NOTE: I get a steady stream of sales emails, cold calls, podcast invitations, and collaboration offers. Most people and companies (and AI) don't get how Stigma Marketing & Development works. They see “marketing” and assume ads, automation, funnels, and growth hacks. This post helps clarify what Stigma is really about: authenticity, humanity, and development—not gimmicks, not volume. It’s a reference point I can send to anyone who still doesn’t get it. LMK if you want to talk after reading this.
The first official marketing classes I took were in an MBA program at the University of Montana. Before that, I’d already been playing with websites, Adobe Creative Suite, and brand messaging since high school. As a recovered pastor, I’d spent years working in communication, leadership, organizational development, and curriculum design—and in nearly every role, I found myself doing marketing.
Ethos, Pathos, Logos, and the Stigma of Marketing
Like many, I was drawn to the psychology and philosophy behind persuasion. At its root, marketing is a rhetorical craft: persuasion through credibility (ethos), emotion (pathos), and reason (logos). These aren’t corporate buzzwords—they’re ancient ideas from Plato’s dialogues about the human soul. In other words, these words are not just philosophical concepts, and obviously deeper than mere marketing; they are psychological. Every marketing act deals with the inside of humans on both ends, just like business. In today’s times, with how things are now, if we’re not careful, we can lose our souls in the process of trying to gain the whole world while competing with each other.
Marketing carries a stigma, and for good reasons (one of the reasons for the name). People roll their eyes at “salesy,” “spammy,” or “manipulative” tactics. We avoid kiosks and salespeople. The classic marketing funnel (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Loyalty) is upside-down. It’s also religious vernacular.1 Another relative of the marketing funnel is the Purchase Funnel. That’s why Stigma Marketing & Development runs on a bottom-up philosophy and development-first approach. We don’t treat people as data points sliding through a funnel; we build relationships from the ground up. Real influence doesn’t come from automation or gimmicks. It comes from trust.
When marketing is done wrong, as exemplified by cigarette marketers in Mad Men, the bad reputation marketing gets is that it’s about deception and manipulation for personal gain. It uses ethos, pathos, and logos as tricks to try to convince people they need something to be better than they are; thus implying they are not good enough, and that we have the solution to their life’s problems.
Too often, marketing has treated people as means to an end, instead of the ends. To be fair, this is rather human, as we all can understand how we treat our professions and people as a means to an end. I’ve written before that the business world keeps screaming about trust, transparency, and transformation. AI SEO and the decentralization of technology are also helping drive this. Academics is also beginning to feel AI’s impact internally (source: www.tandfonline.com). These are all human things. For marketing, people are tired of crap they can’t trust: tired of being sold to, tired of algorithms pretending to care, and tired of the world screaming in their pockets.
The paradox is that the same rhetorical tools that can elevate and connect people can also dehumanize and distance them when scaled through technology. This isn’t just theory: it’s happening today. Marketing has always been about psychology, and AI has made persuasion auto-generated. That’s dangerous. AI promises efficiency, but what’s the catch?
“When technology leads and humanity follows, dysfunction is inevitable.”
— Tristan Harris
AI Slop: What It Is, Why It Matters
“AI slop” is what it sounds like: low-effort, high-volume, formulaic content designed for impact and speed over depth and quality. Wikipedia calls it “filler content prioritizing quantity over quality.” It’s the sludge clogging our feeds: autogenerated videos with fake voices, sales emails, endless SEO listicles, and templated “thought leadership” with no thought. Amazon and Etsy are being flooded with AI-Slop.
Why is it spreading? Because it’s easy and the incentives reward it. The digital economy runs on connection, and marketing on content. AI makes both cheap to mass-produce. One person can now publish hundreds of posts, ads, and “articles” a day. The cost is low, the scale is infinite, and algorithms can’t tell human insight from machine mimicry.
Marketing agencies aren’t competing with each other anymore. They’re competing with everyone and their AI bot armies. The marketing field has turned into a race for volume, including the long tails of industries and niche markets. At what point does the noise become maddening and the competition become cancerous?
Evidence and Risks
- Eroding trust: Humans can no longer reliably tell what’s real. In a 2024 study with 1,276 participants, people could only distinguish AI-generated media from real human content at about 50% accuracy—a literal coin toss (source: arXiv). When reality itself becomes a guessing game, trust becomes scarce currency.
- Data pollution: Marketing analytics are quietly being poisoned by synthetic data. AI-fabricated user reviews, survey responses, and engagement behaviors are entering datasets, misleading companies into optimizing for ghosts. Models trained on fake interactions feed back into strategy, creating distorted “insights.”
- Platform crackdowns: Platforms have noticed. YouTube has updated monetization policies to penalize repetitive AI content, explicitly calling out “mass-produced or synthetic spam” (source: The Verge). Google Search now treats low-quality AI copy as spam, signaling that quantity will not protect you.
- Cultural dilution: As AI slop floods the ecosystem, it drowns real human voices. The noise-to-signal ratio gets worse. People grow numb, scrolling past everything. Algorithms then learn from that behavior—rewarding shallowness because shallowness performs.
- Feedback loops: When AI trains on AI, the internet becomes a copy of a copy. Generative models already scrape their own regurgitated text. Each iteration compresses nuance and originality further. The system literally eats its own tail.
The result is predictable: brain rot, creativity atrophies, attention spans decay, and authenticity becomes performance. The irony is thick. Services and products meant to serve people are now the mechanism by which human connection and psychology are flattened and fragmented.
Psychology, Leadership, and the Human Cost
We live in a human world, and AI is a human technology. Poof humans out of existence, and AI ceases to have purpose. Maybe in twenty years that won’t be true. Until then, facts and humans matter.
People are already reacting to digital saturation. They’re seeking out tangible, physical, ancient things:
- Nature and the Tangible (like the physical variations of Tetris)
- Mindfulness, fantasy, spirituality, mythology, magic, and mysticism.
- Counseling, therapy, CBT/DBT, and embodied work.
Society is already showing symptoms of fatigue. Reading comprehension and emotional intelligence are declining; attention spans are fractured. Ghosting is the norm in business and friendships. Mental health crises seem to be everywhere. Humans crave things they can trust—relationships, story, presence.
Despite the hype, most people are realizing they don’t want AI to do everything for them.
The Flattenings
- Psychic flattening: Overreliance on algorithmic prompts dulls intuition and imagination. Generative tools create feedback loops. Each request for “ten ideas” weakens the muscle that once generated its own. Every conversation we have with AI, it influences us. The technology is barely five years old, and already we’re outsourcing responsibility and relationship to the machine.
- Atrophy of discernment: If systems feed us “answers” faster than we can form questions, our inner compass erodes. Inquiry—the soul of critical thinking—requires tension. Remove it, and you get passive consumption.
- Emotional flattening: Machines don’t feel. Using them to simulate feeling distorts empathy. Auto-responses like “We care about your feedback 😊” train audiences to confuse politeness with care, efficiency with intimacy.
- Organizational risk: Teams tempted to lean on AI for scaling may lose cohesion, creativity, and meaning. Shared struggle (debate, drafting, revision, etc.) is how humans build culture. Remove that, and what remains is sterile productivity.
- Leadership paradox: The new challenge of leadership is modeling resistance. Leaders must show that deep, slow, human work, like vision casting, culture-building, and emotional reasoning, can’t be automated. The discipline of saying no to expedience becomes a mark of wisdom.
The Existential Dimension
The more we refine our A/B tests, automate our funnels, and perfect our persuasion tactics, the more we amplify the very sickness that gave marketing its stigma.
After two decades of internet, smartphones, and social media, and a century of industrial globalization before that, we’ve all seen how digital forces have rewired the human condition. Ghosting, family detachment, loneliness, polarization, and the collapse of community are among some commonly discussed aspects.
If we keep accelerating without reflection, if we continue the empiric chase for wealth, metrics, and speed, without investing in the humans on both ends of the digital Infosphere, we’ll find ourselves psychologically bankrupt.
In twenty years, we won’t just have better AI; we’ll have worse humans.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
— Peter Drucker
A Bigger Conversation: Culture, Fragmentation, and Renewal
We’re living in an age of cultural fragmentation and global nihilism—a breakdown of coherence, identity, and trust. Across every industry and demographic, people are asking the same kind of questions: “What’s true anymore? “What’s going on in the world?“
It’s not politics or economics; it’s existential. Modern humanity is struggling with the human condition itself.
Writers have been naming this for years.
- Mark Manson, in Everything Is F*cked, called modern nihilism a crisis of hope.
- Carl Jung, a pioneer in psychology, warned that when the psyche loses contact with depth, it compensates with collective madness. He worried about the times we live in now.
- René Girard, in The Scapegoat, showed how societies unite through blame—a dynamic mirrored in our cancel culture and online mobs. He warned how, once globalization was complete, it’d take a spark to set it all on fire.
- Tony Wright’s Return to the Brain of Eden speculates we’ve literally devolved away from coherence, and speculates that Western society is coming to a brink.
- Ken Wilber, in A Theory of Everything, framed it as the disintegration of meaning across developmental lines.
These aren’t tangents; they’re signals. This list just happens to be from my reading, and there are others, like Dopamine Nation, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and The Drama of the Gifted Child, that have far-reaching implications for this industry. What have you noticed from your reading list?
Marketing is a part of the same ecosystem. If communication becomes synthetic and shallow, the culture follows.
The Wager
TIME recently published an article comparing AI’s moral stakes to Pascal’s Wager (source: TIME). Excuse the recovered pastor here, this is from a Times article, and I have some disagreements with Pascal: Blaise Pascal argued that believing in God was the safest bet: you lose nothing if wrong, but everything if right. The same logic applies to AI and humanity now:
If we bet on humanity, on meaning, humanity, and creativity, and AI turns out less revolutionary than predicted, we lose nothing. We gain healthier organizations, clearer minds, and stronger relationships.
But if we don’t bet on humanity, if we automate our ethics, outsource our art, and digitize our souls, and AI truly transforms everything, then we lose the essence of being human. With how AI is going to impact employment and economy, it’s time every professional and leader starts taking this wager seriously.
The rational choice is to prepare for transformation by investing in the human side of the equation: awareness, empathy, discernment, creativity, and humanity.
What This Means for Marketing
In this fractured landscape, marketing rooted in human story and relational trust isn’t just competitive—it’s necessary for cultural sanity.
That’s in part why Stigma M&D exists. I built this business to address the fragmentation and to prove you can build a strategy with authenticity, meaning, and human connection and still win. Maybe even “succeed” because of it.
Success built on hiding, protecting, or playing safe is brittle and hollow. To succeed in relational, creative, or leadership spaces, you have to risk being seen.2
How do we do that?
- Adopt minimal AI use in messaging. Use AI to assist, not replace. Always have human oversight and voice audits. Anything that sounds synthetic doesn’t go out.
- Elevate human metrics over vanity metrics. Measure culture, trust, loyalty, and morale alongside clicks and conversions. Longevity beats virality.
- Foster real storytelling. Host conversations, not just campaigns. Publish fewer, deeper pieces. Make algorithms adapt to human content, not the other way around.
- Hold a moral line. Ask before every campaign: Would I respect this if I were on the receiving end? If not, delete it. Integrity is the new competitive edge.
Marketing that honors reality is one way we resist cultural decay and participate in renewal.
Conclusion: Invitation and Moral Compass
AI is here to stay, but we decide what role it plays. We can either let it govern what it means to be human, or use it to enhance the very qualities machines can’t replicate.
The call to marketers, leaders, and creators is simple: you’re better than templated noise. You didn’t enter this field to become a glorified algorithm. You came because you believe communication can shape reality. So let your wisdom, scars, and uneven edges be your differentiator.
This isn’t regression. It’s realignment. It’s about making the digital world serve our small worlds again: the relationships, teams, and communities that actually matter.
The rat race of more, faster, cheaper has reached its breaking point. With AI demanding we become more human, maybe this is the moment marketing finally grows a conscience.
Resist the slop. Keep it soul-deep.
Make marketing human again.
Footnotes:
- There’s a clear correlation between Western religious phenomena and modern marketing methods. The Purpose Driven Church movement and leaders like Bill Hybels helped introduce the marketing funnel and business-style strategies into the Evangelical world over the past two decades. As a recovered pastor, I can say this feels less like speculation and more like observation. It also explains, in part, my own drive for authenticity in marketing and business, but that’s a topic for another post. ↩︎
- Brené Brown’s research on success and shame reframes achievement through the lens of vulnerability and integrity. In Daring Greatly and Rising Strong, she argues that genuine success comes from courage, the willingness to show up imperfectly, and that shame thrives where authenticity is absent. Applied to marketing, her insight is sharp: any strategy that manipulates, hides, or objectifies people corrodes trust and feeds collective shame. Success, in her terms, is defined not by performance metrics but by relational honesty and moral alignment. ↩︎
