Has content been reduced to just a marketing asset or can I tell you a story?

My earliest memory with a creator was approximately 30 years ago. The creator was my grandmother and I was her audience. I was a troubled sleeper and her antidote was to invent fantastical and bizarre tales where ‘scientist dinosaurs’ were trying to save their species. I don’t know if she was trying to calm me but what she did was spark my imagination for the rest of my life.

This style of personal storytelling shaped my life choices. Working with creatives to produce content to make you feel something. I found a home in digital marketing.

I have loved being in this business for over 15 years, working with publishers and IP owners building their branded content muscle and cementing their relationships with advertisers.

But when you try to convince an advertiser to spend their budget on storytelling versus a direct sell, I won't lie, it’s a challenge! You can have the best of intentions but if you spend all your creative expertise on process alone the campaign will always suffer.

During my time at VICE, I was deeply immersed in the production of a high value branded series for a luxury car brand. Tight deadlines, a leaner budget than the brief deserved, alongside a client who needed to feel like they were getting more than they were paying for. You get the vibe. It was a compelling concept spotlighting upcoming voices in fashion, art and culture; talent you would not ordinarily associate with the brand. We gave them the opportunity to build relevance with a new aspirational generation.

What we didn't have on the project was time. The brief kept expanding, the stakeholders kept multiplying, and by the time the creative actually got made, five rounds of revision had knocked every interesting edge off it. What came out the other end wasn't bad, it just wasn't what we set out to make. The idea had been diluted down by the bloated process that so many campaigns suffer from. If only we had AI at the time!

Everyone is busy panicking about whether or not AI will replace creatives instead of defining what we want AI to help us with in the creative process. My grandmother didn't need a book, let alone a machine to move me and make me think. Do we need AI to be the new storytellers? 

For me the real question is simpler, and more urgent:

What are you using AI for? 

If you use it to outsource execution I understand that when volume and scale are the goal. Handing the punitive tasks to a tool so skilled people can spend their time on skilled things, great. 

Where it becomes problematic is when we use it to outsource judgement.

Sure, if you sit down in a GCSE exam with just a pen and a prayer, the ability to think fast still matters. But that is not real life. Real life is a keyboard, a browser, and a model that has read more than you ever will.

Katherine Nathan is a storyteller, creator and coach. I met her while working at BBC Studios and her very personal style of imparting insights through conversation and storytelling had me magnetised once again.

“Women who look and sound like you rarely get to go up and speak on that stage. You owe it to them to be great when you speak. It will secure an opportunity for them in the future” she said while coaching me to speak at an IAB event in 2025.

She’s been running RATCHET, a creative production company, since 2015. They’ve been using AI tools long before it was even in commercial consideration. Starting with beta versions five years ago this has evolved into more sophisticated models tailored to specific needs. In this process she's had to think carefully about what to hand over and what to hold on to.

The answer she's landed on is structural. AI runs through the end to end operation at RATCHET. Not as a replacement for the team, but as the infrastructure underneath them. The grunt tasks that nobody with real craft wants to spend their days on — rotoscoping, accounting, data management, audio cleanup — those are handled. What that creates is time. Thinking time. Conversation time. Time with the client. The kind of time that can't always be quantified but is the actual source of good stories.

"It frees creatives up to do what they're actually brilliant at," she says. "Turning the human experience into content that connects with audiences.”

But here's the part worth sitting with. When her edit and graphics teams started experimenting with the early tools, they had something that a lot of teams rushing to adopt AI right now don't. Their experience and years of developing their skills helped them call bullshit on AI manufactured creativity. The artefacts. The clichés. The things that look fine on a quick scroll but fall apart under any kind of professional scrutiny.

Katherine is quick to call out a recent example. RATCHET uses AI-generated voices in their production workflow. Not as the final output but as guide tracks. Temporary placeholders that let an edit take shape before a real performer comes in. Anyone who has sat in an edit suite watching that switch happen knows the difference. The room changes, the pacing shifts, you find things you didn't know were there. An AI voice holds a space. A human performance transforms the work. And importantly we support talent development in the creative industry.

If I had put this article into Claude, I think you guys would have called me out; as an audience we’re getting attuned to inauthenticity quicker than you think!

So here’s a challenge to your team or client: Can they articulate specifically, not vaguely, what they think is wrong with an AI generated piece of content?  Not just "it feels a bit off."

If they can't, they are not ready to handle creative decision making or indeed train AI to do anything, because they won't know how to engineer ‘good.’ And that is the difference between a team making content vs one telling great stories that tap into the human experience.

Not the paralysing, neurotic, nothing-ever-ships variety. Not the person who rewrites the same email fourteen times and misses the deadline entirely. The productive kind. The kind that is a genuine, learnable discipline. And I am going to argue that every single one of us needs to develop it, starting now.

What does this mean for Marketers?

For anyone running a creative team or commissioning work right now: you don't have to resist AI, but you do have to develop the talent and expertise that makes it useful. The businesses winning are using it to create more space for thinking, for client relationship building, and for creative conversation. Not less.

In Asimov's Liar!, a robot trained never to harm a human ends up causing catastrophic damage by telling everyone exactly what they want to hear. Optimised to satisfy. Architecturally inclined toward agreement.

If we stop interrogating ideas and refining content because a large language model always tells us it's fine, we don't just lose craft, we lose the very human curiosity that made us want to tell stories in the first place.

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