How to survive the AI flood.

The problem wasn't AI. It was abandoning Ronald, Grimace, and McDonaldland. Disney gets it. Arnold gets it. Here's what 95% of the commentary missed.

Dec 17, 2025

Marcel: “The flood is here. Most brands are drowning. But the smart ones? They built arks years ago...” 🌊

Three Brands. Same AI tools. Wildly different outcomes.

A few weeks ago, Coca-Cola released its AI-generated Christmas ad. Backlash hits immediately. “Soulless!” “Corporate slop!” But they keep it running. It scores 5.9 on System1 - above average for effectiveness.

Why? Because Coca-Cola didn’t just make an ad. They have an entire Christmas universe they’ve built since 1993. Polar bears. Red truck convoys. Snowy villages. “Holidays Are Coming jingle”. A complete world that people recognize instantly.

Last week: McDonald’s dropped their AI Christmas ad. 48 hours later? Pulled. Comments deleted. Video privated. The Netherlands division blamed.

Here’s what’s actually criminal (spoiler alert, it’s not the AI usage): McDonald’s has an entire universe. McDonaldland. Ronald McDonald’s world. Grimace. The Hamburglar. Mayor McCheese. A complete universe with characters, locations, stories, and distinctive visual language built over decades.

They chose not to use any of it. Made a generic ad that could’ve been for any restaurant. Left their universe at the dock of the bay (can you hear Otis singing?).

Same week McDonald’s pulled: Disney announces $1 billion investment in OpenAI. They’re not licensing 200 characters. They’re licensing access to entire universes. Marvel. Star Wars. Pixar. Each with worlds, characters, visual languages, and stories people love.

Just imagine an ark filled with this bunch of characters.

The AI Flood Isn’t Coming. It’s Here.

Infinite content. Low cost. Complete accessibility.

Every brand can now generate thousands of pieces of content daily. Professional-looking videos. Polished imagery. Endless variations.

Remember ‘the sea of sameness’? It’s turning into a flood. And it’s washing away everything that isn’t anchored to something distinctive.

Over 50% of the internet is already slop. And 85% of brands is not distinctive. That’s a dangerous cocktail.

What survives? Only the brand universes that can rise above.

For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger built his universe over 60 years. The Terminator world gave him catchphrases and a persona. Bodybuilding gave him a distinctive physical presence and authority. His personality, accent, and motivational style created a universe people wanted to live in. Now he’s using AI to make that universe accessible 24/7 to 500K+ people daily. Same universe. Infinite reach.

McDonald’s? They have McDonaldland. A complete universe with characters, locations (Grimace’s world, Hamburglar’s hideout), visual language, and decades of stories. For the x-mass campaign, they left it at the dock and tried swimming with generic holiday content instead, and it backfired, rightfully so.

Luckily, they are investing heavily in their IP, for example, this recent collab with Minecraft. So I’m pretty sure they’ll keep making the right bets in the future. The question for them will be, when do they invite fans in to play?

Building Your Brand’s Ark: What Actually Survives

Here’s the paradox most brands miss: The most distinctive assets are the least used. And the least distinctive assets are everywhere.

The ark has limited space. And the data shows exactly what survives the flood vs. what drowns instantly.

What Goes On the Ark (Survives the AI Flood):

🔈 Sonic Assets (8.5x effective, 6% usage): Netflix “ta-dum.” Intel’s notes. AI floods visuals, but distinctive sounds cut through instantly.
🐨 Brand Characters (6.0x effective, 14% usage): Geico Gecko. Flo. Tony the Tiger. Personality AI can amplify but not create from nothing.
🎼 Jingles (5.0x effective, 8% usage): “Nationwide is on your side.” Already in people’s heads. AI can’t compete with decades of memory.
🧴 Unique Product Shapes (3.2x effective, 28% usage): Coca-Cola bottle. Apple silhouettes. Physical territory AI can’t flood.
🤡 Entertainment Assets (The Attention Moat): Geico’s funny ads. Red Bull’s extreme content. People choose to engage. That’s the moat.
🌎 Complete Universes: Coca-Cola’s Christmas villages. Marvel’s visual style. Mental real estate competitors can’t occupy.

How Brand Universes Get Built

Stage 1: Create Your Distinctive World

Not “develop brand guidelines.” Build an actual universe with its own rules, characters, visual language, and personality. Something that has tension. Something that can make a kid laugh.

Can Gen-AI help? Sure - it’ll generate 1,000 concept variations. But YOU decide what makes your universe distinctive vs. forgettable. YOU define the world’s personality, rules, and boundaries. YOU choose what’s worth building into something recognizable.

Coca-Cola created a specific Christmas world with specific characters in specific settings with specific emotional tones. McDonald’s created McDonaldland with specific characters in a specific playground universe with specific personalities.

The thinking can’t be outsourced. The universe has to be intentional.

Stage 2: Fame Through Entertainment

A distinctive universe with no audience = empty ark. You build a captive audience through strong entertainment. You build strong entertainment through strong creativity. Study after study proves this.

Entertain or Die - Researching how to make brands more entertaining | WARC — Graph from ‘Entertain or Die’ report

AI’s role here? Speed up the testing. Create 10 stories from your universe instead of 1. Post daily instead of monthly. Find what makes people want to spend time in your world. But the entertainment value comes from understanding your audience, not from prompts.

Stage 3: The Playable Brand

This is where AI becomes rocket fuel. Once you have a distinctive universe + fame, you can scale infinitely.

Disney will let fans play in their universes on Sora. Create stories with Mickey. Put Vader in new scenarios. Built with Marvel characters. All on Disney’s platforms with Disney’s licensing fees.

Go play with Marcel to see what I mean.

“But I Don’t Have 100 Years to Build a Universe...”

You don’t need them.

Disney spent a century building universes intentionally. Every world is designed with care. Every character with purpose. Every story is crafted to entertain. That’s what $1 billion buys you access to.

But Gen-AI can compress the timeline - if you’re intentional from day one.

The four levers that matter:

Strong Distinctiveness - AI generates worlds fast. You choose which one is memorable. What makes your universe impossible to confuse with anyone else’s? What makes people recognize it instantly?
Strong Personality - AI scales your universe’s voice. But generic personality = invisible universe. Define how your world speaks, acts, behaves. Make it sharp. Make it memorable. Then let AI echo it everywhere.
Strong Entertainment Value - AI makes testing cheaper. So test more. Find what makes people want to spend time in your universe. What makes them laugh, share, return. Entertainment builds fame. Fame builds equity. AI speeds up the loop.
Massive Visibility - Two paths: Pay for reach or earn it through social. AI helps both. Create more from your universe for paid channels. Test more variations for viral content. Volume isn’t the goal. Finding what makes people care about your world is.

The difference between Disney and a new brand isn’t just time. It’s intentionality.

Disney built universes that people love on purpose. You can compress that timeline with AI if you’re intentional about building a distinctive, entertaining, memorable universe from day one.

Marcel: “AI is the accelerator. Choose what to accelerate. Accelerate generic? Drown faster. Accelerate distinctive? Build an unsinkable ark.” ⚡

Bottom Line: Build Your Ark.

While everyone argues whether AI will replace creativity, the smart brands already know the answer:

AI doesn’t replace brand universes. It amplifies them.

Disney’s licensing entire universes for $1 billion. Coca-Cola’s Christmas world carries 30 years of equity through any backlash. Arnold’s motivational universe reaches 500K people daily at scale.

The winners aren’t fighting AI or rushing to adopt it first. They’re the ones who built universes distinctive enough, famous enough, and entertaining enough to survive infinite generic content.

McDonald’s had McDonaldland. They just forgot to bring it aboard.

Marcel: “Build your universe. Make it entertaining. Load it onto your ark. Then let AI make it infinite. Or don’t, and watch AI expose you as forgettable. Your choice.” 🐕💼

Want to build your brand universe?

I help companies create distinctive brand universes and characters using Gen-AI. The kind that is actually used (not stuck in a Figma file somewhere). If you’re exploring this for your brand, book a 20-min call or check out some examples here.

And of course, you can subscribe to the newsletter to learn how to build a strong brand powered by Gen-AI.

🎁 Holiday bonus 🎁

As a little gift for all you wonderful subscribers - I made the Buckle Up Briefing free as of today, so you can now read all the previous paid articles and learn more about how I’m building Marcel’s universe.

Here are just a few of the latest ones: