIn post, and publishes whatever comes back without a trace of original thought or human judgement.

“I think we removed the nuance a little bit from using AI in marketing,” he says. “We either view it as good or as bad, but there’s a whole spectrum of usage in between.” His own position is that AI becomes problematic the moment it replaces something that previously involved taste, heart, or soul. Use it to sharpen thinking, overcome a writing block, or stress-test an argument — fine. Use it to eliminate the human from the communication altogether, and you’ve lost the thing that made the communication worth having in the first place.

The paradox is this: AI was supposed to make marketing more powerful. In many ways it has. But by flooding channels with content that is technically competent and humanly inert, it has also made the trust deficit significantly worse. The very tool that promised to solve the volume problem has deepened the authenticity problem.

When scarcity creates value

Here’s where Phil’s argument turns from diagnosis to opportunity. “Because of AI, humanity is now the skill,” he says. “It’s the thing that is going to help you stand out. When something becomes rare, it becomes valuable.”

This isn’t wishful thinking — it’s basic market logic applied to attention and trust. If the majority of content being produced is AI-generated, indistinguishable, and impersonal, then content that is visibly human, genuinely authentic, and even a little imperfect becomes a differentiator by default. Phil points to a striking example from the pandemic: when marketers lost access to studios, equipment and polish, they had no choice but to produce lo-fi, unvarnished content. Engagement went up. “People loved that it was real and a bit raw,” Phil recalls. “It showed you that the trust comes from being real and being imperfect.”

That lesson was available to every marketer in 2020. Most brands quietly forgot it as soon as the studios reopened. The argument now is to go back and learn it properly — not as a crisis response, but as a deliberate strategic choice.

Phil draws an analogy that captures the spirit of the shift well: the feeling you get when you walk into a café you visit regularly and the staff ask if you want your usual. “It’s the nicest feeling,” he says. “Marketing needs to get back to that a little bit more.” Not nostalgia for its own sake — but a recognition that the fundamentals of human connection haven’t changed, even if the channels have.

Human-first in B2B

Phil’s human-first framework is built around three levers: your audience, your team, and your personal brand. Each represents a group of humans that most B2B marketers are systematically under-utilising as trust-building assets.

The audience lever is about moving beyond content consumption toward genuine participation — influencer partnerships, community building, and content co-created with customers rather than aimed at them. The team lever addresses what Phil considers one of the most overlooked opportunities in B2B: employee advocacy. “I’m amazed when I speak to businesses that have thousands of employees and they’re not really doing anything to engage them in promoting the brand,” he says. When employees are genuinely bought in and visible in marketing, the effect is compounded — both in reach and in credibility.

The personal brand lever is the one many B2B leaders resist longest. Phil counts himself among the natural introverts who resisted it. But his position is unambiguous: everyone already has a personal brand, whether they’re actively shaping it or not. Not being on social media is itself a signal. The question is whether you’re making a deliberate choice or simply ceding the space to others.

Crucially, Phil argues that this framework is not a B2C concept being retrofitted to a B2B context — it’s actually more naturally suited to B2B. Longer sales cycles demand sustained trust. Buying groups of eight, nine, ten people require relationship-building across multiple stakeholders at multiple levels. And in a category where reputational risk drives decision-making — where, as Phil puts it, “you don’t get sacked for hiring IBM” — the human connection isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the thing that tips the balance.

The opportunity

Phil is optimistic — not naively, but practically. He doesn’t know whether the broader market will correct toward authenticity in the next 12 to 18 months, and he’s honest about that uncertainty. What he does believe is that the opportunity exists right now for marketers willing to take it seriously.

“If you’re smart and you do this right, there’s a big opportunity,” he says. “But you have to be willing to focus on the longer term, focus on quality over quantity.” It doesn’t much matter whether the rest of the market follows. If the majority of brands continue machine-gunning AI slop across their channels, the ones showing up as genuinely human will stand out for exactly that reason. The scarcity does the work.

The implication for B2B marketers is straightforward, even if the execution takes courage: stop competing on volume, and start competing on humanity.

Practical takeaways

1. Put more faces in your marketing — starting this week. Whether it’s your own image on a personal brand post or your team members in brand content, human faces drive measurably higher engagement. It doesn’t need to be polished. It needs to be real.

2. Get your team into your marketing. Employee advocacy remains one of the most underleveraged assets in B2B. Even a small number of employees sharing, commenting, or creating content dramatically extends reach — and does so with the kind of peer credibility no brand channel can replicate.

3. Shift time from posting to engaging. Phil’s party analogy is worth taking seriously: the brand that spends a month showing up at other people’s gatherings tends to draw the bigger crowd when it hosts its own. Prioritise commenting on, sharing and genuinely supporting the content of customers, prospects and industry voices.

4. Find your personal line with AI. The question isn’t whether to use AI — it’s where you draw the line between using it to sharpen your thinking and using it to replace it. If the output doesn’t have your judgement, your voice, or your perspective somewhere in it, ask whether it’s actually serving your brand.

5. Play the long game. Human-first marketing is not a quick-win strategy. It’s a commitment to building trust over time — through consistency, authenticity, and genuine relationship-building. In a landscape where most brands are optimising for short-term metrics, that’s where the real competitive advantage lives.