The era of the unified tone of voice is nearly here – thanks to AI

Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger.

For as long as I can remember, the world of copywriting in financial services has been divided in two.

The smaller part is the sexy stuff.  The ads, the social media posts, the landing pages .  The stuff that comes in short sentences and nice straightforward language.  The stuff that the writers want their readers to enjoy.  And – most importantly – the stuff that’s intended to differentiate, to help build the personality of the brand.

The bigger part is all the other stuff.  The stuff that’s mostly there because it has to be there.  The Ts and Cs.  The health warnings,  The explanations of pound cost averaging.  The stuff that comes in horribly long sentences full of horribly difficult words.  And – most importantly – the stuff that all sounds exactly the same, and does nothing at all to help build the brand.

On the whole, the first kind has always been written with care by good writers, and the second kind has been written without care by not-very-good writers.   (Actually it’s not quite that simple.  Occasionally good writers fail to dodge a brief to tackle the Ts and Cs, but this doesn’t tend to go very well, in a using-a-Rolls-Royce-to-deliver-the-milk kind of way.)

Speaking as a writer, and also as someone who cares very much about brands, I’ve always known that this state of affairs is highly unsatisfactory.  Spending a big chunk of the available time and money trying to show people that your firm is different and distinctive, while simultaneously spending another chunk showing them that it’s exactly the same, has always seemed plain daft.

Of course it makes sense for organisations – just like individuals – to flex their personalities somewhat, depending on the context.  We express ourselves differently when we’re talking to, say, our life partner, a High Court judge and the bloke we sit next to at the football.  But we’re always still fundamentally ourselves.  We’re not unrecognisably chameleon-like.

Many of us in marketing communications have always believed that the same should be true, in principle at least, of brands.  It’s quite weird when people make the move from the friendly, informal social media page to the policy document, and all that friendliness and informality disappears without trace.  Actually, it’s worse than weird – it’s suspicious.  We cynical and suspicious customers very strongly suspect that all that social media amiability was just an act – that the real personality of the company was the cold, legalistic, uncaring one revealed in the chilly language of the policy document.  Insurance policy documents read as if they’ve been written by people looking for ways to avoid paying out on claims – and, surprise surprise, that’s how their customers perceive them.

In a chicken-and-egg kind of way, the existence of the two worlds of copy both reflects, and is reflected by, the way that the industry that produces it is organised.  The good stuff is written by good writers, with good briefs, good budgets and good project management.  The other stuff is written in circumstances where some, or even all, of these advantages don’t apply.  That’s just the way it is.

Except that before our very eyes, almost week by week, it’s becoming the way it isn’t,  As you’ve very likely spotted, this is another piece about the impact of AI.  And one of the more mind-blowing things about AI is that when it comes to writing, there’s only one kind.    AI will write whatever it is you tell it to write, just as quickly and just as cheaply as it’ll write anything else.  So, for the first time, there’s no obstacle to achieving a single, consistent tone of voice right across the whole of a firm’s output.

Well, actually, hang on a minute.  That’s the direction of travel, but it’ll be some while before we reach the destination.  Anxious copywriters are out there in their hundreds on LinkedIn arguing that AI absolutely isn’t, and never will be, smart enough to write anything that’s really good to read.  For myself, I probably agree about the “isn’t,” but not about the “never will be.”   At the current rate of progress, I’d give it three years.  But until then, there will continue to be a need for a polish by a real (and talented) person.

And hang on a minute longer, because AI-written copy will only ever be as good as its prompts.  And figuring out what those prompts should be to enable big, complex organisations to achieve a consistent and distinctive verbal identity is a big, difficult new challenge in its own right.

But still.  Look at it this way:  all of this is moving us into the same world that our design colleagues have been living in for years.  Every big brand today has a visual identity, which can be applied across the totality of its output, but flexed suitably to deliver different kinds of message to different target groups in different media.

Meanwhile, we writers haven’t really bothered to play those games.  We’ve been satisfied with a binary choice – sexy, or not sexy.  Now, with the help of our new artificially-intelligent friends, life’s going to get a good deal more complicated.