As AI Floods the Market With Mediocre Content, Brands That Create Cultural Moments Build Equity

Attention is a finite resource, and the marketing industry is depleting it. Every push notification, retargeted ad, and brand jumping into a viral moment to grab a mention adds to the extraction. The professional term is 'mining attention,' and it's an apt metaphor. Mine too aggressively from any resource and eventually the soil goes barren. That's the trajectory consumer attention is on right now, thinned by overproduction, over-optimization, and the relentless pressure to be everywhere and ship content at a pace that AI has made effortless, but audiences are growing wary of.

Helping businesses find clarity in the noise is Natalia Saraeva, the Founder and Strategy Lead of boutique brand strategy consultancy Brantica. She's spent more than 20 years as a strategic planner across FMCG, fashion, automotive, tech, finance, and hospitality, working with brands like Unilever, Carlsberg Group, Fiat, and Beiersdorf. More recently, she has led brand strategy and content production for high fashion clients including Prada, Armani, Gucci, and Bulgari through FashionToMax. Her decades of work across heritage brands and startups have reinforced the conviction that lasting brands are the ones that bring something to culture rather than constantly extracting from it.

"Participating in culture is about giving, not taking. If you're just reacting to every cultural moment, you're a follower. You're standing in the crowd with everyone else. The trick is in creating," Saraeva says. In her view, the principle of origination over reaction is the line between brands that build meaningful equity and those that chase relevance until they've diluted themselves into nothing.

What makes a brand?

Saraeva starts with a definition of brand that sounds simple, but disciplines everything that follows. A brand, she explains, is a stable set of expectations, values, and aspirations delivered consistently over time. Coca-Cola and Nike endure as benchmarks because they've maintained that consistency across decades of cultural change. The expression evolves, but the foundation doesn't. "What has to change is the way we communicate that coherent, stable set of expectations," she says. "But the core, the promises, what you bring to the table, that should remain. Staying consistent is very difficult when everything is changing and everybody is driven to change with it."

She believes the brands most at risk are those built entirely on trends. Saraeva watched it happen in fashion with sustainability. Brands that anchored their identity in a cultural wave rather than an intrinsic truth found themselves stranded when geopolitics and technology shifted the conversation. "All of those brands that built their consistency on a trend, which was a temporary one, have faded out."

The Frankenstein problem

The pressure to produce at volume has created a structural tension between brand integrity and performance optimization. Saraeva describes it through a moment she experienced firsthand briefing a seasoned creative strategist on a performance campaign. It required five headlines, five descriptions, and five images, all interchangeable and rotated algorithmically to optimize for clicks. "She looked at me and said, 'Do you understand I'm creating a Frankenstein?' And she was right," Saraeva recalls. "The system rotates the pieces to find what gets the most attention, but the result is a patchwork that doesn't hold together as a coherent brand expression."

That tension scales across organizations. Teams optimizing for performance metrics produce content that converts in isolation, but erodes identity in aggregate. AI accelerates the cycle by making average content infinitely reproducible. "Brands that do this will eat themselves up. They will be getting the average of an average of an average. They will be diluted," she asserts.

Restraint as strategy

Saraeva's sharpest example of the opposite approach comes from luxury fashion. When TikTok arrived in Europe, every major fashion house had its name registered on the platform. But Prada, Gucci, Bulgari, and others didn't post anything. They spent roughly a year deciding how to show up without compromising their identity. "There was a big deal about even entering that platform. They were monitoring, deciding how they should appear to still keep their identity. I think being conservative like this is sometimes nice. You can be very creative about expressions and staying relevant, but at the same time, there are some decisions where you have to be very boring and very intentional about preserving what makes the core of you."

The contrast with reactive brands is instructive. Saraeva distinguishes between brands that create cultural moments and brands that borrow from them. Reacting to a trending story may generate a mention, but creating something original generates meaning. "Good brands don't react. They create those micro-trends," she says. "Reacting is taking. You're borrowing somebody else's cultural life. You might build a brand that way, but you'll be a reactive brand and you'll go down."

To build a brand, start with belief

For startups and growing brands, Saraeva's advice is deliberately stripped down. She advises that a full brand architecture isn't necessary on day one. What's crucial is a clear statement of belief that describes what you exist to do, why it matters, and what change you're trying to create. "You don't even need a name or a logo to start. You just need a statement of what you believe in. Experiment, but remember that there will be a point when you need to be true to what you said you were. The consistency starts there."

She draws a firm line that not every moment is worth engaging. When the cultural conversation turns negative or exploitative, the brands that jump in for a mention risk their reputation for a single data point of visibility. "Not every mention is worth your reputation," Saraeva says. "Everything is searchable now. So be specific about what you believe in, and let that be enough."