New is easy. Right is hard.

New is easy, right is hard.

While this statement is true of many things in life, in this case I’d like to apply it to the impact of AI on commercial creativity.

It‘s seemingly impossible these days to discuss creativity and AI without ending up either happy clapping or hand wringing depending on which side of the debate you’re on.

Yes, there will be many opportunities along the way to reimagine, for the better, how we get things done. At the same time, if you are a student of history, you know there will be many pitfalls too. After all, as humans we have form going all in on something new at the expense of common sense.

For what it's worth, I believe we must be wary of easy wins.
We must be wary of appropriated and aggregated intelligence.
We must be wary of thinking faster is better.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about things made by real people, in real life, that's a whole other can of worms. I’m talking about creativity applied to business outcomes.

I'm talking about Marketers that use execution to work out what they really want. Businesses that think AI is the answer to all their problems and hustlers who like to move fast and break things, often confusing agility with speed.

Because there are no short cuts to long term success.
Because you only get out what you put in.
Because crap served at the speed of light is still crap.

And of course there will be many more, less obvious pitfalls.

I'm not saying you should ignore the new, easier ways of doing things, far from it. You should be using AI to help explore, educate, organise, iterate and execute - just be wary of thinking you don’t need curious, complicated, unpredictable human judgement to make clever, unforgettable and iconic work.

If you know before you look, you can't see for knowing

As we all reckon with the understanding and implementation of rapidly evolving Ai tools, it is critically important that we also seek to engage with people who bring outside perspective to our businesses and brands.

Typically there are enough people already onboard who love the brand and are fans of the category, so the trick is to not end up surrounding yourself with like minded followers.

A person who isn't operating with the same 'understanding' can bring a healthy level of clear sighted observation that will help reveal insights otherwise ignored.

In The Great Unknown, we believe in turning uncertainty into opportunity.

The answer almost always lies somewhere in the middle

Part of what inspired the launch of The Great Unknown and the kind of work we aspire to create, is a belief that the answer is usually somewhere in the middle.

And just to be clear, that does NOT mean average.

In Advertising, we need to be good at sitting in the middle of things. In simple terms, creatives sit between their business and their client's business - clients sit between their shareholders and their customers - and of course customers sit between their wants and their needs.

Each of these positions have their own agenda and version of success. They can be born of tangible needs, shaped by invisible forces and judged with gut feelings.

Because of these wonderful ambiguities, at The Great Unknown we believe our job as creative problem solvers, is an ‘and’ not ‘or’ arrangement.

It’s not Art or Science, right or wrong, sales or brand, long or short, all or nothing – the answer sits somewhere in the middle. The intersection of where often unequal forces meet.

Each arriving unique to the situation and requiring open minds to push and pull, propose and reject, scribble and erase, capture and discard, debate and decide to find the best combination of completion and success.