Creativity in an Age of AI

In a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg described a vision where a client comes to Meta and says "I want customers for my product," and Meta does everything else. It generates the photos and videos of those products with AI, writes the copy with AI, assembles an infinite number of ads with AI, targets those ads to people on its platforms with AI, measures which ads perform best and iterates on them with AI, and then has those customers buy the products on its platforms.

At the recently concluded Cannes International Festival of Creativity, the dominant theme was AI. One of the worries was what AI would do to creativity inside a tech infused, data driven, highly measured ecosystem dominated by Meta, Google, Amazon and others.

So it is worth turning to someone who knows the subject. Sir John Hegarty co-founded Bartle Bogle Hegarty in 1982, the agency behind brands such as Audi, Levi's and Johnnie Walker. He has won the Cannes Lions Lifetime Achievement Award, written two books on advertising and creativity, and spent a career arguing that creativity is central to business growth. Here are four of the ideas he shared, including the best definition of creativity I have heard.

AI is a collaborator, not a tool

Sir John has embraced AI. He believes it will be profound, and above all a democratizing force that lets more people make things. He suggests we should not view AI as a tool but as a collaborator that allows all of us to act as creative directors. The old division of labor between art director and copywriter gives way to a fusion of the two. The big open question, he says, is not capability but copyright: who owns the ideas and the work.

Brands are being milked, not fed

Sir John worries that many of today's brands will fail to endure, and that some are being actively destroyed. Marketers have become so data driven, and so hooked on lower funnel promotion with measurable outcomes, that brand destruction is underway. He points to Nike as one example.

Brands are not built by promotion alone. They are built by persuasion. With the exception of personal brands like influencers, very few enduring brands are built online. Direct to consumer brands that depend on metrics, measurement and narrow targeting tend to erode, because the platforms keep pushing you toward people who already buy the brand or look like those who do. That audience is too narrow, and competitive bidding for the same people makes it expensive to reach.

It is critical for a brand to become known by people who do not yet know it. That is where most growth comes from. Convincing those people is not about utility, features or performance. It is about telling a story of what the brand stands for, how it makes someone feel, and how it fits into a person's life and resonates with culture.

Today brands are being milked and not fed, with a focus on the short run. What is measurable may not be all that matters.

Smarter brands are no longer fixating only on online media. They are building experience stacks: stores, out of home, immersive media and real world moments. Out of home grew 8 percent last year.

What creativity actually is

Someone once told Sir John that the greatest art of all might be music. He thought music might be the second greatest. The greatest art, he said, is human life itself. A human life is an act of creativity. From that he draws his definition:

Creativity is an expression of self.

Listen to the most creative people and you hear the same thing: here is what I wanted to say, this is what I wanted to show, this is what I am trying to build.

He separates two kinds of creativity. Pure creativity is the spark that leads to the iPhone, creates The Simpsons, or designs the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Applied creativity is the next version of the iPhone, the next episode of The Simpsons, the staircase inside the museum. Pure creativity is the greatest wealth creator and engine of growth we have. It does not come from A/B testing, mathematics or focus groups. It feeds on curiosity, instinct, exposure to different perspectives, feelings, and things that do not compute.

This is where AI versioning sits. Generating endless variations of a theme is a smart, cost effective way to win the lower funnel sale of a brand that was built by a different kind of creativity. It is a machine producing variations through optimization and correlation. It is not the human act of self expression that builds brands in the first place. AI will unleash human creativity. It will not replace it.

Leadership takes courage

Sir John argues that too many leaders fail to lead. There is plenty of arrogance and hubris, but underneath it a lot of following: data clutching, herd behavior, buzzword bingo. Leadership is about courage. The leaders who matter step ahead, march to a different drummer, and take risks on intuition, ideas and instinct. The symbol of his agency was a black sheep, and the point was always to zig where others zag.

His advice to young people is simpler. Find and do something you love. Do not just follow the data. Play more. Play is stepping forward without the rules.