I recently encountered a perspective that made me stop and think. Writing in Forbes, strategist Elizabeth Ross warned that AI isn't helping brands find truth; it's herding creative thought toward an "undifferentiated middle where every brand sounds the same, looks the same, and ultimately becomes invisible." Reading that felt like a confirmation of everything I’ve been seeing lately. Apparently, John Long felt the same way, as he highlighted Ross’s piece on LinkedIn shortly after his book, Zombie Brands, was published earlier this year. It was a connection that felt both inevitable and urgent.
Here is the thing: Zombie Brands is not an AI book. While AI is a recurring character throughout the text, it remains a supporting actor rather than the star. What Long has written is something more foundational, a diagnosis of why brands lose their creative nerve and distinctiveness, forfeiting their relevance to become little more than lifeless zombies. It reads less like a business textbook and more like a creative manifesto, the kind you find yourself nodding along to and then quietly panicking. Given the state of marketing in early 2026, it is impossible to move through these chapters without feeling the urgency of his diagnosis ratcheting up.
The Tool Versus the Architect
Long does not object to AI, but he is certainly opposed to the temptation to let it do all the thinking for us. His point isn’t that you shouldn't use these tools; it’s that many have fundamentally misunderstood what they are for.
AI is, by design, a consensus machine. If you ask it for headlines, it will naturally generate competent, derivative, thoroughly unsurprising results. Long’s suggestion for breaking this cycle is liberating: let the model do exactly that. Use the model to churn out the first fifty safe, mediocre ideas in five minutes. Clear the obvious off the table. Now you can get to work on the idea that makes someone uncomfortable in a meeting, the creative outlier, the strange and unexpected connection that only a human mind can conjure.
To illustrate this, Long points to the David Ogilvy example of the "Man with the Eyepatch" campaign for Hathaway shirts. Of course the idea didn’t emerge from a template or a broad prompt. It came from the unglamorous work of immersing yourself in a brand’s reality, learning the business from the inside out until you find the specific human detail that makes a story stick. No model trained on the consensus of the past can generate that kind of insight. You have to do the legwork yourself.
Fireworks Above the Lighthouse
This is where the book becomes personally relevant, as it connects directly to a topic that I have been writing about for a while. Long draws a contrast between two types of brand behavior. Fireworks are the one-off stunts, the viral moments and "stuntvertising" campaigns engineered to spike engagement and then vanish. They light up the sky for a second and leave it darker afterward. Lighthouses, by contrast, are fixed and consistent, still burning when the creative weather turns foul.
The hard truth underneath that metaphor connects directly to something I explored in CRM Magazine earlier this year. Most customers are not in a buying window 95 percent of the time. That long stretch between purchase decisions is what I call the Long Middle, and it is where brand affinity is either built or quietly destroyed. Cognitive research on interference theory tells us why: when audiences receive too many disconnected messages, they remember none of them. A string of unrelated Fireworks does more than just fail to build equity. It actively works against it. Coherence is not a creative nicety. It is the price of being remembered.
The Lighthouse is what survives, and provides a guiding light through the Long Middle. Consistency isn’t a creative constraint; it’s a compounding asset. Long’s formula is to shoot the fireworks directly above your lighthouse. The key word is above. The bold, dramatic gesture has to lead people back to what the brand actually stands for, not conflict with it or distract from it. Used correctly, it acts as a seamless bridge back to the core narrative and serves as the loudest possible reminder of what the brand has always been about.
REI: #OptOutside
Long’s best example (IMHO), and it is a great one, is REI’s 2015 #OptOutside campaign. While every other retailer was plotting their Black Friday assault, REI did something genuinely strange: they closed their stores. All of them. And they told their employees to go outside.
This move didn't just say that REI believes in the outdoor life; it demonstrated it, at real cost, during the most conspicuous shopping moment of the year. It was a firework fired in perfect alignment with their lighthouse. Because the gesture was so inseparable from what REI actually stands for, it led audiences straight back to the brand’s core message without a hint of friction. The result was 6.7 billion media impressions and a 9.3% revenue increase. Not because REI got loud, but because they got true.
The Efficiency Trap
Long wrote this book about corporate forces that have been quietly drifting toward safe decisions for years: the slow erosion of creative courage, the addiction to short-term metrics, and the gradual replacement of genuine brand personality with whatever tested well last quarter. Those forces were already doing serious damage on their own.
Now hand them a tool that can generate a hundred templated content variations before lunch. When used as a content factory rather than a creative accelerant, AI doesn’t produce better brands; it just produces faster brand zombies. Many organizations are currently optimizing themselves into a state of homogenized mediocrity. In the rush to drive operational efficiencies, they are forsaking the very uniqueness that differentiates them from the competition.
The precondition for using AI correctly is having a team that still knows the difference between a mediocre idea and a genuinely great one. In a culture that has been rewarding "safe" for a decade, that instinct is exactly what has been quietly trained out of people. That is the real reckoning coming in 2026: not whether to use AI, but whether there is still enough creative muscle in the room to push beyond the average and identify the fresh, exciting ideas that will actually cut through.
Zombie Brands doesn’t solve that problem for you. What it does is name it clearly, trace how we got here, and make a compelling case that the only way out is through: through the discomfort of the weird idea, the friction of the bold gesture, and the patience to build something that lasts longer than a news cycle. In a world where everyone has access to the same technology tools, your competitive edge isn't your technology stack. It's the creative instinct to know when the algorithm has done its job and the real work begins.
It’s a quick read. Pick it up before you write your next brief.
