Business leaders and brand marketers are feeling the pressure to do more with less—and with AI. But where does it actually belong in the creative process? Adam Sievering, Copy Director, Creative R+D at LPK, shows where it can help most, and where it can hurt.
Pressure to do more with less, the need for speed, and the curiosity surrounding AI are challenges that many brand and business leaders face today. In a world where efficiency is paramount, integrating AI into the creative process seems promising—but where does one start, and how can it actually make the outputs better?
Generative AI is transforming the creative landscape, offering mind-blowing opportunities alongside daunting challenges. With tools like Midjourney, Firefly, Runway, Suno and ChatGPT at our fingertips, ideas surge to life in seconds, breaking down barriers that once kept us all within the reasonable limits of time, budget, and mental bandwidth. We can improve established creative processes, automate workflows, expedite exploratory phases and apply real-time insights to our creative choices. Generative AI (Gen-AI) tools blow the doors off these limitations, and as a creative professional myself, I’m thrilled by this newfound freedom to make big ideas bigger and bring them to life on a scale that simply wasn’t possible before.
“There’s an urgent need to integrate AI not just strategically, but creatively, into our workflows.”
But with endless possibilities, we now face a new guard of creativity killers: overstimulation, decision paralysis, and unclear boundaries in this collaborative working relationship between us (the humans), and our miraculous AI assistants. Compounding this is the unprecedented pressure for creativity to deliver measurable results. This relationship is especially complicated in creative endeavors, prompting us to question who is more reliable when it comes to owning the creation phase of each project: the human experts, or their AI counterparts?
Pressure to Embrace the AI Advantage
As a creative lead at a decades-old brand consultancy, we’re seeing the astounding rate of change in AI capabilities and the urgency our clients feel to bring these capabilities into the work. But what’s the rightful place for AI in our pursuits? At LPK, we’re navigating this question daily.
According to a recent DBA report, What Clients Think 2024, 95% of clients believe great creativity can move a brand forward. In addition, 74% of them expect AI to cut costs, most likely through automation that streamlines tasks, jobs, and possibly entire departments. So it’s no surprise that 76% feel paralyzed by economic uncertainty. These figures underline the immense potential, possible risks, and urgent need to integrate AI not just strategically, but creatively, into our workflows.
“AI is a tool to enhance human creativity—not replace it.”
But how do we harness the magic of AI without losing our creativity, rigor, discipline, taste and sanity?
Harmonizing Human + Machine
It’s undeniable that the use of generative AI tools is on the rise across industries. A survey showed 65% of respondents reported they were “regularly using AI” in their work—nearly double from 10 months prior. And at LPK, usage exceeds that average at 88%. As we embrace this technology in both our personal and professional lives, it’s crucial to remember that AI is a tool to enhance human creativity—not replace it.
“95% of clients believe great creativity can move a brand forward. And 74% expect AI to cut costs.”
At the time of writing this article, generative AI tools and large language models (LLMs) are not without fault or limitation. We (the humans) shouldn’t blame them. Nor should we depend on them to understand and effectively navigate the chaos, contradictions and complexities of what we affectionately call “the human experience.”
Until proven otherwise, we know that the discerning human copilot remains critical to creative pursuits, relying on taste, strategy and intuition to lead us to our desired destination.
Creating an AI-Enhanced Approach:
1. Collaborate to set clear objectives: At LPK, we believe in working collaboratively with our clients to define clear objectives for every project, then determine where AI comes in. The result is a tailored approach for using AI tools to generate outputs that align with the strategic goals and desired outputs—rather than simply getting lost in the possibilities.
2. Prioritize quality over quantity: To the point above, AI can generate unthinkable volume in mere seconds. To avoid creative overload, our teams focus on refining a small crop of high-quality ideas, rather than getting overwhelmed by many.
3. Integrate Human Touch: It’s a starting point, not a finish line. We create AI-generated ideas as an initial canvas, then add our personal insights and cultural understanding to make them truly resonate.
How We’re Using AI in the Creative Process
At LPK, we’ve embraced AI to enhance our creative processes through a series of structured sprints. These sprints allowed us to experiment with AI using workflows and use cases familiar to us and how we typically solve problems at LPK. Our creative directors and AI experts collaborated to blend human ingenuity with machine efficiency, yielding impressive results.
Sprint 1: Define the Problem
We started by identifying key consumer needs and cultural contexts. This grounding ensured relevance in today’s and future markets.
Sprint 2: Create a Product
Next, we ideated and developed a product to solve the identified problem, focusing on the consumer journey to create a viable solution.
Sprint 3: Create a Brand
We built a brand around the product, defining elements like the brand strategy, naming, and visual concepts.
Sprint 4: Visualize a Brand
Activating key visual components, such as logos, color schemes, and typography, brought the brand to life. We also developed essential consumer touchpoints like packaging and websites.
Four new-to-the-world brands created with AI: Nomadia, a functional beverage; Squad, a digital-first beauty brand for Gen Alpha; Pipsqueak, reimagining baby food; and Playtful, an at-home cooking companion.
Sprint 5: Market a Brand
We explored above-the-line brand activation, pushing beyond traditional deliverables to new channels facilitated by AI. This included producing comprehensive brand guidelines.
Sprint 6: Synthesize
Finally, we identified efforts that could be productized to create client value, developing think-piece topics and insights for marketing.
The Pros + Cons of Embracing AI
The outcomes of our AI experiments have been promising. We’ve seen increased efficiency, more innovative ideas, and the ability to bring new products to market faster. But the journey isn’t without its challenges. Balancing AI-generated ideas with human-centered design remains critical.
“We reduced concept development time by 40% and dramatically expanded the volume of ideas generated.”
In fact, our data shows that AI can significantly speed up the front end of the creative process without sacrificing quality. In one experiment, we reduced concept development time by 40% and dramatically expanded the volume of ideas generated.
Increased Efficiency and Innovation: The structured approach of AI sprints enabled us to rapidly iterate and refine ideas, resulting in quicker turnaround times and more innovative concepts. By setting clear goals for each sprint, we ensured that AI-generated ideas were aligned with our strategic objectives and brand vision.
Challenges of Overstimulation: While AI has significantly boosted our creative capabilities, the sheer volume of ideas can sometimes be overwhelming. It’s crucial to filter and refine these ideas through a human lens to ensure they resonate on an emotional and cultural level.
Human-Centered Design: Maintaining a focus on human-centered design solutions ensures that AI-generated ideas are not only innovative but also relevant and impactful. This balance between AI and human insight is essential for creating meaningful brand experiences.
AI-Generated, Human-Curated
In the end, human taste matters most. AI can generate a multitude of ideas, but the human touch is irreplaceable. Our clients and brands don’t pay us (or any agency) to produce average work. It’s the nuanced understanding of culture, emotion and experience that makes creative work resonate.
“In the end, human taste matters most.”
At LPK, we believe in an AI-augmented, human-curated approach to creativity. As anyone in a creative industry knows, taste is an interpretive skill between many different things learned over long periods of time. In our experience, clients struggle to buy originality, and excitedly, we’ve found these tools help people see things they might not have been able to see before. It takes both talent and incredible self-awareness to have the curatorial skills to produce great work.
Through our experiments, we now know that great creative output is dependent on a winding path that uses a stack of technology and human intellect to gain an enormous advantage.
Curious how AI can optimize your approach to consumer strategy and creativity? Reach out to have a deeper conversation and schedule a free workshop.
