Open every competitor’s website in your category, one browser tab after another, and read the headlines back to back. “The platform that scales with you.” “Built for modern teams.” “Powering the future of whatever.” You cannot tell them apart. Not because these companies actually do the same thing, but because they all asked the same three or four AI models to write their marketing, and the models all pointed at the same spot.
I have a name for that spot. The Mehdian.
What Is a Mehdian?
A Mehdian is the average, middle-of-the-road result you get when AI writes your marketing. It is a portmanteau of two words: “meh” and “median.” Median, because a language model is a machine for finding the middle. Meh, because the middle of everything is, by definition, unremarkable.
Feed your positioning through a model and it comes back technically fine, grammatically clean, and completely forgettable. Here is the important part: that is not the AI malfunctioning. That is the AI doing exactly what it was built to do.
Why AI Regresses to the Middle
A large language model does one thing, over and over. It predicts the most probable next word.
“Most probable” sounds like a synonym for “best.” It is not. The most probable phrasing is the most common phrasing. The most common phrasing is the one that already exists ten thousand times over in the training data, which is to say, the exact phrasing your competitors already used. Ask a model to describe your product and it will drift, sentence by sentence, toward the center of everything that has ever been written about products like yours.
In most parts of life, landing in the middle is safe. In marketing, the middle is a death sentence. Average is not a small tax you pay for convenience. Average is invisible. If your message sits in the dead center of your category, buyers have no way to tell you apart from the four other startups on their shortlist, and a prospect who cannot tell you apart will default to the cheapest option or the one they already know. Being forgettable is not a minor cosmetic problem. It is the whole problem.
Where the Mehdian Does the Most Damage
AI is genuinely useful for plenty of marketing work. It can spin up a hundred subject lines, tighten a messy brief, summarize a call in seconds. Use it for that. Please.
The Mehdian does its real damage in the two places that are supposed to make you different: your positioning and your strategy. Those are not volume problems you solve by generating more. They are judgment problems you solve by choosing.
Positioning is the deliberate decision to stand somewhere specific and give up everywhere else. It only works because of what it excludes. A model cannot exclude anything. It is trained to cover the whole distribution, to hedge toward the safe center, to sand off the one sharp edge that would have made you memorable. So it writes positioning that offends no one and moves no one. It writes a strategy that reads like a summary of every strategy, because that is literally what it is. This is the same reason AI slop feels so lifeless once you learn what taste actually means: the machine optimizes for the average, and taste is the refusal to accept it.
The Tell
You already know if this happened to you, because the tell is a quiet one.
Your messaging reads fine when you proofread it and does absolutely nothing when it ships. Nobody argues with it. Nobody repeats it. Nobody quotes it back to you. Three weeks after launch you cannot find a single customer who can describe what you do in their own words. That is the Mehdian. It does not fail loudly with a typo or a broken link. It fails silently, by refusing to land.
The Way Off the Median
The way off the median is not a better prompt. It is a human who is willing to make a call the machine never will.
The moves that make a brand distinct are the low-probability ones. The sharp claim. The narrow audience you choose on purpose. The thing everyone in your category is too cautious to say out loud. AI is built to avoid exactly those, because they are improbable by definition, and improbable is the one thing a probability engine is designed to skip. Somebody has to decide that the brand is going to plant a flag on one specific hill and defend it while everyone else spreads themselves thin. That decision is what a seasoned marketing leader is for.
It is also why the fix for bland AI output is almost never more output. When founders feel their marketing is not working, the instinct is to make more of it. Usually the real issue is not a shortage of hands or content. It is a shortage of senior judgment about what to say and what to give up. That is the difference between a marketing problem and a marketing leadership problem, and the Mehdian is what a leadership gap looks like once AI fills the vacuum.
At Field Vision we call the goal Growth Without Guesswork, and here is the irony. AI gets sold as the end of guesswork, but for positioning and strategy it quietly smuggles guesswork back in. It guesses the average and hands it to you with total confidence and perfect grammar. The job of a real marketing leader is to replace that confident average with a deliberate choice.
What a Decade of Not Being Average Taught Me
I have spent more than ten years making these calls in rooms where being average was not an option.
Positioning Twitch back when “watching other people play video games” sounded ridiculous to every adult in the building. Launching products at Amazon, Pandora, and Hard Rock where a dozen competitors were all saying the same safe thing, and the only way through was to say the thing they would not. None of that came from the middle of the distribution. All of it came from choosing a point of view and committing to it while it was still uncomfortable. Distinct brand positioning has never been a thing you can average your way into.
That is exactly why we built the Mehdian as its own idea, and The Mehdian Check as a way to put your AI-written marketing under a trained eye. You bring the positioning, messaging, or strategy a model helped you write, and we mark every place it settled for average and hand you the specific moves that make it distinct.
What To Do About It
- Use AI for volume, not for verdicts. Drafts, summaries, variations: go for it. Positioning and strategy: not without a human making the final call.
- Treat “sounds fine, does nothing” as a symptom, not a style. It usually means your message landed on the median.
- Remember that the cure for average is not more content. It is a sharper choice, made by someone who has made that kind of choice before.
- Read your category’s homepages side by side. If you blend in, you have a Mehdian problem, and it is quietly costing you every visitor who cannot tell you apart.
If AI wrote your marketing, it wrote you into the middle. Run the Mehdian Check and we will show you exactly where you landed on the median, and how to get off it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Mehdian?
The Mehdian is the average, forgettable result you get when AI writes your marketing strategy or positioning. It is a portmanteau of “meh” and “median.” Because a language model is built to predict the most probable next word, and the most probable phrasing is the most common one, AI pulls your marketing toward the statistical middle of everything ever written about products like yours. That middle reads as generic and invisible.
Why does AI produce average marketing?
A language model generates the most statistically probable output. The most probable phrasing is the most common phrasing, which is the one your competitors already used. So the model drags every sentence toward the center of its training data. That is average by design, and average marketing is invisible because buyers cannot tell you apart from everyone else saying the same safe thing.
Is AI bad for marketing?
No. AI is excellent for volume work: drafting, summarizing, generating variations, cleaning up briefs. It becomes a liability only when you hand it the two jobs that are supposed to make you different, positioning and strategy, because those require choosing what to give up, and a model is built to cover everything rather than commit to something.
How do I know if my positioning is generic?
The tell is quiet. Your messaging reads fine when you proofread it and does nothing when it ships. Nobody argues with it and nobody repeats it. A few weeks after launch, no customer can describe what you do in their own words. Read your category’s homepages side by side, and if you blend in, your positioning has regressed to the median.
What is the Mehdian Check?
The Mehdian Check is a Field Vision diagnostic. You bring the positioning, messaging, or strategy that AI helped you write, and Field Vision reads it against your market, marks every place it settled for average, and gives you the specific moves that make it distinct.
Suspect your marketing went Mehdian? Run the Mehdian Check and we will find where you landed on the median. Want the sharpest version of these ideas first? Read Sightlines on Substack and subscribe for the next one.