The onslaught of disinformation and AI slop is real. The average person now takes in around 34 gigabytes of information every day, and to keep up with demands, output is increasingly low-effort and machine-spun, making it cheaper and easier to produce and scale. The result is not just falsehoods moving far and wide, but a growing sea of sameness where brands risk blending into interchangeable noise. 

To stay ahead, distinct and retain substance, brands need to be proactive and crystal clear about what they stand for. Here’s how.

Identify your Brand Truths Offline

With the rate of disinformation rising, it’s hard to preempt exactly what parts of your brand are most vulnerable. Add AI into the mix, and the risk is not just being misrepresented, but becoming indistinguishable. If your thinking is shaped too early by prompts and patterns, your output can drift into the category average.

Start offline. Get in a room, face-to-face, and start to identify a set of core brand truths to act as your north star before any production cycles kick in. These truths are the heart of your work: the why, what, and who that can’t be auto-generated.

Some key questions to ask: What impact are we trying to make? What promises do we keep? What values show up in our decisions, and not just on posters? 

I like to pair brand truths with a simple communications SWOT matrix. By mapping weaknesses alongside strengths, you identify where your brand might be saying one thing but doing another, a major risk in an era of disinformation. This allows you to surface credible, provable truths, not just idealised brand traits.

Always-on Brand Truth Campaigns

Getting the truth to your audience first is the best defence against any lie. Disinformation spreads because it’s fast and everywhere, not because it’s well-designed. Social media users are 70 per cent more likely to share or retweet falsehoods than facts, so make sure that your content is easy to share. Keep it visual, concise, and repeatable. Don’t wait to defend your brand. Tell the truth first, and tell it often.

Do this by building always-on content that reinforces your brand’s core truths, not just during crisis, but year-round. This is also how you stay recognisable when AI slop makes everything around you feel copy-paste.

Most importantly, back every key message with proof. Ensure all your brand’s key messages and unique selling points have both internal and externally verified proof points. For example, if you lead with the ethical standards of your product, become a certified BCorp, then release video footage of what makes your product supply chain sustainable.

Educate your customers

The threat of disinformation isn’t a secret, or a dirty word. You can blunt the impact of potential future disinformation by talking about it in a way that feels genuine to your business. Warn your audience about the dangers, the perpetrators, and what to look out for. 

Think: what are the important conversations and effective education pieces circulating your internal teams? This kind of authenticity and clarity serves a dual purpose here. It protects trust and makes your brand easier to recognise in the slop.

If you have a brand that holds authority and operates in a particularly vulnerable market, designate budgets to creating educational content. Banks are a great example; most now proactively educate their customers on how to spot a scam, which personal information to never give out, and what to do with a spoof email.

Educate your audience on what disinformation looks like in context. Write an article, build a landing page, or simply send out an email campaign. Make sure to put time into targeting the right audiences. In Australia for example, people in regional areas are much more concerned about misinformation originating from activist groups than urban dwellers. 

Invest in storytelling

As much as you need to invest in getting your truths front and centre, the reality is that often the best story wins. Disinformation spreads because it’s designed to be tantalising or myth-like. By engaging people’s curiosity, you bypass many of the brain’s defences to fact-resistance. Package your facts up in a compelling story that wins over your audience.

Storytelling is also where brands can resist the sea of sameness. AI can scale messages, but it struggles to replicate lived experience, specific detail, and real human stakes.

So how to tell your story? Produce a brand video story, invest in brand ambassadors, a set of influencers that represent your brand truths and share it, content series such as social reels sharing brand truths from the words of your team, employees.

Create community

The rise of online subcultures and cult following presents an opportunity for brands to either create a community or become symbols of existing communities. This is nothing new, think of Redbull and its connection to extreme sports or Lululemon and wellbeing. A strong community behind a brand will prove invaluable to counteract disinformation.

Community also protects distinctiveness. When people actively participate in your brand, it feels lived and specific, not generated.

Find your community and invest in it. Build partnerships, release interactive campaigns, protect your causes. That community will serve to strengthen

In the new post-truth world, your brand’s strength won’t just be measured by its products or services, but by its ability to inspire trust and lead with integrity in the face of uncertainty. The key is resilience, not just reaction. The digital landscape may feel chaotic, but with the right strategy, your brand can be a beacon of reliability and originality in a world searching for clarity.