The pursuit of creative excellence in the AI era

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has pushed creativity towards a crossroads: the possibility of enhancing the creative process, while also raising existential questions about the essence of originality, taste, storytelling, and the very shape of the industry itself.

While fears around AI homogenising creative content persist, many industry leaders see Gen AI as an amplifier of human ingenuity, not a substitute. As Peter Gasston, innovation lead at VCCP and innovation director at its AI agency, faith, puts it: “The idea has still got to stand on its own. AI is not going to give you a creative idea – only a human can do that.”

AI serves as a tool to rapidly visualise and refine human-derived concepts, like VCCP’s campaigns for Virgin Media O2 featuring a hang-gliding goat and a walrus in a speedboat.

“When you take ideas to the client with a Gen AI illustration...you can actually show them what you want the ad to feel like,” Gasston says.

These campaigns ultimately used traditional methods like CGI – itself an emergent technology two decades ago – but benefited from the addition of AI in pre-production stages.

Similarly, VCCP has used AI to proliferate the use of CGI assets with the creation of O2’s 'Bubl Generator'. By leveraging an AI model of the mascot character, the brand overcame cost and logistical barriers of adapting its high-quality CGI to create more reactive social media content. The result was a more agile creative process that didn’t replace human artistry but augmented its responsiveness and effectiveness.

Hyper-personalisation in a homogenised world

Phil Warfield, equity marketing director at Cadbury, worked with VCCP to mass-produce personalised retro posters for consumers during the brand's 200th anniversary campaign, My Cadbury Era.

“We were looking back at Cadbury’s heritage, but we wanted to play forward from a technology point of view,” says Warfield. With over 75,000 posters produced and a 45 per cent opt-in rate for customer data, the campaign exemplified how AI can deliver personal value to consumers in ways that were previously logistically or financially prohibitive.

The numbers are one thing, says Warfield, but anecdotally, the amount of posters being sent around by friends and family, across different organisations, told him this was a real example of getting the idea right. However, Warfield points out that AI worked alongside manual checks to ensure accuracy in representing diversity.

“AI is a tool in our toolbox, and we are choiceful as to which campaigns we use it for. Ultimately, it will never overcome the kind of human-to-human nature of the creative development process,” says Warfield, who believes AI tools are most transformative when they create time for deeper craftwork.

Over the last year, Coca-Cola has committed heavily to adopting the use of AI as an engagement tool for consumers, while supplementing its personalisation strategy too.

For Christmas 2023, the company used AI which would allow consumers to send Christmas cards to loved ones featuring the brand's owned IP such as its polar bears and iconic glass bottle design. The initiative proved so popular that it has taken the use of the technology even further this year, using Gen AI to recreate its much-loved 'Holidays' campaign.

Supplemental activity also allows consumers to talk to an AI Santa and create their own snow globe on their mobile devices through a QR code, and also take part in their ‘Shadow’ experience - a technology that will allow users to walk next to the red billboard only for the words: ‘Needs more Santa's' to appear before their shadow begins to resemble the silhouette of Santa Clause. 

“The aspect is, how can we keep redesigning and architecting these new experiences so that we can invite and have more consumers to really participate with us?" explains Islam ElDessouky, global VP of creative strategy and content for The Coca-Cola Company.

“Mock-ups in minutes”

As Ben Shaw, chief strategy officer at MullenLowe, says: “Every use case of AI I’ve seen so far gets you to an expected place quicker than any human can get to. For now, that speeds up the creative process and provides a platform for us to get to something new, different and novel. However, this is the worst AI is ever going to be, and I’m sure it will be able to replicate the creativity of humans in the next few years.”

Already, he points out, there is a greater weight of client expectation for an additional level of crafted final output, which can be expensive to achieve to the untrained eye. Meanwhile, marketers are “expecting things quicker now as they know we have access to tools that make mock-ups in minutes”.

The challenge for marketers is ensuring AI enables quality output that resonates with audiences, rather than churning out soulless, repetitive work. Though Shaw is quick to point out there is already a plethora of this delivered by human hands: “When 99 per cent of advertising is already boring, intrusive and lazy, then it already isn’t meeting the storytelling and craft demands of humans for them to consume it. Every car ad with winding roads, every vodka campaign about self-expression, every telecom ad with a new phone and a monthly price. This is all commoditised creativity already, and most of us will never even know if it’s made by AI or not.”

“AI can’t give you good taste”

The rise of Gen AI use in creativity also shifts the focus from technical skill to the more elusive attribute of taste – something that AI cannot provide, as designer and writer Elizabeth Goodspeed points out: “Taste is what enables designers to navigate the vast sea of possibilities that technology and global connectivity afford, and to then select and combine these elements in ways that, ideally, result in interesting, unique work.”

In essence, creatives must move beyond using AI to produce attractive visuals to curating and crafting work that communicates emotion, tells a story, and stands out amid the "sea of sameness."

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Mark Eaves, founder of The Brandtech Group’s Gravity Road, who argues that one of AI’s most profound impacts is its potential to democratise creativity, empowering individual creators and small brands to produce professional-grade work without prohibitive costs.

Gravity Road’s Hotel Chocolat TV campaign harnessed Gen AI to craft a fantastical world that resonated emotionally with audiences: System1 ranked it the 8th most creatively effective piece of film across the UK in 2023. It was the only one of the top 10 most effective ads of 2023 that led with Gen AI in its production.

“The continued sales-driving effectiveness it’s delivered means it’s still running on air, and showing no signs of wear-out,” says Eaves. “This is not niche experimental stuff posted on LinkedIn to look clever. This is mainstream, business-growth-driving output at the centre of a brand’s campaign.”

Putting original human thinking at the heart of creative processes, work like this represents a whole world of production opportunity that was previously out of reach for smaller brands. It’s a new flavour of the same democratisation that search and social delivered, says Eaves.

And for many creatives, AI opens doors to disciplines they previously couldn’t explore. A photographer might now venture into filmmaking, while an illustrator could experiment with immersive world-building. This cross-pollination of skills, fuelled by AI, and informed by taste, is poised to stretch the horizons of human creativity, enabling more people to realise their storytelling ambitions.

Consumer insight x AI = meaningful storytelling

Mays Elansari, most recently regional brand marketing director for Subway, says Gen AI is most commonly being used among marketers to drive efficiencies, picking off the low-hanging fruit in terms of automation of digital assets like resizing and price-point updates. But where creativity is concerned, Gen AI should be used as a co-pilot to help amplify and support storytelling.

“The best briefs always tend to be rooted to a consumer insight. And I think that's where meaningful creative comes out. That's where you can find the sweet spot, the opportunity, from an AI perspective, for agencies to delve into,” she explains.

While AI can democratise production for smaller brands, it can also raise the bar for what constitutes standout work. Elansari points to Doritos’ AI-driven crunch-cancellation campaign, a project which cheekily made the corn triangles into “the world’s first AI-augmented snack”.

In a few clicks, it allowed PC gamers to download bespoke software that listened for Doritos crunches from other gamers – and cancelled them out in real time. The AI tech was tested on 5,000 Doritos crunch noises so it could separate the audio of someone’s voice from the specific crunch of a Dorito, addressing a common annoyance among gamers, and tapping into a cultural moment around misophonia.

The campaign generated 1.8 million site visits, and led to a 76 per cent brand lift, winning two silver and one bronze Cannes Lion for Doritos ‘Silent’, proving that when AI aligns with consumer insights, it can create memorable experiences.

Matt Watson, executive creative director for Europe at PepsiCo’s in-house agency Sips & Bites, says: “It's using new technologies like AI, but it's based on a fairly simple insight. When it comes to it, if you understand that niche, you understand that human, you understand what problem you're trying to solve, it all falls in line quite easily. By silencing one of our biggest assets, we made it even louder.”

A growing sphere of possibility

The creative opportunities from AI are now endless, and becoming more so by the day, says Shannon Kalkstein, former global head of Unilever’s in-house agency U-Studio, which works with The Brandtech Group’s Gen AI marketing platform Pencil.

“There is constant innovation and improvement in Gen AI. What looked good six months ago, we would certainly look at it today and say we could do way better,” says Kalkstein.

For example, she explains that where liquid shoots used to be “a hugely expensive production,” requiring specialised photography and an array of equipment, “we can now iterate that using AI really quickly.”

Yet Kalkstein points to limitations in the technology when it comes to rendering humans “in a reliable way,” and of course, as AI’s sphere of possibility grows, so do ethical considerations and philosophical questions about authenticity and connection.

“Every company is going to have their own feelings about synthetic-generated humans, but the technology is changing all the time,” says Kalkstein, pointing to the contrary positions taken by Mango and Dove.

While Mango is eliminating some human models and using AI-generated avatars to create campaigns more quickly, Dove refuses to use AI-generated images of people, staying true to its ‘Real Beauty’ values of authenticity. Many believe adland faces a critical responsibility to balance innovation with transparency, particularly when it comes to disclosing AI usage: this is not merely a legal issue but one of consumer trust and brand integrity.

Meanwhile, as Kalkstein explains, agencies must adapt to changing dynamics as teams are being restructured to balance traditional design skills with the new demands of AI integration. As the world’s biggest brands rush to invest in building their own datasets and training models on their own unique proprietary content, roles like prompt engineers are becoming essential, blending creative intuition with technical expertise. The remuneration model for agencies is also evolving; moving from asset-based pricing to value-based payment, as AI enables vast quantities of content production.

It’s apparent that the advertising industry happened to be a very good first-use case for Gen AI, explains Eaves, who predicts that the majority of marketing content is going to become machine-generated, because the majority of it is derivative assets.

“If you’re in the quantity game, rather than the quality game, it’s a firestorm unless you’ve designed your operation around it,” he says. “Because if you do the everyday in manual ways, then Gen AI will beat you to the line on every commercial and logistical measure. What this leaves is an open space for those original moments of eye-popping unexpectedness that give brands fresh cultural and commercial energy. And that is something to be very optimistic about.”