Here’s a truth about AI, stripped of the hysteria: We’re not witnessing the death of creativity – we’re watching its evolution unfold in real-time.
Think about the first time someone put a pencil to paper. Did we panic about the death of memory? When Gutenberg fired up his press, did we mourn the loss of hand-written manuscripts? No. We adapted. We evolved. We soared.
AI isn’t your replacement – it’s your creative ally. It’s the assistant that handles the mechanical while you focus on the meaningful.
But here’s an insight that’s often missed: As we build these digital scaffolds around our creative process, we’re not just saving time – we’re often compensating for skills we didn’t develop enough, or at all, in the first place.
It’s like learning to drive without understanding how an engine works. The car still gets you where you need to go, but there’s a disconnect from the underlying mechanics. And sometimes, that’s perfectly fine. Other times, it matters deeply.
But – and this is where it gets interesting because of the tension. While AI helps us leap over technical hurdles, we must never lose sight of the raw, human insights that make creative work resonate.
Understanding the fundamentals of storytelling, human psychology, and cultural nuance – that’s the difference between work that matters and work that merely exists.
The future isn’t about AI replacing humans. It’s about creators/designers/makers/directors who understand how to orchestrate these new tools in service of bigger, bolder, more human ideas. Because at the end of the day, no algorithm can replicate the electricity of a perfectly timed cultural moment or the raw emotion of a story well told.
We’re not facing a mass extinction event apocalypse. We’re on our way to experiencing a renaissance.
The question isn’t whether AI will replace us – it’s how we’ll use it to amplify what makes us uniquely human.
As AI democratizes creative production – just as high-level languages democratized programming – we need to rethink how agencies create value.
Conventional wisdom suggests that when technical execution becomes commoditized, taste becomes the differentiator.
But this assumes a universal standard of taste exists. It doesn’t. What’s cool to Gen Z might be cringe to millennials (or is it the other way around?). What’s respectful in Tokyo might be too formal in São Paulo. What’s premium to one group might seem wasteful to another. One VC’s Patagonia vest and Allbirds is, well, let’s just leave that one alone.
What we’re really talking about is cultural intelligence: the ability to navigate multiple frameworks of value and meaning across different contexts.
Consider what happens when anyone in an agency can generate compelling visuals, write decent copy, or produce serviceable pitch-quality videos using AI. These technical aspects of advertising – once a moat protecting established agencies – become table stakes. But what replaces them isn’t simply “good taste.” It’s something more dynamic.
Agencies that creatively thrive will excel at three things:
First, cultural navigation. They’ll understand how meaning and value shift across different contexts, communities, and cultures. They won’t impose a single taste framework but will move fluidly between many.
Second, collective intelligence. Success won’t come just from individual brilliant minds but also from diverse teams that bring multiple perspectives to creative problems. This diversity isn’t just demographic – it’s cognitive, experiential, and cultural.
Third, adaptive judgment. They’ll combine human insight with AI capabilities, using data and research to inform creative decisions while maintaining human empathy, cultural sensitivity and an unquenchable curiosity to keep learning and playing with what’s new.
This has several implications:
Creative leadership becomes even more about orchestrating diverse perspectives than only imposing singular vision.
Small agencies can compete through specialized cultural expertise and adaptability.
Client relationships evolve into learning partnerships, where both sides develop better cultural intelligence together.
The irony is that many agencies are optimizing for the wrong things – not just in terms of tech-driven production capabilities of faster and cheaper or achieving ever more massive scale – but in their very understanding of what makes work resonate.
They’ve built only ‘hierarchies of taste’ when they should have been building networks of cultural intelligence. It’s the difference between saying “we know what’s best” and saying “we know how to learn from everyone.”
What matters isn’t developing only “good taste” but rather building the capacity to understand how different communities create and perceive value. This requires humility, curiosity, and constant learning – qualities that can’t be replaced by AI but can be enhanced by it.
If this sounds too abstract, consider the opposite: an agency that believes its taste is universal, using AI to scale that limited perspective and make a lot of things faster and cheaper. That’s not just a failing business model – it’s a form of cultural myopia.
The future belongs not to those with “the best taste,” but to those who best understand how taste is constructed, challenged, and transformed across different contexts. Everything else – including our current notions of taste – is being disrupted.
This isn’t just about survival. It’s about creating work that matters in a world where meaning itself is increasingly fluid and contested. That’s one of the real challenges – and opportunity – of the AI era.
There’s a future scenario where we could witness the most fundamental shift in consumer decision-making since the birth of mass media. While the advertising industry has weathered tech disruptions – from television to social media – AI agents represent something far more profound: the potential disintermediation of human choice itself. AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers. With people perhaps never even seeing the ads.
Consider this: For decades, we’ve mastered the art of persuading humans through emotional storytelling, cultural resonance, and psychological triggers — let’s call this Advertising. We’ve built entire frameworks and successful creative businesses around human decision-making patterns.
But what happens when our target audience becomes an AI agent optimizing for parameters rather than responding to persuasion? When algorithms, not emotions, determine which toothpaste ends up in your basket?
The paradigm shift is profound: brands will need to advertise to the agents themselves, but consumers will have unprecedented power, able to instruct their agents to ignore certain brands entirely without advertisers ever knowing. This creates an asymmetric dynamic where brands might have no choice but to play by these new rules if that’s what consumers demand.
However, this isn’t an obituary for advertising – it’s a call for reinvention. We need to stop thinking in false dichotomies of human VS. machine and instead architect for a hybrid future.
Here’s how:
First, rebuild creative organizations around “dual-stream intelligence.” One stream continues to master human psychology, cultural anthropology, and emotional storytelling. The other develops expertise in parameter-based communication, understanding how to translate brand value into quantifiable metrics that AI agents can process. Or in Pelle Sjoenell‘s BBH Labs post from back in 2018: ‘Selling to Machines, our next customer.”
Second, evolve the creative process by starting with the decision architecture. How will this product or service be chosen in a world where both humans and AI agents influence the purchase? This means developing creative that can simultaneously spark emotional connection with humans while optimizing for AI comprehension.
Most importantly, brand building doesn’t become irrelevant – it becomes bifurcated. Humans will still set their agents’ preferences based on their beliefs, values, and emotional connections to brands. This means the long-term game of building brand equity remains crucial, but the tactical execution of purchase decisions may increasingly shift to agent-to-agent communication.
The agencies that will creatively thrive in this new era won’t be those with the most sophisticated AI tools or the biggest data sets (sorry mega-holding-company-mergers!). They’ll be the ones that can seamlessly bridge the human and machine realms, creating work that resonates across both spheres.
The future of advertising isn’t dead – it’s being reborn. And for those willing to embrace this transformation, the creative possibilities are limitless. After all, we’ll be going beyond creating ads – we’d be architecting decision ecosystems that bridge human emotion and machine logic. That’s not the death of creativity – it’s an evolution.
There’s a certain irony in “discovering” theories about taste and aesthetics that have been deeply explored for centuries, particularly by marginalized voices often overlooked.
Hopefully, a certain % develops genuine curiosity and engagement, leading to evolved taste, deeper personal enjoyment and value. Not just status-seeking or the endless quest for growth and monetization.
Also, a friend pointed out the notable omission of female philosophers and theorists who made significant contributions to aesthetics and taste. Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, bell hooks and Iris Marion Young come to mind. But deeper consideration brings Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun…
“Speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating. Who wants to live without the Internet or jet travel? ///Or Lyft, or Amazon 2-day delivery, or any of the fifteen different ways we can message anyone, or everyone, around the world///
The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry. Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel.
“Inevitably, a life of hurry can become superficial. When we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people.”
Moreover we don’t make connections with ideas. We don’t synthesize. We don’t test theories over time. We don’t play with ideas.”
– Carl Honore “In praise of slowness: challenging the cult of speed”
When everyone goes fast, most advantages brought by speed get lost. The only choice we see is that we have to go faster.
David Foster Wallace summed this up perfectly when he said “Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”
The implications on *thinking* are fascinating:
We have forgotten how to look forward to things, and how to enjoy the moment when they arrive. Restaurants report that hurried diners increasingly pay the bill and order a taxi while eating dessert. Many fans leave sporting events early, no matter how close the score is, simply to steal a march on the traffic.
Then there is the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well. Like many people, I read the paper while watching TV— and find that I get less out of both.
In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.
Boredom— the word itself hardly existed 150 years ago— is a modern invention. Remove all stimulation, and we fidget, panic and look for something, anything, to do to make use of the time. When did you last see someone just gazing out the window on a train? Everyone is too busy reading the paper, playing video games, listening to iPods, working on the laptop, yammering into mobile phones.
Instead of thinking deeply, or letting an idea simmer in the back of the mind, our instinct now is to reach for the nearest sound bite. In modern warfare, correspondents in the field and pundits in the studio spew out instant analyses of events as they occur. Often their insights turn out to be wrong. But that hardly matters nowadays: in the land of speed, the man with the instant response is king. With satellite feeds and twenty-four-hour news channels, the electronic media is dominated by what one French sociologist dubbed “le fast thinker”— a person who can, without skipping a beat, summon up a glib answer to any question.
In a way, we are all fast thinkers now. Our impatience is so implacable that, as actress-author Carrie Fisher quipped, even “instant gratification takes too long.” This partly explains the chronic frustration that bubbles just below the surface of modern life. Anyone or anything that steps in our way, that slows us down, that stops us from getting exactly what we want when we want it, becomes the enemy. So the smallest setback, the slightest delay, the merest whiff of slowness, can now provoke vein-popping fury in otherwise ordinary people.
Fast eats time. One consequence of fast is that we make poor decision after poor decision. Those decisions don’t go away never to be seen again. It’s not like we make a bad decision and we’re done with it. No, the consequences are much worse. Poor decisions eat time. They come back to haunt you. They create issue after issue. They feed into the perpetual motion machine of busyness.
And in a culture where people wear busyness as a badge of honor, bad decisions actually lead us to think that we’re doing more.”
The most valuable compensation for working at a startup as opposed to a “normal job” is a dramatically higher rate-of-learning (ROL).
“Your rate-of-learning is a better proxy for how successful you will be than your current salary or stock compensation because it’s a leading rather than lagging indicator.
Abandoning the cubicle at your normal job to throw yourself head-first into a startup is a fiery accelerant for growth, changing your career trajectory by orders of magnitude through a substantially increased rate-of-learning. To explain why, let’s define ROL:
Definition: Rate-of-learning is the velocity at which you are aggregating new insights and deploying them in ways that build value.
In physics, velocity is measured along two vectors: speed and magnitude. In this case, the pace at which you are uncovering new insights (speed) has a direct relationship with the leverage you accumulate deploying these new insights (magnitude). Whether this process of aggregating and deploying insights is in the form of writing code or driving growth, scaling this steep learning curve is the forging process that turns you into a badass full-stack developer or full-stack marketer with a high market value—not getting paid a large salary to sit in meetings all day.
There are three reasons why I believe rate-of-learning is your most valuable personal asset class:
Compounding interest on learning.
You may have noticed in the graph above that the line representing startup rate-of-learning is exponential while that of a normal job is linear. While this is more conceptual than anything else, it illustrates an important point: if you reach a fast enough rate-0f-learning you start generating compounding interest on those learnings.
Let’s use a real life example. Imagine you’re a growth marketer at a startup and uncover a new way to drive sign-ups by aggressively retargeting people who have visited your blog organically. You deploy the retargeting campaign and it works, so next, you find a way to generate more quality blog content by syndicating posts from experts in your space so you can attract even more eyeballs. Having successfully widened the top of your funnel, you switch gears and figure out how to dramatically increase conversion by personalizing sign-up page copy and background images based upon location data you’re pulling off a visitor’s IP address. This leads to another insight about a series of fields that can be moved out of the sign-up form and into the onboarding flow to reduce friction. The cumulative effect? You increase sign-ups by 20%.
In a startup, this series of experiments can happen over the course of a few days. In the alternative universe of a normal company you might be waiting a week for a small retargeting budget or approval from your manager. Therefore the valuable insights that should theoretically follow your initial insight may never come. If you extend this slower rate-of-learning over months or years, the opportunity cost of missed insights is massive.
Learning equals leverage.
People think having “f*** you” money is leverage, but in reality, a high rate-of-learning gives you more leverage than money does. If I were to give you a choice between wiring $10,000 to your checking account or an opportunity to uncover 50 powerful insights that could land you an awesome job at Airbnb or Dropbox, which would you take?
Another way to think about rate-of-learning dividends: the present value of money is low, especially when interest rates are at 0%, because you can’t generate as much compounding interest on money as you can on your learnings. So if you have a choice between getting paid $50K at a startup or $100K at a dying company, your future self will thank you for taking half the pay in exchange for a 3-5X ROL. A high rate-of-learning is the most bankable asset you can have in the startup world because it’s the vehicle by which longterm value is created, both within yourself and for your startup.
Learning is an end to itself.
The interesting thing about highly successful people is that most of them don’t stop working once they’ve “made it”. They continue climbing the learning curve long after the millions from big exits have been wired to their bank accounts. Why? After years in high rate-of-learning roles, they discover that learning was an end in itself.
Though it may seem like money is spilling all over the streets in Silicon Valley, don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
Play the long game. Put yourself in a position to maximize your rate-of-learning, even—and especially—if it makes you a little uncomfortable. The long game is hard, but rewarding, because you’ll know you had the strength to make the steeper climb.”
// Acquiring that higher ROL is not limited to startup experience. A couple of years working at a furious pace on multiple accounts at a world-class idea factory like Crispin, Porter + Bogusky will teach you equivalent multiplier skills. Different skills from what I learned at a mobile startup. But just as valid. Repeat this across other world-class agencies and there’s a step-change in experience.
I’ve taken this approach to learning. The first half of my design career was spent at emerging technology companies and a couple of startups. But recently, it’s been agencies all the way. Building up my creative experience stack from a broad base of multidisciplinary knowledge and mental models.
Somewhere along the way, you become comfortable with the uncomfortable. Ambiguity becomes a signal for opportunity. And it’s another level of fun to apply what I know to solve problems. //
“If I want to persuade you, what I need to do is pitch my arguments so that they’re in the range of a bubble around your current belief; it’s not too far from your current belief, but it’s within this bubble.
If your belief is that you’re really, really anti-guns, let’s say, and I want to move you a bit, if I come along and say, “here’s the pro-gun position,” you’re actually going to move further away. Okay? It’s outside the bubble of things that I can consider as reasonable.
We all have these latitudes around our beliefs, our values, our attitudes, which teams are ok to root for, and so on, and these bubbles move. They flex. When you’re drunk, or when you’ve had a good meal, or when you’re with people you care about versus strangers, these bubbles flex and move in different ways.
Getting two groups to work together is about trying to get them to a place where their bubbles overlap, not their ideas, not their beliefs, but the bubbles that surround their ideas. Once you do that, you don’t try to get them to go to the other position, you try to get them to see there’s some common ground that you don’t share, but that you think would not be a crazy position to hold.
There’s the old Carlin bit about when you drive on the road: anyone going faster than me is a maniac and anyone going slower than me is a jerk. That that’s the way we live our lives. We’re always going the right speed, and everybody else is missing the boat. We don’t take into account that I’m going fast today because I’ve got to get to the hospital, or I’m going slow today because I know I had something to drink, and I shouldn’t have, so I’m going to drive real slow. We don’t take those things into account. We just think whatever I’m doing is the right thing, and we have to recognize there’s this space around those, and if we can find that overlap we can get some movement. And so that’s not a nudge idea, per se. It’s really about finding when people are in a mental space where they’re more open to other ideas, and what is often going on there is you’re trying on identities.
William James said long ago that we have as many identities as people that we know, and probably more than that. We are different with different people. I’m different with my son than I am with you. We have these different identities that we try on, and they surround us. With some friends I can be more of a centrist, and with other friends I might be more of a liberal, depending on what feels like it would work in that moment, and they can all be authentic positions that I really believe at different points in time. I’m really interested in looking at that as a mechanism of persuasion when it comes to regular old persuasion, when it comes to education, when it comes to public health, and when it comes to international issues as well. It’s finding that latitude of acceptance and finding out how to use it successfully.”
// We try to do this with clients, who hire us specifically for innovation, but often don’t know how it feels to recognize, accept and then embrace it.
It’s perhaps a cross between horse whispering and aversion therapy.
This is often the case for clients that are Director-level and below. Higher and more senior, howerve, and it gets easier, because you wouldn’t usually be speaking to that C-level group otherwise.//
The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”
There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.
Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.
Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”
“Rising connoisseurship is a response to life in an age of information shaped by consumerism. As ideas increasingly become the coin of the realm, people distinguish themselves by what they know. An important way to demonstrate this is through what they buy.
It is a form of conspicuous consumption that puts less emphasis on an item’s price tag — craft beers aren’t that expensive — than on its perceived cachet. In hoisting a Tripel brewed by Belgian monks, the drinker is telling the world: I know which ale to quaff. As, in all fairness, he enjoys a very tasty beverage.
Ironically, many items celebrated as examples of connoisseurship — handcrafted, small-batch, artisanal products — are themselves a reaction against the mass production trends of the global consumer society that shapes us. Just as art connoisseurs authenticate paintings, others seek wines and cheese and cupcakes that seem mystically authentic.
“A lot of what gets called connoisseurship is really just snobbery,” said Thomas Frank, who has dissected modern consumer culture in books like “Commodify Your Dissent,” which he edited with Matt Weiland, and “The Conquest of Cool.” “It’s not about the search for quality, but buying things that make you feel good about yourself. It’s about standing apart from the crowd, demonstrating knowledge, hipness.
”The rub is that, as access to knowledge through a Google search has become synonymous with possessing knowledge, fewer and fewer people seem to have the inclination or patience to become true connoisseurs. How many people, after all, have the time to make oodles of money and master the worlds of craft beer, cheese, wines and everything else people in the know must know?
In response, most people outsource connoisseurship, turning to actual connoisseurs for guidance. “Many people want the patina of connoisseurship on the cheap,” said Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College. “So they contract out the decision-making process. My guess is that a tiny fraction of people who are true connoisseurs of wine — and there are some — don’t make enough money to buy a $500 bottle of wine.”
As Steven Jenkins, an expert on cheese and other products at Fairway Market in New York, recently told a reporter for The New York Times: “The customer has no idea what he or she wants. The customer is dying to be told what they want.”
People have always relied on connoisseurs for guidance. What is different today is the idea — suggested by journalists and marketers intent on flattering their customers — that people can become paragons of taste simply by taking someone else’s advice.
Dr. Schwartz said this could be a wise strategy. Consumers may not get the pleasures of deep knowledge, but they also avoid the angst. “You get the benefits of discernment without paying the psychological price” of having to make difficult choices and distinctions, he said. “You’re happy because you’ve been told what to get and don’t know any better.”
“Most of us were raised to believe that compromise is noble. When faced with an otherwise intractable conflict, compromise invites people to make mutual sacrifices to maintain a good relationship. Compromise is arguably the bedrock of democratic societies and healthy marriages everywhere.
But compromise makes bad products.”
/// Replace ‘bad products’ with ‘bad advertising campaigns ///
“We’re not trying to get elected or choose which movie to watch. We’re building products that must stand the test of time. People need to understand them and value them implicitly. To meet that standard products must have a clarity of purpose and in my experience such a strong point of view is rarely achieved through a compromise of conflicting visions. Instead, it is most often the product of a single vision, sharpened through conflict with competing visions.
I can usually spot the product of a compromise a mile away. Teams who have conflicting goals will come to me, together, to present an idea that isn’t exciting to either of them, but is acceptable to both. It’s very rare that I’m enthusiastic about the mediocrity achieved through compromise. Beyond my own teams I can see it in products I use every day. I see inoffensive but uninspired design choices and I recognize the tyranny of the averages that must have lead to it.
The better solution is to embrace disagreement and turn it into productive tension. Without letting it get personal, we must explore the underlying cause of conflict. Is it structural because the teams have different goals? Is there a fundamental difference in how you view the world? Are there tactical questions about sequencing and relative investment? Whatever the reason, understand it from all sides and escalate around that.
These are my favorite meetings. Conversations that expose fundamental tensions often uncover gaps or contradictions in strategy. Consequently, they improve not only a single decision but the entire constellation of decisions that follow.
These conversations make products better. In the end everyone may not agree with the decision the leadership arrives at but they will know that their position has been heard and considered, and will hopefully be able to disagree and commit to the path forward.
Relationships are no less important in work environments than they are outside work, but the trade-offs we make to maintain relationships at work are different. Being uncompromising is not an invitation to be closed-minded or lean on authority, as those would be very short-lived solutions. Instead, this approach demands even more of us and how we treat others, so we can continue to productively disagree for the duration of a project.
After all this the product may still fail, but if it fails (and you executed well) at least you can learn from the failure because it disproves a point of view. If a mediocre product fails, you learn nothing. Working the averages may reduce your downside risk but it also cuts off the upside.”
Wandering Wandering Star 