Bubble Bursting AI Prompts: Ruairi Curran On Fuelling His Mind With Playfulness

When I first trained as a planner, I was seduced by the romance of it all – having come straight from a summer labouring on building sites, I felt I could represent the consumer’s voice as well as anyone else in the department, and was pretty pleased with myself for finding a career that seemed to want me to flaneur about town, sit in cafés and make observations on people in a little moleskine.

My head of planning, Russ Lidstone, was so wary of the ‘bubble effect’ of our agency’s marbled Knightsbridge office overlooking Hyde Park, he would take Creative teams all the way to Newport to brief them on a Tesco campaign inside a Tesco store surrounded by Tesco consumers.  He set up an ethnographic research programme that ensured everyone in the Planning department spent two days living alongside households of different shapes and sizes across the country, from Birkenhead to Brighton - that was the lore: escape the ivory tower, get into the real world, soak it all in.

I still value these sources of insight and inspiration; walks, overheard conversations on trains, stand-up shows, scrolling TikTok – but my experience of today’s world of same-day home-delivery, self-checkout tills and tap-and-go is that those real, messy, unfiltered encounters are rarer than ever. And in an era of short turnaround strategy sprints, there’s no time for five-hour ethnographies.

As much as I miss that culture of appreciation for audience understanding, I’m over it because I’m finding satisfaction in much faster, more direct and targeted ways thanks to AI.

Although I still eavesdrop on train conversations whenever I can (no algorithm beats that), my Brain Food today isn’t really gallery visits or podcasts - it’s what I feed the machine, and what it feeds back to me. With the right prompts, I can now replicate the spirit of ethnographic research, but instantly, scalably, and with more range than I could ever achieve in person. It’s not a replacement for lived reality, but it’s a powerful stand-in when the old rituals no longer fit the pace of the job.

One of my favourite examples is taking a tweet I saw, in which someone described a Diet Coke as a “fridge cigarette” – a deadpan, brutally accurate metaphor that nailed the cultural subtext, capturing how the brand offers not just refreshment, but identity, relief, habit – and turning it into a prompt:

“Summarise [brand] in a single, sharp cultural analogy, like: ‘Diet Coke = a fridge cigarette.’

It should be:

– Funny (or dark-funny)

– Culturally literate

– Emotionally true

– Rooted in lived behaviour

The goal: a knowing, screenshot-worthy line that makes people say, ‘That’s so true it hurts.’

Keep it under 15 words. Make it tweetable. Make it brutal.”

Some examples of the kind of response you get from this prompt;

·       Oatly = The protest sign in your fridge

·       Stanley Cup = Hydration as identity

·       Peloton = Gym class as Instagram story

·       And my favourite: Calm app = A panic button with whale sounds.

It’s not as romantic as conducting creative briefings in the aisles of the Newport Tesco, but it’s more honest to the way we need to work now.

For strategist’s that want to ‘pop the bubble’, AI is the fastest pin we’ve ever had.

Ruairi Curran is executive strategy director at Gravity Road