By Clare Dewhirst, Director, City Nation Place

This is the second article in a new series where our Director, Clare Dewhirst, will be drawing on countless conversations with place leaders around the world to identify emerging trends, challenges, and opportunities. 

I’m hoping that you’re not so fatigued by the number of articles out there about AI that you won’t read this one. To reassure you, I’m not planning to give you more advice on how to use AI or how to adjust your marketing strategy to ensure that your place brand still shows up in the search algorithms. As important (essential, really) as that information is, I want to share a positive perspective on why place branding teams are absolutely the right people to meet the challenge of the growth in AI head-on.

Your place brand against the machine

Misinformation is no longer just a challenge for nation brand teams. Have you come across a trend called “urban decline porn”? The BBC has reported on the growing number of deep-fake videos of city centres that portray places as neglected and crime-ridden, often stoking racist hate in the process. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, spoke at a disinformation summit just last week calling for action against the “outrage economy” that he says is “eating away at the basic bonds of trust that hold our societies together”. As the Guardian reports, research compiled by an analysis unit within the Greater London Authority has shown an increase of between 150% and 200% in online narratives describing London as particularly dangerous over the past two years. Sadiq Khan believes that London should be viewed as the canary in the mine – a warning to other cities that this trend is growing.

But this is the extreme end of reputation risk. As you may well be tired of hearing, AI is changing how people research places, whether they are looking for somewhere to live, to visit, or to invest. The result is that every destination, town, city, region, and country needs to be purposeful about ensuring that the right information reaches interested audiences – or even that your place shows up at all. We’ve always said that having a place brand strategy is important to ensure that your reputation isn’t only created by what other people say about you, and that’s even more necessary in the world of GEO and AEO.

We’ve published articles on the actions you need to take to ensure that your place shows up in the way that you would like it to, and we’ll continue to provide opportunities for places to share what they’re learning and how they’re responding. But essentially, having a shared narrative for your place that is adopted and amplified by all the important voices is the key. Having consistent, authentic messaging that the AI search bots find across trusted websites will put your place at the top of the answer engines. And this needs the kind of collaboration and orchestration that I believe only an effective place branding team can deliver.

Place branding, done by humans, earns trust and stands out from the crowd

A Pew Research study in 2025 found that 34% of adults said they were more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI, whilst 42% are equally concerned and excited. Concerns about AI are especially common in the US, Italy, Australia, Brazil, and Greece, where half of adults said they were more concerned than excited.

Similarly, back in 2024, Nielsen IQ’s research showed that consumers are quite sensitive to the authenticity of ad creatives. Consumers intuitively identified most AI-generated ad content and perceived it as less engaging, and even “high-quality” AI-generated ads “elicited weaker memory activation in the brain”.

Against a backdrop of well-documented, growing distrust of AI, human-led storytelling is non-negotiable. And done right, there is very little which is more authentically human than place branding and place marketing.

By contrast, many AI tools optimise to the average. AI-generated content might be cheaper and easier to create at scale, but it is also adding exponentially to a sea of sameness that is turning off audiences. Even without AI, advocates for place branding have always warned of the danger of ‘sameness’ in place marketing and advertising. In our Accelerator place branding training course, we share a video created by fellow trainer Mary Harris. In it, she compiles all the tourism marketing campaigns that focus on beaches and all the investment promotion campaigns that focus on tech excellence. The only remarkable thing about the video is how unremarkable the clips are when viewed in aggregate.

This is the data that AI is training from, and it is this risk of ‘sameness’ that necessitates effective, authentic place branding. To quote Talking Heads’ seminal lyric, “same as it ever was”: it’s only a real understanding of your place’s “why here” that will connect with your community, with visitors, with talent, and with investors. You need a place brand team to do the work of engaging with your place’s history, with its present, and with its hopes for the future to define that “why here” in a way that will resonate, and through resonance will be amplified to build both your online and real-world reputation.

Who’s doing it well

Just take a look at the place promotion campaigns that have gone viral and resonated with the global public over the past five years – they are all built on a human understanding of what makes their place special and how it can meet people’s needs. Just as one example, Iceland’s tourism advertising has consistently led with humour, empathy, and human insight. It’s organic to the Icelandic personality and provides quirky ‘solutions’ to the problems that their audience faces – whether that’s scream therapy during lockdown or getting a horse to draft your out-of-office so you can truly switch off on holiday. A quick look at our Hall of Fame will highlight a number of other great place branding, place marketing, and place shaping case studies to see the work of teams who know their place and know what will work.

One of the clear trends we saw in the finalists for the 2025 City Nation Place Awards was the way in which place brand teams are working with local creators and creatives to amplify or build perceptions in a way that is unique to their place.

I’d like to share two examples, from two wildly different places.

Sheffield in the UK worked with local artists to create huge murals to elevate a city centre regeneration project to create a place that reflected the place brand and put it on the world stage at the same time – with one of the murals being voted second in a world street art competition. The Marketing Sheffield team also worked with local creatives to bring the “Sheffield Inspires” narrative to life in a unique way – through graphics and music that feel totally rooted in the city’s history as the home of electronic music.

The South Australian Tourism Commission developed a place brand vs a tourism marketing approach and, in the words of their winning Best Use of Design entry, “chose revolution over evolution, boldly leaving familiar assets behind to craft a design language that could only belong here”. They did that by working with local artists, designers, and photographers to bring their “Celebrating the simple pleasures” positioning to life.

Delivering the right AI solutions with passion

All of this is, of course, not to say that AI tools don’t have an important role to play in effective place branding and marketing. I don’t want to come across as a luddite who doesn’t recognise that AI tools can, for example, help place brand teams track reputation and perceptions of their place in real-time, analyse data efficiently to support strategy, or deliver your human-generated idea at scale.

But I do think that the growth of AI means that investing in a long-term approach to owning and managing your place reputation is more important than ever and that place branding teams already have the right skills to navigate the challenges. When we launched City Nation Place back in 2015, we ran a poll that asked whether diplomacy or creativity was the most important attribute of a great place brand team, and the response was resolutely 50/50. Place branding teams build the collaboration and motivate the stakeholders to give you the loudest voice. They understand the essence of your place and create the narrative that gives you the point of difference in a world of AI-generated sameness.

Who would you rather have stewarding your nation, region, or city’s reputation – big tech and the algorithms or people who are so passionate about the places they work for that they voluntarily wear merchandise on Zoom calls when I speak to them?