Here I am again. Scrolling my feed, looking for inspiration to write this.
And, what do I see?
Four AI-Generated explainer videos, six carousel posts and two near-identical “thought leadership” essays about agentic AI.
None of it is memorable.
This is the world we have built.
The barriers to entry for content creation have dropped. Shot on iPhone, low-cost SaaS editing tools and GenAI content production.
The good news: Talented people can bring their wonderful and crazy ideas to life.
The bad news: We now live in a world of endless hours of algorithmic content, across every format, every platform, every vertical.
Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez is banking on creators
The big-shot creative director of the past has already had to cede so much control to “those bloody influencers.” Unilever is the loudest example of an advertiser admitting the old model is broken. CEO Fernando Fernandez has moved 50% of the budget into social and partners with 300,000 creators globally. He's right that broadcast no longer cuts through but in solving the distribution problem, have we created a saturation problem?
But this can all change. In this world of infinite content, so many of these brilliant ideas don’t cut through. They get lost in the noise.
Now is the time for the creative director to seize back the power. If they can walk the tightrope between technological brilliance and human ingenuity, they deliver creative intelligence in a way that has never been seen before.
TLDR: In a world where anything can be made, we’ve got to start asking ourselves firstly, “should it be made?” and secondly, “who are we making this for?”
How do we do this? We need to redefine the art of building a creative brief.
Let's start with what creativity actually is.
Creativity is about finding something new that resonates and bringing it to life in a new way that makes a group of people feel something. It’s about deviating from the mean.
The best creative work cuts through because it does something unexpected, something that surprises people into paying attention.
This is the literal antithesis of what AI does naturally. AI is extraordinarily good at pattern recognition, at reordering what already exists, at producing work that is competent, coherent, and average.
Too much creative work misses the mark because people set off in the wrong direction.
The team runs hard with a vague sense of the audience, a generic set of brand guidelines, and a mood board pulled together in an afternoon. Great for a zeitgeist idea that is celebrated at awards ceremonies, but in reality, it’s likely going to be ignored by the people it was supposed to move.
Ironically, we’ve never had better tools to fix this.
AI is already changing the creative process but the industry has largely deployed it at the wrong end. Most out there are using it to generate faster, to produce more, to execute at scale. What we should be doing is using it upstream, to dramatically amplify the role of planning and strategy.
Because AI is genuinely, undeniably extraordinary at one thing: synthesising vast amounts of data and finding the signal amongst the noise.
The best AI-native agencies are already doing this. They are feeding enormous quantities of behavioural data and psychographic data into custom software and building context engines that power what I'd call creative intelligence. These platforms infer wants, motivations, objections and desires of different audience clusters, their use of language, the content they actually engage with, the cultural references that land and the ones that don't.
These same creative intelligence tools can, and should, go further - enriching customer data, be it weekly customer interviews, monthly brand surveys, brand immersion sessions, CRM data, sales data to build robust, three dimensional personas.
We need to be arming our creatives with rich, dynamic maps of how real groups of people think and feel, built from real data. Maps that allow them to find the meaningful truth that speaks directly to the heart of specific subsets of the audience.
With the right brief, creatives are empowered.
I’ve seen it already. They have a platform to springboard off from. For the first time ever, they can begin to bring ideas to life through the eyes of the people they are trying to reach.
Oh, and it turns out work made for real people, by real people, tends to reach real people.
In a world where anything can be made, you have to start giving considerably more thought to the question of whether it should be made. The ability to produce has outpaced the ability to think. A context laden brief does the heavy lifting and gives more space so we can slow down and think. Original thinking ftw.
Walk the tightrope between AI-powered intelligence and human creative instinct, and I believe we unlock a genuinely new era. Not more content. Better content & beautifully crafted.
To all the creatives out there. Now is the time to seize back control.
What Does This Mean for Marketers?
If you are a CMO, look at where your AI budget is being spent. If it is mostly going on execution tools such as image generators, copy generators, video tools, ad variant engines you are doing the loud, obvious version of AI adoption. It feels productive. It looks good in the quarterly review. It is almost certainly costing you cut-through.
The quieter, harder, more valuable move is to spend at least half of your AI investment upstream. On data infrastructure. On audience intelligence. On the context engines that turn briefs from a-mood-board-pulled-in-an-afternoon into a real-time map of who you're actually trying to move.
If you are a creative, this is your moment. Ask for the brief you've always wanted. Push back when the audience definition is thin. Refuse to start work without an evidence base. The old line was that you should be sceptical of strategists. The new line is that you should be furious when nobody has done the strategy at all.
And if you are running an agency, the most important question to ask in 2026 is not "how fast can we make this?" It's: "do we actually know who we are making this for?"
In a world where anything can be made, the only question worth asking before you start is whether it should be.
The ability to produce has outpaced the ability to think.
The agencies and brands that win the next decade will be the ones who learn to point AI at the thing it is actually good for.
Original thinking, for the win.
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