They say they want something fresh, sharp, honest, unexpected; they’re tired of safe, and they want work that cuts through. And often, in that moment, they mean it. The energy is real. The appetite feels real. The ambition in the room feels real. Then the idea begins to take shape.
Many years ago, when I was a street performer at Disney, I was given an assignment that thrilled me. I couldn’t wait to do it. I spent time and money on it, and I was proud of the work. Little did I know that scant days after I started performing this new bit, I would walk the lonely outer road around the park and back to my dressing room in shame.
Here’s the situation. At Disney MGM Studios, there was a back lot that looked like New York City. We called it New York Street. The street was usually empty. There was no ride back there or anything like that. Commercials and films were sometimes shot there, but usually not when guests were in the park. It was a huge area of possibility. One day, a mid-level director came to the street performers’ trailer and told us about an idea to put characters on the lot. Not traditional Disney characters like Mickey and the usual cast, but street performers who could improvise and interact with guests. They wanted to try the idea with a few performers before committing fully, just to see if it worked.
I was told I was going to be a homeless guy. Funny, fun, a guy who was homeless but knew the city and saw himself as a kind of ambassador. I was thrilled.
I went to the costume department and got my costume pieces and extra stuff, bags to carry things in, and all the rest. I built my backstory, gave myself a name and a history, worked out my makeup, so I looked street-living and all that. I got to work very early that first day, when the park was still empty, and strolled back to New York Street. In a police call box, I put a cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and I had little things hidden all over the street, things that gave me a sense of place and allowed me to feel like I lived there. When the stage was set, I went back to the trailer and dressed, did my makeup, yellowed my teeth, grabbed my stuff, and headed back out. I found the perfect notch against a building, nestled in, blanketed myself with newspapers, and waited for the crowds to arrive.
When the first guests came onto the lot, they discovered me waking up, finding a cup of coffee, and settling into the day. They took pictures, and I told them about the history of New York, answered questions, and did bits. It was a great first day. Good crowds, playful energy, lots of laughs. I had a good day.
Day two, I did my morning setup, dressed, and headed back out. About an hour into my shift, I noticed a group of white shirts, higher-ups, standing off to the side watching me. I wasn’t concerned. I was doing what I had been asked to do, and I had a good crowd around me, maybe fifty people, laughing and being entertained. I finished my bit, the crowd took pictures and moved on, and the white shirts stayed a little longer. They didn’t say anything to me, but after a minute, they slipped out a gate that led backstage.
About ten minutes later, my director approached me and told me I needed to get off the street. Backstage, he told me a few guests were concerned because they thought a homeless guy had gotten into the park. Management saw my bit, and they were concerned too. I was brought before the entertainment managers, the people who had put me on the street in the first place, and I was told I was not allowed to do what I was doing.
After some hemming and hawing, they finally told me what the problem was. They said they wanted an authentic New York City homeless person, but not really. I was too dirty, too scary, too realistic. They said they wanted a homeless person who didn’t really look or act homeless, someone nice, someone fun for the kids to meet, like a friendly town bum.
That was not how the idea had been pitched to me. I was told they wanted a realistic homeless person who was funny and entertaining. That’s what I was doing. But according to management, I was doing it too well. I was taken off New York Street and put back as my normal character, Sam from Hollywood Public Works, on Hollywood Boulevard. I was removed from the gig because I did the gig too well.
I was angry, of course, but I liked the job, and Disney is a huge corporation, so I didn’t really have a fight. Still, it struck me as cowardly to ask me to play this character, then get afraid it was too real and remove me. I had done exactly what I was asked to do, and from my point of view, it had turned out better than expected. But management got scared. They said, give us a realistic New York homeless person, but make him fun. I had been working street at Disney for about four years at that point, and I knew what was expected. I wasn’t playing drunk or drug-addled. I was playing a realistic but fun homeless guy on New York Street. Exactly what they asked for, but not what they wanted.
Looking back, I can see where a homeless guy at a theme park, especially one as polished and top-tier as Disney, would be jarring. But I didn’t come up with the idea. I just executed it. And the more I’ve thought about that experience over the years, the more it has reminded me of something that happens all the time in branding and marketing.
Someone gets an idea, and the brainstorming starts. Great ideas are thrown around. Risky ideas. Groundbreaking ideas. Stuff that feels alive. Stuff that actually might break through. Then, sooner or later, someone asks the question: Can we really do this? And once that question enters the room, everything starts to change. Where passion and risk were steering a minute ago, fear and timidity take the wheel. Do we want to make waves? Do we really need to take this risk? We want to stand out, but not too much. We don’t want to be weird or frightening. Maybe we need to look at this realistically. Maybe we should take a step back.
And then the step is taken. All the crazy, risky, good, line-crossing, norm-breaking ideas get put in a drawer, and the usual stuff, the safe stuff, the same old same old, gets pulled back out of storage and made to look like wisdom. A lot of brands say they want originality. What they really want is originality with the unsettling parts removed.
The Pattern
What stayed with me after that Disney experience wasn’t just the embarrassment of being pulled off the street, but the contradiction at the center of it. The people in charge had asked for something more real, more textured, less cartoonish. They wanted a character who felt like he came from somewhere, not just another polished performance dropped onto a set. But once that idea stopped being theoretical and became something guests could actually see and react to, they got nervous. What had sounded bold in the planning suddenly felt too bold in practice.
That shift happens all the time, and not just in theme parks. It happens in conference rooms, creative reviews, brand workshops, and campaign meetings. In the early stages, people talk very bravely. They say they want something fresh, sharp, honest, unexpected; they’re tired of safe, and they want work that cuts through. And often, in that moment, they mean it. The energy is real. The appetite feels real. The ambition in the room feels real. Then the idea begins to take shape.
It gets written down. Designed. Spoken out loud. Mocked up. Put into headlines, copy, and visuals. It stops being an exciting possibility and starts becoming an actual choice, something that could be seen by customers, shared publicly, questioned internally, or blamed on someone if it lands wrong. That’s when the mood changes. Not always dramatically. Usually, it happens in smaller, more respectable ways.
The language starts to soften. Sharp becomes risky. Unusual becomes confusing. Honest becomes a little too aggressive. The question is no longer whether the idea is good, but whether it is safe enough. Can we tone it down a little? Can we make it more broadly appealing? Can we make it feel more familiar? Can we keep what is interesting about it without making anyone uncomfortable? That is usually the moment the idea starts to die.
Not all at once. No one pulls the plug in some dramatic fit of fear. It happens piece by piece. A phrase gets cleaned up. An image gets swapped out. The strange but memorable angle gets replaced with something clearer, which usually means flatter. The original spark is still technically there, at least on paper, but the thing that made it feel alive has been steadily removed in the name of caution, alignment, accessibility, or brand safety.
By the end, everyone can still claim they kept the original idea. And in a narrow sense, maybe they did. But they kept the version of it that no longer asks much of anyone. The version that doesn’t push, doesn’t surprise, doesn’t make anybody lean in. The version that feels easier to approve and much harder to remember.
That’s the pattern. People say they want something bold, but what they often want is the appearance of boldness without the discomfort that comes with actually being distinct.
The Problem With Content
For years, the answer to every marketing problem has seemed to be more content. Need attention? More content. Need engagement? More content. Need authority, trust, reach, traffic, relevance, visibility? More content. By now, every brand is publishing something all the time. Blogs, videos, emails, carousels, thought leadership posts, brand films, podcasts, social captions, founder takes, trend commentary, and behind-the-scenes moments. The machine is always running.
That would be fine if more content were the same thing as more meaning, but it isn’t. Most of what gets produced now isn’t failing because it’s poorly made. It’s failing because it could have come from almost anyone. The language is polished enough. The formatting is clean. The strategy is probably defensible. Yet so much of it slides past without leaving a mark because there’s no real mind behind it, no distinct way of seeing, no feeling that an actual person or brand believes something specific enough to shape what gets said and how it gets said.
That’s the real problem. The internet doesn’t have a content shortage. It has a point-of-view shortage.
Plenty of brands are communicating constantly without saying much. They’re present, but not memorable. Active, but not distinct. You can feel the effort that went into the production, but not the conviction behind it. Everything is optimized to be acceptable, professional, and broadly useful, which often means it arrives sanded smooth before it ever reaches anyone. Nothing catches. Nothing lingers. Nothing makes you think that sounds like them.
A point of view is what changes that. It gives content shape. It creates selection. It tells you what a brand notices, what it cares about, what it rejects, what it finds boring, and what it thinks people get wrong. Without that, content becomes a delivery system with nothing especially alive inside it. More assets go out into the world, but they don’t build much because they don’t carry a strong enough signal to be recognized or remembered.
That’s part of what makes this moment so strange. Brands have never had more tools, more channels, or more ways to publish, yet so much of what gets made feels oddly interchangeable. You can swap logos, change a few nouns, smooth over the voice, and a lot of it still holds together because it was never rooted in a distinct perspective in the first place. It was built to fill the calendar, satisfy the plan, and keep the engine moving. That may produce volume, but it doesn’t produce much gravity.
The brands that break through usually aren’t the ones making the most content. They’re the ones who feel like they mean something when they speak. You can sense a point of view in the choices they make, the angle they take, even in what they choose not to talk about. That difference matters more now than ever, because when everyone can publish, publishing alone no longer seems impressive.
Why Brands Pull Back
Most brands don’t pull back because they’re stupid, and they usually don’t pull back because they’re lazy. They pull back because once an idea starts to feel real, it also starts to feel risky. In a brainstorm, boldness is exciting. In a review meeting, boldness can suddenly feel like exposure. Now there are opinions, approvals, stakeholders, and the quiet fear that someone, somewhere, might not like it.
That’s when the language starts changing. Nobody says, let’s make this forgettable. Nobody says, let’s remove the one thing that made this worth noticing. It comes out differently. Can we soften it a little? Can we make it more accessible? Is there a version that feels a bit more on brand? Could we say the same thing in a way that feels safer? Those questions sound reasonable, and sometimes they are. But they also have a way of draining the life out of an idea while making everyone feel responsible and strategic.
Part of the problem is that most organizations are built to reduce risk, not create distinctiveness. They know how to protect the brand, the audience, the decision-makers, and the room from discomfort. What they don’t always know how to protect is the original spark. That gets treated like the unstable part, the thing that has to be managed before the work can go out into the world.
There’s also the simple fact that having a point of view means ruling some things out. It means saying this is how we see it, not just tossing a handful of agreeable statements into the air and hoping they sound smart. That kind of clarity can feel dangerous because it closes doors. It leaves less room to hide. It makes the work more recognizable, but also easier to judge. A bland message can always defend itself by saying it was trying to appeal to everyone. A sharper one has to live or die on whether it actually means something.
That’s why so much brand communication ends up in the same washed-out middle. It isn’t that people don’t have ideas. It’s that by the time the idea survives its rounds of revisions, approvals, caution, and second-guessing, it no longer has enough nerve left in it to matter. What started out distinct gets smoothed into something acceptable. What started out alive gets turned into something professional. And what started out with a point of view ends up sounding like it was written by a committee that wanted to avoid trouble.
And that’s usually the trade being made, whether anyone says it out loud or not. A brand gives up some memorability in exchange for comfort, some clarity in exchange for consensus, some edge in exchange for safety. The trouble is, safety has its own cost. Safe work rarely gets rejected, but it also rarely gets remembered.
Where AI Fits
AI didn’t create this problem, but it does make it harder to ignore.
For a long time, brands could get away with producing average content because average content still took time, money, people, planning, and effort. There was at least some built-in friction. Now the friction is disappearing. Posts can be drafted in seconds. Campaign ideas can be spun up instantly. Emails, summaries, captions, headlines, landing page copy, all of it can be generated faster than ever. That changes the landscape, whether people want to admit it or not. What it doesn’t change is the need for a point of view. If anything, it makes that need more obvious.
AI is very good at producing language. It’s good at structure, pattern, tone mimicry, and giving something the shape of a finished piece. What it can’t do on its own is decide what’s worth saying, what’s too boring to repeat, what feels true for a brand, should be pushed harder, should be left out, what deserves a sharper angle, or what belief should hold the whole thing together. It can generate material. It can’t supply conviction.
That matters because when content gets easier to make, bland content multiplies even faster. The internet is filled with language that sounds competent, polished, and complete, but doesn’t carry much life. You can feel that already. A lot of things read smoothly now, technically fine, or say what they’re supposed to say in the way they’re supposed to say it. Then they vanish on contact because there’s no real pressure behind them, no real taste shaping them, no actual perspective making choices.
That’s where people get AI wrong. The threat isn’t that it’ll replace every human voice with machine language. The bigger danger is that it gives brands an even easier way to produce more of what was already forgettable. More volume. More filler. More content that checks the box without leaving a mark.
Used well, AI can absolutely help. It can speed things up, unblock teams, organize thinking, and reduce friction in production. But the brands that get the most out of it won’t be the ones asking it to create a voice from scratch. They’ll be the ones bringing a voice, a standard, and a point of view to the table first. Then the tool has something to work with. Then it becomes an amplifier instead of a substitute.
That’s the part that matters most. As content gets cheaper and easier to produce, the value shifts somewhere else. It shifts toward judgment. Taste. Restraint. Clarity. Perspective. The question is no longer can you make content. Now it’s whether you have anything to say that sounds like it came from you.
What Point of View Does
A real point of view does more than make content sound smarter. It gives it shape. It tells a brand what to lean into, what to leave alone, what to challenge, and what not to waste time repeating just because everyone else is saying it. Without that, content tends to drift toward the middle. It may be polished, useful, even well-written, but it doesn’t feel anchored to anything. It doesn’t feel like it came from a particular mind. It just feels produced.
That’s why point of view matters so much. It creates recognition. You start to feel that a brand sees the world a certain way. It notices certain problems and gets irritated by certain clichés. It cares about certain tensions and has preferences and standards. A way of sorting through the noise. Even when the subject changes, the perspective stays legible. That consistency is what makes the work feel authored instead of assembled.
It also helps with something brands often struggle with: selection. Once a brand knows what it believes, content gets easier to shape because not every possible message deserves equal attention. A point of view narrows the field. It helps a team decide what’s on-brand in the deeper sense, not just the stylistic one. It gives people a reason to choose one angle over another. It keeps a brand from sounding like it swallowed every decent idea it heard in a meeting and tried to publish them all at once.
The other thing it does is make content more memorable. People remember a clear perspective more than they remember polished generalities. They remember the brand that said something with conviction, or framed a familiar issue in a way that felt specific and alive. They remember the feeling that someone was actually there behind the language. That doesn’t mean every brand needs to be loud, provocative, or constantly pick fights. It just means the work should sound like it comes from somewhere.
And maybe that’s the simplest way to put it. A point of view makes a brand feel like it comes from somewhere. Not from the internet in general, from a prompt, or a deck full of approved phrases. From somewhere real. From a way of seeing. From a belief about what matters and what doesn’t. In a landscape full of content, that’s often the difference between something people scroll past and something that actually sticks.
The Takeaway
The problem for brands now isn’t that they lack tools, channels, or ways to produce content. They’ve got more of those than ever. The problem is that volume has become easy while distinctiveness still takes nerve. It still takes judgment. It still takes the willingness to say, this is how we see it, and to keep saying it even after the brainstorm is over and the safe alternatives start circling the room.
That’s the real shift. Content alone is no longer impressive. Everyone can make it. Everyone can automate it. Everyone can keep the machine running. What still stands out is a point of view strong enough to shape the work and steady enough to survive the approval process without getting sanded down into something forgettable.
For brands, that means the challenge isn’t just producing more. It’s deciding what deserves to be said, what deserves emphasis, what deserves a sharper edge, and what can be left on the cutting room floor. That kind of clarity is harder than filling a calendar, but it’s also what gives the work a pulse. It’s what makes a brand sound like more than a collection of assets and messages. It makes it sound like someone is actually there.
That feels especially true now. As content gets cheaper, faster, and easier to generate, the brands that matter will be the ones that still sound like they mean something. Not louder for the sake of it. Not stranger just to prove they can be. Just clear enough, specific enough, and confident enough to resist the slide into polished sameness.
At ThoughtLab, that’s the work that matters most. Not helping brands make more content for the sake of it, but helping them find a point of view strong enough to shape what they say, how they show up, and why anyone should care.
