AI Resurgence: Why Is Marketing Creativity in the Crosshairs?
Are you thinking about integrating AI tools into your marketing strategies? Here are 3 things you need to do beforehand!
Jeff Charney, CEO of MKHSTRY.AI highlights creativity’s role in successful marketing campaigns. He advocates AI as a solution and ally to the creativity crisis, fueling innovation, marketing strategies, and engaging the new generation of consumers.
Do you believe you were born to do something?
I do.
I was born to be creative.
I always knew what I wanted to do, yet some of my earliest memories are of grade-school teachers in South Carolina politely dampening my creativity. “Jeffrey, bless your heart,” they’d say in their Southern drawl. “You’re too creative. If you keep coloring outside the lines, you’ll never be successful and end up stuck here working in the textile mill for the rest of your life.”
Luckily, my parents, who were also teachers, never listened. They made me believe that creativity was my superpower.
To this day, my success can be boiled down to that one word, C-R-E-A-T-I-V-I-T-Y. It’s what powered my decades-long runs as a Fortune 500 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO); specifically leading national creative campaigns and characters that have stood the test of time, like Progressive’s ‘Flo’ and ‘Dr. Rick,’ and the ‘Aflac duck’.
Two years ago, I walked away from my career because I saw a serious problem looming. The flattening of creativity my teachers unknowingly started decades ago is now a creativity crisis.
The Creativity Crisis
Creativity is more indicative of real-world success than IQ. Yet creativity is under fire, which means our creativity crisis is a larger crisis for humankind.
In a global IBM CEO survey conducted by Fast Company, respondents selected “creativity” as the most crucial factor for future success – ahead of hard work, discipline, integrity, or vision. Yet, companies continue to diminish its value.
But this problem starts long before we enter the workforce.
A Creativity Research Journal report by Kyung Hee Lim indicates that “children have become less: emotionally expressive, energetic, talkative, humorous, imaginative, unconventional, lively, passionate, perceptive, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
Whether in children or adults, the causes are universal. Time previously spent mentally wandering and discovering new ideas is now spent staring at screens. New ideas previously celebrated by society are now bogged down by skepticism. The result? Creativity is being drained from homes, classrooms, and events.
Creativity is human ingenuity. We must find a way out so we can power the next generation of genius.
See More: How To Develop a Marketing Culture That Measures Creative Performance
Creativity and AI Calvary
I see firsthand how the creativity crisis impacts the $350B marketing industry. The rise of advertising holding companies and the CRO creates pressure to connect marketing efforts to revenue and causes teams to spend too much on analyzing data. The result is a “slide rule” mentality and analysis paralysis that prevents the industry from connecting with a new generation of customers.
As all trends seem like they are going in the wrong direction, I believe we are at a pivotal moment to turn this around because AI can help save us.
Consider how many news articles have asked, “Can a machine be trained to be creative?” “Can AI equal or beat human creativity?” Although interesting, I would argue these questions aren’t phrased the right way.
Instead, write it as a hypothesis: If a machine can be trained to be creative, then… what?
Now, let’s apply that to our hypothesis. If AI can spark new creative ideas in anyone, then… what?
We’re talking about human ingenuity becoming better, stronger, and faster—sparking ideas for the next generation of inventions, business models, and global solutions. We’re talking about the ability to make any human assisted by a machine more creative than we ever thought possible.
The scale for what we as humankind can do becomes limitless.
Why the Rise of AI Is a Must-Act Moment for Marketers?
The genie is already out of the bottle. AI is here, and there is no going back. For today’s marketers, the immediate risk is not losing their jobs to a machine but to another human who learns how to harness that machine. This is a make-history or be-history moment.
There is a sea of generative LLM AI products flooding the market right now. Though impressive, they aren’t custom-trained and don’t add substantial creative value. Whether you’re thinking about how to integrate AI tools into your business or building your own, you need a starting point. You need a way to figure out what’s adding noise versus what’s adding value.
AI NOW: 3 Things You Need to Do
1. Look beyond AI’s bad branding and believe: “Artificial” is a tough word. As marketers, if we could, we’d change it. Perhaps to Activate, Accelerate, or Augment Intelligence. But we need to get onboard. It’s easy to feel that every trend is against creativity or to stand aside and let the creativity crisis continue. But this cannot happen. If you have kids, you’ve seen the playful cat poster in The Lego Movie, calling everyone to “Believe.” And that’s what we need to do. We need to come together, move together, and believe that AI can make us the best we’ve ever been.
2. Don’t use a general tool to do a custom job: Most LLMs simply won’t work well for vertical applications. Find a model that will give you custom, proprietary output vs. the sea of sameness offered by existing self-serve LLMs. And realize that AI technology still relies on your Human Intelligence (H.I.) to maximize AI performance. You’ll always need both.
3. AI time is a whole different treadmill: AI technology is lightning-fast, and AI “time” is just as fast. One hour is a day. One day is a week. One week is a month. And so on and so on. You and your organization must have world-class speed and shift from “Ready. Fire. Aim.” to “Ready. Aim. Fire.” And be prepared to pivot a lot.
Creatives’ Moment to “Rise Up”
I recently saw an Esquire story featuring Lenny Kravitz with the provocative headline – If you love it, let it kill you. At first, I said, come on, isn’t that a bit much? But the more I thought about it, while maybe I wouldn’t actually die on my ‘creative sword,’ the quote did drive home how much I truly love this industry and this profession.
Yet, the role of the true creative in the corporate world has spiraled downward. Moving up the ladder has been a rise of overly strategic, fearful, and data-driven executives. We all realize that folks with slide rules don’t create ads. Let them do what they are best at, and let marketers market.
In our movement to center around creativity, we realize that AI can help and not hurt us in marketing. You need to be open. And every person who considers themselves a “creative” needs to rise up: be the first movers. Become the adopters, users, builders, and trainers of AI. Any human plus AI is better, faster, and stronger than the best, fastest, and strongest humans. Now, we need all other creatives to unite with us in this movement.
The gauntlet has been dropped. Introduce yourself to the brave new world.
How is AI reshaping marketing creativity and unleashing new potential in your business? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
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