Exploring New Avenues of Creativity in the Age of AI

Kass Sells

Global Executive leading Integrated Communications, Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising and Media teams to positive impacts and strong business results.

Published Jul 8, 2024

Q1: Kass Sells, CEO of International, WE Communications: With AI use on the rise in comms, marketing and advertising, how should we be thinking about AI and creativity?

Daniel Blank, EMEA Head of Integrated Marketing, WE Communications: The short answer is that AI turbocharges our creativity in multiple ways, and also challenges us to never again accept an idea that is merely “good.”

One of the best ways that we can use AI in our work as marketers and communicators is to bring our creative ideas to life faster. When it comes to ideation for campaigns, image-generating AI can help us get ideas out of our head, visualize them on-screen, tweak and improve them. We can share them with colleagues to get their input much faster than if we were to try to illustrate it or storyboard it manually ourselves or brief a designer to do so.

This is already proving to be a huge time-saver, helping quickly develop the look and feel in the early stages of campaign development, before bringing in real artists, illustrators and designers to do the detailed work. We still need these people.

For marketers and communicators, that means we can get through some of the mundane, more iterative development stages faster. For creatives, it means not having to throw out so many first drafts, and for clients it means more time can be spent on getting the right creative and strategy in place for a successful rollout. We do, however, need to be deliberate in treating it as a tool, not as co-intelligence.

Another benefit of bringing in AI at these early stages of ideation is the potential to open up the breadth of creative suggestions. Huddling with my creative colleagues to come up with ideas for an exciting new remit is one of my favourite parts of the creative process — and that will remain — but when we bounce our ideas off AI we’re taking our thinking beyond a group of people in a meeting room to huge models of inspiration from around the world.

Q2: How can we keep the next generation of creatives open and also wise to AI’s capabilities and limitations, rather than just using generative AI to remix what has come before?

Creativity has always been remixing, taking things that have been applied elsewhere and using them in new ways or a new combination. We may think what we do is creative and what AI is doing isn’t because we see our own creativity as more organic. As Faris Yakob wrote in Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising for a Digital World, “When something is perceived as original, what we mean is that it is unexpected, novel to that person, not that it has no antecedents.”

So, when it comes to AI — or any new creative or technological development — we need to teach young creatives not to be satisfied with the first or second suggestion. We should never be satisfied with the quickest option. Challenge yourself, push your own boundaries, leave a part of yourself in your work that shows it’s had a human touch.

Part of the fear that AI has generated in creative circles is that it enables us — including people from traditionally noncreative backgrounds — to create something impressive, quickly. But to a very large degree, the internet in general has had the potential to just let you Google something that might be close enough to your creative idea for many years now, but did that make noncreative people creatives? No. With the ubiquity of AI tools, our standards to what we accept as truly creative will adapt anyway. Without the right context, twist or surprise, a simple picture that happens to be impressively beautiful will still just be read as a sterile facsimile of real creativity.

The fun, truly creative thing now might be to improve on something that’s already impressive at first glance, taking ownership of it, and creating something more meaningful or impactful than before.

Q3: As marketing and creative becomes increasingly integrated, the boundaries between data, strategy, creative and digital are blurring. How is this playing out for brands and what does it mean for the future?

I certainly agree that more integrated marketing and comms strategies is a good thing. If we’re giving proper attention to our insights and campaign data — qualitative and quantitative — we can close loops in our strategy and focus on what we know is having a real impact and driving positive engagement.

What it also means, is that brands, marketers and communicators don’t get a free pass for making wild claims. Audiences are savvier than ever, and as WE Communications Brands in Motion research shows, cynicism is surging. To overcome this skepticism, respondents say more transparency is needed, with solid data, testimonials, acknowledgments of flaws and more.

Although we might be excited about the potential of adding AI to that integration mix, research from Dentsu shows that consumers are still uneasy. Their research shows that 48% of consumers fear it will be hard to tell what’s fake and what’s real, up 13 points from last year.

Want to make your brand stand out? Follow the example of brands like Dove, which acknowledged the inevitability of AI and doubled down on its “Real Beauty” campaign, committing to real beauty standards over digital doppelgangers and only using humans in their marketing.

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Q4: At last year’s Cannes Lions, we saw several entrants (and winners) deploying AI in creative and engaging ways. A year later, how do you think we’ve progressed? Has the creative sector’s approach to AI matured?

I think what we’ve seen over the past couple of years at Cannes is recognition for deploying a fairly new tool in innovative ways. Now, with almost half of business leaders (46%) identifying marketing and communications as an opportunity for AI, it no longer feels like a tool that will make your brand or campaign stand out. That you used AI is interesting, but it no longer sets you apart.

As always, I think the best campaigns will still be the ones that identify a real issue in their sector and then take an integrated, strategic approach with an appealing, creative execution. I don’t think AI will be the centerpiece of winning campaigns. I think it will be a tool that helps us find deeper insights and pushes us to create even more impactful ideas, but it will be up to us — people — to use AI to help us be better, create better and produce better work.

Q5: How is AI shaping the future of agencies?

The availability of AI to up your research, analytics, creative and design game will have an impact on the agency world, no question. Mostly in enabling smaller agencies to balance out the absence of a fully staffed design team or an in-house analyst, by leaning on AI tools to at least get them on par. And it has a huge potential, especially in the creative field to make good campaigns great, and great ones outstanding. But their success in making their clients buy into their idea will still be dependent on the people that represent and present that idea.

When a client praises standout work, they want to know they’re praising a person or a team and that they’ll get credit for it. When they want us to tweak the visuals, or the copy, or add a social component to the strategy, they want to speak to an expert from such a field, not a general prompt engineer.

In short, the agency model is built on delivering sound, well-reasoned counsel, on groundbreaking ideas and creativity, and, particularly with communications, on engaging your audience at a very human level. AI can play a role in this, but it would be foolish to treat AI as an agency autopilot.

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