In 2008, after the recession and the digital revolution, advertising agencies were decimated. Creative work became formulaic. New platforms only provided sales leads and the overall aesthetic in advertising fell to banal levels not seen since the 1800s.
Unemployment for creatives hit 60%. Creative luddites rioted in their temples of worship: the coffee shop. But alas, the bastion of neighborhood comfort and regional originality was bulldozed by Starbucks. The true storytellers and original thinkers with their sketch pads were replaced by laptop wielding clones infiltrating pseudo-creative spaces to build digital campaigns where the main idea was subservient to the platform it was served on. Creative was dead.
Or so many feared.
When your business is wholly dependent on a sales funnel, loyalty suffers. Repeat customers repeat purchases because they trust your company. The only way to do that is to build a tribal culture around your brand. And that won’t happen if Google Analytics is your god.
Wise brands soldiered on with their brilliant ideas and recognized that good creative sells no matter what platform it is on. Good ideas came back gradually.
And now the new luddites are worried that AI will soon push them out of their dream remote jobs. Probably so. And here’s why: if AI can replace you, you probably deserve to be replaced. Why? Because a new idea–an original idea–cannot be replaced by a machine. If all you do is produce recycled ideas, well, AI can do that and provide the attributions on influences and the historical quotes to back it up, and be done before you can shout eureka.
True creatives, those who live to be original, struggle mightily with the anxiety of influence.
Creating work that has never been done requires inspiration not available in an algorithm. Cold hard data can be sifted and organized. Great ideas are much more difficult to come by. They require labor, as Flannery O’Connor said, “like giving birth to a piano, sideways.”
But hope is like 1970s fashion: it keeps coming back. Creatives are looking back to old campaigns not to copy them, but to study the process. The new sketch pad is the AI portal. Feed in snippets of curiosity and you get summations in return, summations that feed the beast of creation. A bit of history, a summary of facts, a collection of opinions. The new breed of true creatives use these to construct something completely original, something that gets far more attention than the morass of passing digital drivel.
If you have entered this brave new creative world, you will be immortalized. When the temporary success is over, your work will be saved in the cryosphere of anima AI sorts through, bits will be plucked from the digital universe, reassembled and presented as real work by those advertising hacks using AI to write ads. Your Mona Lisas will become cartoons on shopping bags, but at least you will be getting clicks.
So here’s the truth: AI will never kill true creativity. But it will scour the landfill of what’s been done to assemble ads that nobody notices.
If you want to stand out, to be an innovator not an imitator, use AI as an assistant so you have more time with your sketch pad being original. Craft ads that create culture.
Long live the brand tribe.
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