AI Is Making Brands Old-Fashioned Again
August 20, 2026
And that may be exactly what good marketing needs.
Welcome to this week's Takumi AI Brief. Here's the uncomfortable shift I keep noticing as AI becomes embedded in how we build marketing.
We are entering an era where brands are not rewarded for constant reinvention.
They are being rewarded for something that feels almost outdated.
Repetition. Nostalgia. Stubborn consistency.
While the industry talks about agents, automation and infinite content, a quieter pattern is showing up in the real world.
This week, Dell Technologies brought back an AI generated version of its old spokesman, the same "Dude, you're getting a Dell" character from over twenty years ago, to sell something entirely new. Enterprise AI infrastructure.
Not a new mascot. An old one, rebuilt with new technology, doing a new job.
At first glance, it looks like nostalgia.
I think it's something more structural.
A response to what AI is doing to marketing itself.
01 · The Trend That Actually Matters
For most of my career, marketing teams have worried about creative wear out.
How long can we keep running this idea.
Shouldn't we refresh the campaign.
Usually, the marketing team gets bored long before the customer does.
AI is about to make that tendency much worse.
Because now there is almost no friction in creating something new.
A new visual direction can appear in minutes. Fifty campaign routes can turn up before lunch.
That sounds brilliant.
Until you ask what anybody remembers.
Brands were never built because they constantly surprised people with a different version of themselves.
They were built because certain things showed up again and again until they became familiar.
McDonald's 's has arches.
Nike has the Swoosh.
Mastercard spent decades making two overlapping circles mean something before it ever dared remove its name from the logo.
None of that happened quickly.
Which is why I find Dell's move interesting.
It may look like marketing going backwards.
I think it's a brand rediscovering the value of memory.
And memory takes repetition.
02 · The AI Shift to Watch
There is a contradiction sitting inside modern marketing right now.
AI rewards variation.
Brands need consistency.
The technology can give every person a different version of your marketing.
Different copy. Different imagery. Different creative treatment.
Taken far enough, personalisation becomes fragmentation.
Two customers, buying the same brand for years, barely seeing the same advertising.
Every execution may perform.
But what is the brand becoming in their heads.
That is where I think we need to be careful.
The ability to personalise everything does not mean everything should be personalised.
Some things need to remain stubbornly the same.
Your most distinctive assets. Your point of view. Your tone. The few cues you actually want people to carry around in memory.
AI should create thousands of variations around those things, without constantly replacing them.
That is a very different use of the technology.
Not infinite creativity.
Infinite consistency.
03 · If I Were in the CMO Chair
→ Name the handful of things you want remembered. Not twenty things. Not a values deck. A shape, a line, a character, a colour, a feeling. Customers don't carry your brand guidelines around, they carry fragments.
→ Protect those assets like infrastructure. Once identified, become extremely protective of them. Everything else can flex. These should not.
→ Put AI to work extending reach, not inventing new ground. Can the same assets travel further. Can they localise without losing recognition. Can they show up in more culturally relevant places without being rebuilt from scratch each time.
→ Keep exploration separate from expression. Test a hundred creative routes internally if you want. Show customers only the few that stay recognisable. Creative exploration can be infinite. Brand expression probably shouldn't be.
The CMO Takeaway
Marketing has always had a slight addiction to newness.
New campaign. New agency. New platform. New look.
Sometimes for good reasons. Sometimes because the people managing the brand got tired of the old one before the customer ever did.
AI makes that temptation almost impossible to resist, because newness is becoming ridiculously cheap.
When something becomes abundant, its value changes.
Maybe that's why repetition suddenly feels interesting again.
The mascot you keep seeing. The line you can finish yourself. The campaign that survives long enough to become part of popular memory.
There's a strange irony here.
We are building the most sophisticated marketing technology we've ever had.
And it may end up reminding us of one of advertising's oldest lessons.
People need to see the same thing more than once before they remember it.
Some marketing ideas became old fashioned because they stopped working.
Others became old fashioned because marketers got bored with them.
AI may finally force us to remember the difference.
Mohit Lodha, Founder, Takumi AI