Wonderpanic and the Fight for Brand Soul
Image credited to Cash Macanaya
This year’s Cannes Lions aftertaste is unmistakably synthetic. AI was everywhere – on stage, in sessions, behind the bars serving robot cocktails (still terrible), and most of all, in the creative work itself.
Take AI Granny, the multi-Lion-winning campaign that blended tech and tenderness to create an emotionally rich virtual companion for the elderly. It was smart. It was moving. It proved AI can do sentiment, not just syntax. But let’s not pretend the machine felt a thing. The magic came from the human insight behind the brief, not the code that executed it.
That’s the tension crackling through this moment. AI is turbocharging our creative process and threatening to flatten it. We’re dancing on a knife-edge between wonder and panic. Or, as creative consultant Lars Bastholm puts it: Wonderpanic. In a world racing to automate, a new frontier is emerging in the boardrooms and brainstorming sessions of marketing departments worldwide.
AI is changing everything, but how? Mark Terry-Lush of Hey Honey spoke with three leading marketing minds to get their take. We asked Lars Bastholm, former chief creative officer of Ogilvy, Yates Buckley, co-founder of creative studio Unit9, and William Reed, executive creative director at Hey Honey, to get their perspectives on what brands risk losing with AI.
All offer a clear-eyed view of what brands risk losing with AI and agree that personality is key to competitive edge, which is easily eroded unless brands act with intent.
Honey polled senior marketers across brands, agencies, and technology providers. Most respondents reported using AI every day. Their top uses included content creation, brainstorming, and research. However, only a small portion felt confident that what AI generates reflects their brand.
This shows that AI is widely used, but trust in it is shaky. Respondents are most afraid of losing emotional resonance and creativity. Even more alarming, only a few have a solid AI ethics policy, while many are flying blind. The gap between AI use and understanding is wide and dangerous.
The biggest fear? Losing emotional authenticity. We're facing a collective identity crisis. Drowning in smooth, scalable, synthetic content, we've forgotten something crucial - audiences don't fall in love with efficient brands, they fall in love with emotionally resonant ones.
The Rise of the Synthetic Middle
Lars coined a term for the cocktail of emotion gripping marketers today: 'Wonderpanic.' Defined as 'a sudden, electrifying blend of awe and dread,' it captures the thrill of AI’s potential alongside deep anxiety about what it could replace.
What concerns Lars most is the creative flattening already underway. “When you’re the sum of all human knowledge,” he warned, “you’re not the outlier. You’re the middle of the road.” Optimising for averages, AI may produce technically sound content but strips away the originality that defines successful brands.
He points to the prevalence of 'Adam voice,' the generic, American-accented, AI-generated narration that has become the default for tutorials and explainers. In parallel, the overuse of 'TikTok voice,' the exaggerated, emotionally inflated delivery popularised on short-form video platforms has begun to bleed into everyday communications. “I sometimes have to remind my son that reality isn’t YouTube,” he said. “People don’t yell everything at the top of their lungs.”
In other words, AI is no longer just a tool, it is subtly reshaping human behaviour. As we use it more, we begin to imitate it.
Efficiency vs Effectiveness
Yates Buckley, whose work at Unit9 bridges technology and storytelling, agrees that the embrace of AI has blurred the line between progress and peril. “The easier something is to generate, the less value it holds,” he noted. “Marketing science distilled humans into triggers. Now we’re all playing the same game.”
Yates argues that AI’s very strength, scale and replication, poses a creative paradox. Brands are trading distinctiveness for speed, and in doing so, flooding the market with 'synthetically-competent sludge.' The end result? Generic creative that neither inspires nor connects.
Lars shares that sentiment. “We’re seeing companies fire humans because AI can do the job faster. But just because it’s faster doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s a race to the bottom.” He added, “Time and materials is the dumbest model for measuring creative work. It’s like saying Stephen King’s book should be worth less than Donna Tartt’s because it took him less time to write.”
Both are adamant: creativity thrives not on efficiency, but on friction. The struggle to create what Lars calls the “having written dopamine hit,” is what produces meaningful work. Remove the struggle, and you remove the soul.
Despite concerns about AI diluting creativity, William Reed, ECD at Hey Honey, is slightly more optimistic. "AI isn't a replacement for creativity, it’s an accelerator," he said. “Creating ≠ creativity, just because ‘creating’ became easier, doesn’t mean the art of creativity will be replaced. The true value of AI isn't about speed or optimisation, but about enhancing human intelligence. It allows us to explore more ideas, refine concepts faster, so we can dedicate more time to the craft of creating work that resonates."
Brand Purpose Under the Microscope
When it comes to brand purpose, both thinkers urge caution. “If you’re asking AI to help you find your brand purpose,” said Lars, “you probably don’t have one.” He is sharply critical of what he terms “purpose-washing” where brands co-opt social causes to appear relevant without any real alignment.
Yates agrees that in an AI-saturated environment, consistency between internal values and external messaging becomes more critical. “If your internal values don’t match your external voice, AI will expose that faster than ever.” In his view, congruence, the alignment between what a company says and how it behaves, is the new currency in a world of infinite content.
The Last Moat: Personality
At the heart of their shared philosophy lies one unifying idea: brand personality is now the most irreplaceable asset.
Lars sees a future in which brand interactions will increasingly be voice-led, delivered through agents, assistants, and smart interfaces. That means tone, not just message, becomes the differentiator. “If your brand responds in a robotic, standardised AI voice, it’s dead on arrival,” he warned. “You need to define your brand personality the way you'd define a character in a film - what it says, what it never says, what it believes in.”
He echoes Yates in supporting the shift from USP to what is being called the Unique Selling Personality (USP). “Features can be copied. Personality can’t,” said Lars. “A true personality takes time to grow. It’s forged through context, contradiction, and experience.”
Yates added, “You can’t generate my memory. Or that floor tile I see a face in. That’s human context. That’s what makes us laugh.” AI, for all its linguistic brilliance, lacks lived experience. It can simulate tone and mimic sentiment, but it cannot create real emotional context.
A Call to Action
Lars, Yates , and William embrace AI as long as it remains the assistant, not the strategist. Used wisely, it can assist with ideation, summarisation, and production. But to lead with it is to abdicate responsibility for the emotional core of a brand.
"Our challenge isn't to compete with AI, it’s to collaborate with it in order to elevate our own uniquely human contributions like empathy, originality, and the indefinable 'soul' that connects with audiences," said William.
“Be specific, weird, but most of all be radically human,” said Yates. “Before the algorithms finish eating your soul.” Lars added, “Weird is the last defensible human trait. It can’t be trained or optimised. It’s born from contradiction, not consistency.”
For marketers and business leaders, the message is clear. Brand value no longer lies in having the best offer or fastest content pipeline. It lies in a distinctive, contradictory, fully human identity. And in the age of AI, defending that identity may be the only thing that sets you apart.
