This piece is the third of a five-part series drawing on Juicebox Founder Joel Pember's time at SXSW London 2026.
The biggest threat to your brand right now isn't a competitor. It's becoming the average.
There's a word that came up repeatedly in the context of AI and brand, and it's the most useful single word I brought back from the week.
Slop.
Ungoverned AI regresses everything toward the average of its training data. A brand with no strong core doesn't stay quietly weak when it uses AI to generate at scale; it gets louder and more generic simultaneously as it follows trendlines. No sharp point of view. No clear differentiation. No consistent logic. More output, less unique identity.
This isn't a creative concern. It's a commercial one. Anant Sharma of Matter of Form made the case directly: with genuine product parity now the norm in most categories, narrative and distinctiveness are often the only thing left to separate you. Story doesn't just describe value. It sets it. Efficiency is a strategy with diminishing returns, because growth comes from being chosen; and being chosen comes from a coherence that AI erodes by default.
The practical response R/GA presented in their session was a proprietary framework; a central, machine-readable foundation that lets a brand be interpreted and delivered consistently across any generative experience. The distinction is important: most brand guidelines are written for humans, who respond to poetry and brevity. An AI agent needs in-depth accurate information and operational logic it can act on. The same brand, yet codified differently.
Their proof was a now famous case study for AB InBev, a campaign that turned abandoned carts into 52,000 individualised films, each built from a customer's own cart contents, name and location, every film different, every film unmistakably the same brand. Click-through lifted fourfold. Roughly one in six abandoned carts recovered.
That's the offensive side of the argument. The defensive side goes back to Hugh Bonneville and the body scan. Know exactly which brand traits are distinctively yours. Be deliberate about who is allowed to reproduce them. Name the attributes, the assets, the voice, the particular qualities that make you recognisably you, and refuse to let them be reproduced on demand or diluted by default.
This is the work Juicebox is doing more and more with clients: not just building digital experiences, but building the coherent identity and design systems that makes those experiences consistently, unmistakably theirs. Not a set of guidelines that lives in a document. A living system that can be acted on by humans and agents alike.
Because AI now commonly sits as a third party between brand and customer. Most people meet a brand through an AI system before they meet it directly either in person or visiting owned properties. A brand that hasn't prepared for that; a brand that only exists as prose a human admires is one whose identity is being interpreted by a machine with no accurate brief to follow.
The antidote to slop is coherence. And coherence has to be built deliberately, before the generative output begins. Of all the ideas I brought back from SXSW, this is the one I find myself returning to most in client conversations. The efficiency argument is easy to make and easy to act on. The coherence argument is harder, slower, and far more valuable.
Part 5 closes the series with the question that sits underneath all of it: as everything gets cheaper and faster, what actually becomes more valuable?Dropping soon.
About SXSW London
SXSW London is the leading European platform for convergence and cross-industry collaboration, celebrating the intersection of business, technology, creativity, and culture. The 2026 edition ran from 1 to 6 June across dozens of venues, galleries, clubs, and independent spaces in Shoreditch, east London. Welcoming over 20,500 delegates from 77 countries in its inaugural year, it builds on the SXSW brand's decades of success in Austin and Sydney and its established reputation as a global platform for discovery.
About the author, Joel Pember
Joel Pember is the founder of Juicebox, a Perth-based design intelligence studio operating across Australia and Southeast Asia. Currently on sabbatical in Europe, Joel is spending time immersed in the ideas, conversations, and events shaping the next chapter of the industry. This series draws on his time at SXSW London 2026.
