When AI marketing goes wrong, and what your clinic can learn from it

It is nine in the evening. The clinic has been closed for three hours, and you are sitting with the clinic's Facebook page in front of you, because a post needs to go up tomorrow and once again it is you who has to think of something to write. In your inbox there is an offer from an agency: campaigns, images and copy at a price lower than you had expected. The price is low because most of it is made with AI. And somewhere at the back of your mind sits the thought many clinic owners have had over the past few years: "Couldn't I just let ChatGPT do my marketing?"

You could. The tools are cheap and better than their reputation. Some of the world's biggest brands have thought exactly the same, with budgets and agencies your clinic will never come close to. And it still went wrong for them, in a way that hits a clinic with eight employees far harder than a global brand. I have watched this go wrong several times now. Let me show you three examples. Afterwards you get the part that matters most: why your clinic has the one thing the big brands could not buy, and how that makes your marketing cheaper and more effective than a post about your new scanner or yet another price offer that promises everything at half the cost.

In June this year the Swedish clothing brand Filippa K put a new spring and summer campaign on Instagram. The images were not photographed. They were generated by AI through an agency, and they looked photorealistic. Clean, muted, exactly the Nordic mood the brand has built its name on. It did not take long before people in the comments started to recognise something. The images looked almost identical to real photographers' work for competing brands. The accusations of plagiarism poured in, and within a short time Filippa K pulled not only the images that were criticised, but the whole campaign. Their head of PR said they were taking the matter very seriously.

Notice what actually happened there. The technology did not fail. The images were technically beautiful. What went wrong was that Filippa K had removed the layer of authenticity that makes a brand a brand. The AI had not created anything. It had reused something other people had created, and it hit their credibility in exactly the place a fashion brand is most vulnerable: its eye for aesthetics, its style, its claim to have made its own unique product. I am telling you this because it is a warning worth taking seriously if you run a clinic and are thinking about the AI shortcut.

It is rarely the technology that topples a brand

Filippa K is not alone. In the summer of 2024 Toys R Us released an ad film made with OpenAI's video tool Sora. It showed the brand's late founder as a boy, dreaming the brand into being. Ad people, film directors and artists tore it apart in no time. The characters changed appearance along the way, and everyone could sense how the faces felt somehow uncanny, as if the expression were human but not quite. Measurements of how people felt about the company (yes, they actually spend money measuring that) fell from around 3% who were negative towards them before the campaign to more than 50% negative when the film came out. People called it soulless.

A few months later Coca-Cola did something similar with their Christmas ad. They recreated the classic film with the red trucks in the snow, this time with AI instead of real actors and real trucks. The original film from 1995 was something people had an emotional relationship with. The new one was called empty and without the warmth that is the whole point of a Christmas ad like the ones Coca-Cola makes. Coca-Cola has money and skills enough to make anything they set their mind to. So it was neither ability nor resources that were missing. It was the decision to let a machine make what people used to make, and the audience felt the difference straight away. It gave them neither good publicity nor higher profit.

Even banks run into this. In the spring Jyske Bank was criticised for an ad film that looked strikingly like a campaign a Norwegian bank had run the year before. Here it was (reportedly) not even AI behind it, but the copy mechanism was the same: a creative idea borrowed from another brand rather than spending the time and resources to build it from within. The agency behind it denied it was a deliberate copy and called it an unfortunate coincidence. That may well be true. But the interesting thing is that the audience gave that explanation no chance. The moment a brand looks like another one, the one thing a brand cannot do without disappears: the feeling of being real, and with it the trust.

There is a pattern here worth paying close attention to. When a brand or its PR agency takes a shortcut, the AI shortcut or the copy shortcut, it hits credibility hard. Because the audience needs to be able to feel the human behind it.

Why this hits clinics harder than others

You may be sitting there thinking this is about global brands with million-kroner budgets, and that it has nothing to do with your clinic. That is the thought I would like to challenge you on.

Trust is your most important currency. A patient chooses a clinic with her feelings, long before she sees a price. She looks at your images, your films, your words, and she asks herself one single question, usually without putting it into words: "Do I feel safe here?" That safety does not come (only) from a nice picture. It comes from the sense that there are real people behind the picture. A dentist with a real face. A dental assistant laughing at something. A mood in the room that is not staged, but simply the way it actually is. Authentic.

That is exactly where AI and copies cannot keep up. A machine can make an image of a clinic. But it cannot make your clinic. It can generate a smile. It cannot generate the smile your patient meets when she sits down in the chair at your place.

And here is what I would like you to hold on to: what looks like your limitation, that you are a small clinic with real people and not an agency with unlimited production capacity, is actually the one thing nobody can copy. The big brands can buy everything except authenticity. You already have it. It is present in your clinic every single day, and that is what builds trust.

What this means for your marketing

I have watched clinics spend a lot of money on material that could have been taken anywhere in the world. Polished stock photos of models who have never set foot in the clinic. Copy that sounds as if it were written by someone who has never met a patient. Video with beautiful images but generic content that reflects the dentist's wishes rather than the patient's needs. It is rarely cheap, and it does not work, because it says nothing about you.

The opposite costs less and means more. A real picture of your clinic, with your staff, beats a perfect AI-generated image every time, because it is true. A short film where you say something that speaks to the patient's feelings, and that you actually mean, beats a polished ad, because the patient can feel you.

Notice too what this means for the two most common recipes in clinic marketing. The offer on teeth whitening, free check-ups and a gift card for the bakery on the corner can be copied by any competitor tomorrow, and it attracts patients who shop on price. Not the good patients you want to keep. The post about the new scanner tells the patient what you have bought, not who she will meet. Neither of them can carry a decision that is made with the feelings. The real picture from before can, and it costs almost nothing.

None of this should be read as an argument against technology. I am a big fan of using all the digital tools that exist for what they are good at. But the day you let a machine create your mood, adjust your face and your story, you have given away the one thing you cannot get back. Filippa K could pull a campaign. But nobody, not even Filippa K, can pull back the day a patient stopped trusting that there was a human behind the polished facade.

So here is what I would like you to consider one more time. If a patient could see all the material you send out about your clinic, without seeing the name, would she be able to feel that it was you, or could it be any clinic in the country?

One last tip

If you would like a friendly reminder when I share new ideas for making the working day in the clinic lighter and calmer, sign up to the blog below. It costs you nothing, and I will send you a link when there is something new (1-4 times a month).

Sign up for free

Thank you for reading.

With collegial regards,

Jesper Hatt DDS

P: +41 78 268 0078

Mail@HattConsulting.com

Sources

Filippa K Pauses AI-Generated Campaign After Plagiarism Accusations, Sweden Herald, 16 June 2026. https://swedenherald.com/article/filippa-k-pauses-ai-campaign-after-plagiarism-accusations

The Toys 'R' Us AI-Generated Ad Controversy, Explained, Forbes, 26 June 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/06/26/the-toys-r-us-ai-generated-ad-controversy-explained/

Toys "R" Us sees sentiments plummet over 'soulless' AI-generated ad, Marketing-Interactive. https://www.marketing-interactive.com/toys-r-us-sora-ai-sentiments-plummet

Coca-Cola's AI-Generated Ad Controversy, Explained, Forbes, 16 November 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/11/16/coca-colas-ai-generated-ad-controversy-explained/

Coca-Cola causes controversy with AI-generated ad, NBC News, 18 November 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/coca-cola-causes-controversy-ai-made-ad-rcna180665

Jyske Bank campaign criticised for resembling ad from Norwegian bank, Dansk Markedsforing, March 2026. https://markedsforing.dk/artikler/nyheder/jyske-bank-kampagne-faar-kritik-for-at-ligne-reklame-fra-norsk-bank/