Every creative director has a version of this conversation. Most marketing teams never get to hear it.
We had a conversation recently that stayed with us. A creative director, someone who moves between brands and agencies and knows the inside of more marketing teams than most people will work with in a career, said something that felt worth writing down. So we did.
They mentioned in conversation that 80% of the marketing teams they work with are using AI in some part of their process. As a standard operating tool. And almost none of them are talking about it openly with the creatives they bring in.
Before we go any further, we want to say something clearly. The artists and creatives reading this are irreplaceable. We will stand by that perspective for as long as the house is open. This entire community was formed by and with these people and we believe that the ability to feel the weight of a cultural moment, to make a decision about what belongs in a piece of work based on taste and lived human judgment, exists entirely beyond the reach of anything artificial.
No tool in existence can replicate that and none ever will.
What creatives hold is not just a skill set but a way of seeing the world that takes a lifetime to develop. That needs to be said before anything else.
Now. Back to the conversation.
The gap the creative director identified isn't about the AI itself. It's about the secrecy around it.
When a marketing team is using AI to generate initial concepts, draft briefs or pressure test ideas, and the creative director across the table doesn't know that's happening, two people are working on the same project with a fundamentally different understanding of where the thinking came from.
That misalignment shows up in the work, across all of it, some areas more than others, but it does.
Their perspective was that the transparency ask isn't complicated. It's just uncomfortable because there's still a cultural hesitancy around admitting AI use in creative environments, a sense that it implies something about the quality of the thinking or the skill of the team.
The creative directors who are most at ease working with marketing teams that use AI openly are the ones who've seen what it can actually do in the right hands. Used well, it accelerates ideas and creates more room for the human judgment that follows to do its best work.
What it cannot do is replace that judgment. The creative director in that conversation was clear about this. AI produces material. It doesn't produce meaning. It can generate a hundred directions but it cannot tell you which one is true, which one carries the right conviction or which one will land with a specific audience in a specific cultural moment in a way that actually matters.
What sits behind every great creative decision is a lifetime of looking at the world in a particular way. That's yours. It always will be.
The marketing teams that understand this use AI as an accelerant for the thinking rather than a substitute for it.
The ones that don't tend to produce work that arrives quickly and leaves no impact.
The conversation creative directors are having privately about this is more nuanced than the public debate tends to be. What we take away is that they're asking to be included in an honest conversation about how those tools are being used so the collaboration can function at the level both sides are capable of.
That's not a big ask. It just requires someone to say it out loud first.
Shot of the good stuff.
