The Sea of Sameness

Every brand thinks they’re the wave. Most are just seaweed.

AI didn’t make this workshop. It just showed us how much sameness we’d been swimming in.

I walked into the room and the walls were covered.

Every square foot was filled with destination ads: Miami, Tampa, Aruba, even that Retire for the Weekend campaign everyone in the room loved.

And from a distance, it all looked good.

Blue skies. Palm trees. Perfect drone shots. Beautiful people holding drinks in slow motion.

Then I stepped closer.

That’s when it hit.

It all looked the same.

Each brand thought they were saying something different, but the visuals blended together into one big tropical screensaver. It wasn’t a wall of creativity. It was wallpaper.

That was the starting point of our Sea of Sameness workshop with Visit Lauderdale.

We used AI to map out what “the category” actually looked like, pulling hundreds of tourism campaigns into composite grids to show the patterns no one could unsee. The same ocean-blue hex codes. The same aerial footage. The same tagline rhythm: “Where the sun meets something-something.”

Nobody in the room called that AI art. It was closer to a confession.

When we layered Visit Lauderdale’s past work into the mix, it didn’t look bad.

It just looked… like everything else.

That’s the danger of good. It’s what sameness hides behind.

The conversation changed fast. What started as “Look how strong our brand is” turned into “Oh, we’re just another beach.”

That’s when Make Waves, Not Ripples was born.

It became the rallying cry that pulled Visit Lauderdale out of the aquarium. The brand shouldn’t sell a destination. It should be one. Bold. Colorful. A little wild. Willing to splash instead of shimmer.

But that led us to the real question: what could Lauderdale own that no one else could?

We looked at Miami. We looked at Tampa. We looked at Aruba. Every single one tried to own the beach.

But when we stripped it all back, the answer was sitting right there, moving beneath everything else.

It wasn’t the beach.

It was the water.

Everyone sells the view. Lauderdale owns the experience. The canals, the boats, the sound, the movement, the reflection, the energy. It’s what gives the place its pulse. You can’t fake that. You can’t duplicate it.

That is what we realized in that room. Volume was never the problem. Everyone was already shouting the same sentence.

AI helped us see the pattern. Strategy helped us name it. But instinct found the current running underneath it all. The thing that was already there, waiting to be claimed.

Anyone can have a beach.

We took the ads down off that wall. The water was the only thing left that nobody else had put up there.