Agencies find AI overuse is leading to brief bloat

According to M&C Saatchi’s North American CEO, Nadja Bellan-White, over-reliance on AI for brief writing is approaching “a tipping point… It’s a little bit ridiculous.” Speaking during last week’s Digiday Media Buying Summit, she estimated that 85% of the briefs sent to the agency by clients were written using AI tools. 

The impact? Corporate documents that run into the hundreds of pages, replete with marketing jargon but little actual vision. “How many many times can you say ‘framework’ in one sentence? How many times can you try ‘economies of scale’? How many times can you tell me I need this to ‘tie back to commercial objectives’?”

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Brief writing has become one of the most common applications for AI tech in marketing. More than half (56.4%) of marketers and agencies now use it to build out strategy, media or campaign creative briefs, according to a survey conducted by Basis Technologies between July and August.

Media agencies use agents to suggest audience segments, run analyses of competitors’ media plans or suggest search keywords to bid on. Creative shops and influencer agencies use AI to skip through reams of consumer research, brand guidelines and economic trends, or to find ways of trumping received marketing wisdom. In-house teams at high-spending brands use generative tools to spin up strategy approaches. Even publishers now use agentic tools that respond to client briefs with AI-generated insights.

Staffers will point to the hours clawed back or to the insights discovered from a broader or deeper reading of research. Behind closed doors, however, they kvetch about the cost.

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“I’ve seen some of the worst briefs I’ve ever seen in my career recently, and it’s because they’re so disjointed and there’s no through-line on what… the marketing goal is,” said one agency executive, speaking under Chatham House rules at a townhall session at DMBS.

“AI is making it worse. It’s pontificating on a sentence structure that makes [a brief] 10 pages long,” said another. 

Complaints about the proliferation of memos or emails, or indeed badly written campaign briefs, aren’t new. At the start of the decade, industry veterans will recall there was even a cross-industry initiative to encourage better brief writing. But just as it’s sped up the production of digital creative assets, Claude and ChatGPT tools have enabled bad writing to spread like knotweed. As another agency exec put it: “There’s a lack of critical thinking.”

Industry leaders are beginning to acknowledge those problems in public. “[AI] can be a good sparring partner,” said Bellan-White. “But at the end of the day, you need to be the one to make the decision. You understand the client’s briefs. You understand the market context. You’ve got to really think about what it is that’s recommended.”

It’s not hard to see how AI has become a crutch. Good briefs take time to craft, time that clients are loath to grant their agencies, or to use themselves, for something so far removed from the end product. Little surprise, then, that staffers turn to a solution that does the work for them like a white-collar version of the shoemaker’s elves.

In the Brothers Grimm tale, however, the shoemaker eventually retakes control of production. But advertising staffers are long-term practitioners of what academics call “cognitive offloading,” the delegation of knowledge work to a tool or machine. 

A growing body of research suggests that such over-reliance on AI tools literally reduces the cognitive abilities of users. One 2025 MIT Media Lab study, for example, measured the brainwaves of students writing essays without the aid of technology, compared with those writing with the assistance of search engines or ChatGPT. The AI-assisted group showed a 55% reduction in brainwave activity.

Whatever the name, the signs are the same. A profusion of em-dashes, paragraph upon paragraph of empty, over-long sentences, the phrase “it’s not X, it’s Y.” 

Cognitive offloading isn’t just an abstract (or aesthetic) problem for ad agency leaders, some of whom are recognizing that some marketing staffers have gone from using AI as an aid to relying upon it to prop them up. Bloated documents steal time from colleagues or clients, while many users’ loose attitude to the statistics AI tools conjure up demand for a closer-than usual supervision by fact-checkers. According to a GWI survey of 150 British marketers published last month, 29% admitted inaccurate or misleading insights had cost their companies financially.

“They have exported all of their thinking to AI,” said Tony Russo, vp, innovation and strategy at indie agency Mile Marker, during another DMBS session. “It’s a judgment problem.”

If there is a solution, it’s an offline one. Christina Riccitelli, chief innovation and analytics officer at media agency OpAD, said managers should intervene if they found junior staff leaning too hard on AI. “You have to reel them back in,” she said.

Bellan-White recommended more drastic action. “Turn off your laptop. Just literally shut it down. Turn off your phones,” she said. “I want you to look me in the eye and actually have a conversation. Do you know how uncomfortable that is for people today? Because if you actually have to have a conversation, that means you actually have to know what you’re talking about.”