We’re Eating Our Own. They’re Stale.

We Just “Made” Some New Friends (with AI).

Mark Masterson creates art and writes in Singapore

11 min readJun 29, 2024

It’s Science, Right?

If you cram a bunch of rats together with no way out, they’ll get stressed and start killing and eating the weaker ones to survive. Now think of the cage as an unknown, a boogieman next door that you can’t escape, and a real motivation to either kill, fuck, or marry. That scary beast has been lurking next door to creative departments for a while now — not in the shadows, but right in the glow of our monitors. And while I spent a lot of time shouting at it and prognosticating when it’d finally pounce, I’ve come to some different conclusions.

The Boogeyman in the Machine: Confronting AI Fears

See, I’ve written about the future of billing, loss of creativity, homogenization of ideas, and just about every other spooky or confounding bit. What I haven’t done is embrace it publicly, despite it being a huge part of my life and even growing. A 2023 survey by the World Economic Forum found that a staggering 85% of creative professionals are concerned about the impact of AI on their jobs.

Whatever this AI thing that was scaring me, the spectre in the room, that scared the shit out of me. Well, I’m going to turn my underpants inside out.

The Death of Different: How We Lost Our Way

We’ve lost something over time: Creativity. Or at least the ability to sell the stuff that actually sells stuff. We decided that clicks, media, time, focus groups, consultants, are good and that the compromise for focusing on these is that we have Cannes once a year where mostly clients show that they don’t suck by picking their favorite holding company to try their best to make them seem human. In the words of marketing guru Seth Godin, “The industrial age taught us to make a good living. The connection economy demands that we make a difference.” While the business sides have grown more and more and the media departments had their rises, creative was relegated to a combination of a sweat shop/petting zoo that people trot out for a break from the spreadsheets and not much else.

We’ve totally blown it. We gave up a long time ago. A lot of us decided to let others speak for us and as those people have gotten dumber, fitter and less interesting, they weeded out our more senior creative voices and mentors. They use the excuse of keeping the creative fresh and youthful. We forgot why we really cared and instead sold our souls for a few overpriced awards.

AI: The Unlikely Savior or Saver?

AI isn’t our distructor, it may be our savior — at least for the smart ones — because we’re back in the seat where differentiating ideas can live. For the CD’s we can lead the symphony and a lot more is stuff we can learn. Sure we specialized just like you told us — the best of us specialized in the everythingness. For the others, it’s in learning the language of creativity combined with sociology, strategy and finding the insights that their future will grow — we’ll let the tools fight where they belong. In fact, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that “by 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” and by 2045, we’ll experience the “Singularity,” where our intelligence will be multiplied a billionfold by merging with the AI we’ve created.

Embrace the Discomfort

I’ve started to think about AI as a reality and my relationship with it beyond what you might think. In creative, we’ve known for a while that we can be replaced. Maybe because we’re always on the verge of change, whether it be the tools,marketing methods, or a younger, cheaper guy who wears black just a little better. Knowing and this little bit of truth isn’t an awaking for me that we don’t really have to run faster than the beast. We just have to run faster than you, and in my case, have a lead and am increasing it. A recent study found that 71.6% of creatives believe AI will support their roles, not replace them.

Building Smarter Humans: The Key to Thriving in the AI Era

“Working smarter” is a suckers mantra. Everyone claims to do it, but it’s just code for squeezing more blood out of Sisyphus’ dick. Making smarter humans is the real goal — cultivating a team that isn’t just efficient but truly intelligent, adaptable and ahead of the curve, people that see the hilarity and joy in the tension. That’s the difference between surviving and thriving.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard reminds us, “Technology is not what we seek, but how we seek.” Society and technology have already optimized the hell out of our time, leaving little room for actual thought, innovation or fun. So, if you want your team to not just keep up but to outpace the competition, you need to foster an environment that nurtures smarter individuals. Invest in their learning, challenge them to think critically, and empower them to experiment and take risks. Build a team that wants time to read, time to breathe and learns more than the latest tool. Somebody recently wrote about the overuse of military jargon in our world, but the reality is that outsmarting and outlasting is what the smart team trains for.

My AI Arsenal: Tools for Amplifying Creativity

I’m working in the usual CS and played just enough with Firefly to know it’s about as good as Adobe “stock,” which says a lot. It’s all got some AI in it at this point, and if it helps you game the system, it saves time. Apple’s suite is catching up,and the Bauhaus thing makes it easier intuitively — more saved time. It all adds up. A study by McKinsey estimates that AI has the potential to automate 45% of current work activities, freeing up time for more creative endeavors.

I’m also using GPT, Otter, ElevenLabs, MidJourney, Gemini, Perplexity, and a few more. I bounce between the best chat,strategy, research, and visual solutions, treating them like a room full of juniors and seniors who just work a lot faster. They don’t offer me anything new, but they fill in my blanks and save me search, comp-building, and combing through client websites. They also open my head, so I’m reminded of the knowledge that I’ve picked up about everyone else’s responsibilities too.

The Creative’s Dilemma: Adapting or Dying

As AI continues to disrupt, with every agency role seemingly hanging in the balance, it’s been mostly the creatives I see sounding off on the topic — myself included, on various fronts, even delving into the future of billing and account structures. Some are scared to death, but some see the layers of a 4th dimension where everything is clearer — after the first year of the gloom and doom, some of us are waking up to areas of the world where “creativity” might be useful in other types of “portfolios.” This echoes the sentiment of many industry leaders, with 62% of creative executives believing that AI will fundamentally change their business models within the next five years.

Fuck ’Em: A Manifesto for Creative Independence

For those who didn’t notice, creative groups are in a state of constant change. While the rest have learned to call the same things by different names and found different ways to organize the same structures, art, copy, and strategy hack their way through. The creative groups work not only in different mediums, but also find a new brief with new questions and answers every day. We are built to question and built to solve. Maybe you didn’t notice, but we’ve been doing our generative training one assignment at a time.

In my world, we’ve taken our first year of immersion and said “fuck it! Let’s own it.” We’ve done what we’ve been trained to do: suck it up and keep gaining — you’ve been thinking about how it can respond to your emails. We’ve been thinking about teaching it other things. Now we’ve gained so much that it’s the old that’s holding us back. So, I decided something: “fuck ‘em.”

We’re embracing AI, not to replace you, but to empower us. We’re building smarter teams, automating the mundane, and reclaiming that spark you borrowed and never returned.

Automating the Expected: Reclaiming Creative Time

The brief is the most important document in any agency. It affects creative, finance, production, accounts, media — just about everybody. It’s the map, but it’s spoken word, emails, jpegs, PDFs, sometimes a real brief from the client, voice memos, and is supposed to come with some insights. And it’s often written slowly and by who’s available, not who’s best. After many sessions of teaching and finding that even if they wrote the brief, it wasn’t sufficient, I automated it. I wrote the app and took away everything except the pleasant client conversations and drinks. As I was told when I introduced my new gadget and said, “they don’t know what I just did to them”: “they just lost their relevance.”

As a living, breathing testament to the generative power of breathing — a bit like a human learning machine — I’ve absorbed and synthesized the best of what global agencies and those within these holding companies use. This allows me to develop not just a brief, but one that harnesses the wisdom of countless others who have tried to perfect it since the dawn of advertising. While I’ve stolen the good bits of these past efforts, I’ve woven them into a framework where the brief takes center stage. It’s the left brain of the creative department — analytical, strategic, and the guiding force behind every idea. I've created this prompt, but the daring is in the details and humanity.

I’m still moving and learning, and I’m automating our presentation format section by section, replacing the responsibilities of others with more speed and accuracy — if there was no negotiation on pricing logistics, I’d automate those too. My creatives already know a lot of other people’s jobs. We don’t want to do ’em. I’m just saying that when we need things to happen and we’re gradually becoming smarter, we don’t have time to wait for people to learn how to do things that are much more mechanical and methodical than what we do every day.

Accountable Service

We’ve learned what to do with the dumb stuff. Bad feedback, basic feedback, and new information get fed into the machine along with our expertise, and it comes out without needing to teach anybody how to wipe their own ass. Once the brief is completed and hopefully read by the person that puts it together — I’m not holding my breath that they actually look at anything or think much deeper than the name of the client and when it’s due. Once that’s done, it goes to traffic and Creative gets their hands on it. From there it starts to get interesting.

In response to any new requests for instruction from the creative team to teach beyond our normal scope, my response is that if a person can’t manage to deal with a process as simple as a job application, then how are they taking up our profession’s oxygen? If the creative team could stomach the dumb stuff that others still embrace, we’d just do it. You see, we’re smart enough to avoid a lot of the people that just make us dumber by just talking to them.

Despite introducing new methodologies, processes, and leading education on various topics — even the basics like crafting an agency brief — the waiting game is over. Those who haven’t adapted will be left behind.

Creative Independence: A New Paradigm

With the help of AI, my new direction is creative independence, but perhaps not as you’d expect. My approach involves embedding account-side replacement technology within the creative department itself. We’ll leverage AI to streamline the briefing process, taking client briefs and basic feedback directly from client briefs, documents, emails, conversations, and even WhatsApp messages, and generating foundational insights, strategic starting points, timelines, and other essential elements directly for creative teams. This approach will streamline traditionally manual and often inefficient tasks, freeing up more time for ideation and innovation. Step by step, we’ll also automate production tasks and research, including talent sourcing, speaker selection, music integration, timeline management, and platform optimization. Let’s face it, creative is often seen as a “loss leader” — an expense rather than an investment. But I’m here to tell you a different story about losing.

The New Creative Suit: Data-Driven, Creative and Daring

If I were in this position and thinking about the picture with those getting smarter and those getting comfortable, I might consider that my new approach may need a different way to represent itself. One of the words in my new language is: “discomfortable;” it’s how we speak about creativity, how to harness its power and not languish in the ways of the old. The new “suit” is someone not expecting to be taught, but an account person demanding to learn and share and partner in one cohesive ecosystem of solutions. The new machine is one of data and daring whose partner saves time doing changes, embraces that their world just got turned upside down and sees sky and not ground. It’s a sink or swim moment, and we’re choosing to fly.

Back it on up, am I being optimistic? That’s not what I do. I’m seeing a silver lining, well maybe not a silver lining. Whatever this AI thing that was scaring me, the spectre in the room, that scared the shit out of me. Well, I’m going to turn my underpants inside out. It’ll be more comfortable for me. Maybe some others are gonna get shit on.

There’s light at the end of the rainbow, and a tunnel of darkness where the Boo Radleys dwell. But Boo isn’t so bad once you get to know him, and neither is AI. Of course, Bob never understood either of them.

A Redrawing of Borders: The Future of the Creative Industry

This isn’t a revolution; it’s a redrawing of borders. If you truly understand, if curiosity drives you, AI becomes a collaborator, a catalyst. The old ways, the comfortable routines, the stale hierarchies — they’re relics, as outdated as my old Zip disks. We, the creatives, the ones who thrive on change and challenge, have been building a ladder. We’re embracing AI, not to replace you, but to empower us. We’re building smarter teams, automating the mundane, and reclaiming that spark you borrowed and never returned.

The future of the industry isn’t about your assumptions, but if you weren’t already thinking, you’ve missed it. Many agencies have rushed into what they believe the future holds, and they may be right for themselves. For me, it’s discomfort that keeps things interesting, and the knowledge that no single answer is universally correct. Everyone’s timeline is different, and we live in a world where each individual has their own channel. This is not a declaration of anything, but a personal manifesto.