Featuring Brendán Murphy, Senior Partner and Global Executive Creative Director at Lippincott / Ivan Mato, Executive Creative Director at Elmwood UK / Tom Evans, Founder & Creative Partner, BigSmall / Craig Matchett, Creative Director, Saffron Brand Consultants
As International Creativity Month comes to an end – and new creative platforms like Apple’s Creative Studio accelerate how work is made across the industry – creativity itself is being quietly redefined. As tools promise faster, more accessible and increasingly automated output, a bigger question is emerging. So, we asked industry leaders if they are expanding their thinking, or shifting it away from craft and judgement towards systems, speed and scale.
Brendán Murphy, Senior Partner and Global Executive Creative Director at Lippincott
Creativity is a way of thinking unbound by any tool. A child or adult needs no instrument to see a picture in the clouds or imagine a lamb in a box on the moon, and a wax crayon’s abstract marks can tell a hundred stories. The real crisis isn’t that more people can be creative online, it’s that platforms let others lift and replicate work without payment or credit. The novelty of machines writing poems in the voice of Robert Frost or painting like Matisse will give way to how artists, songwriters and filmmakers use those tools to expand, subvert and invent. We’re still early in this technology’s arc, and human hunger for the new keeps tastes shifting. Creators learned their craft by copying and then diverging; tribute bands and forgers impress, but they aren’t the artists that fill stadiums, museums, streams or that we aspire to be. Brands thrive where the true meets the new — canned content is instantly forgettable, while serendipitous, culturally true moments (Oreos dunking in the dark, Duolingo leaning into Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl moment) propel brands forward. Creativity and automation are polar opposites; magic happens in the divergence from the norm. We’ve already seen the backlash against Coca-Cola’s AI generated holiday ads, and while its’ easy to blame AI, the backlash wasn’t really about the technology — it was about a failure to deliver the originality, surprise, and emotional warmth consumers expect from a brand that once promised to ‘Teach the World to Sing’ and gave us the shared moments of its polar bears.
Ivan Mato, Executive Creative Director at Elmwood UK
The real danger isn’t in the tools themselves. It’s in automating the idea generation stage. That’s when things become stale and formulaic. If humans don’t take care of the conceptual work, AI will just regurgitate what’s already been done. You’ll get competent, but you won’t get breakthrough. It’s never been easier to reach ‘Good Enough.’ It’s never been harder to reach great.
There’s also the risk of losing the appeal of the new. Humans favour familiarity, sure, but we also get a delicious hit of satisfaction from the surprising. From the thing we didn’t see coming. If brands fully automate their creative process, the cookie-cutter nature of the outcome becomes inevitable.
What makes brands matter is their ability to surprise us, to show us something we didn’t know we wanted. That requires human curiosity, human bravery, and human judgement about what will resonate. The moment you automate those decisions, you’re not building a brand anymore. You’re managing a content factory. And factories don’t inspire loyalty. They just produce sameness at scale.
Tom Evans, Founder & Creative Partner, BigSmall
A farmer selling fresh eggs had a simple chalk sign. Messy. Wonky. Rustic. People bought the eggs. Then he got design software – proper fonts, colourful layout, a star burst. No one bought eggs.
The farmer could make stuff now, but he’d lost sight of the point.
Tools like Apple’s Creator Studio should be celebrated for democratising making. They open the door to more people, more voices, more ideas. I would have killed for these tools when I was younger.
Craft isn’t disappearing it’s moving upstream, into judgement, taste, restraint, and knowing what’s worth putting into the world at all. Tools don’t determine the quality of creativity, judgement and curation do. AI is exposing who’s good at deciding. Who knows when to stop. The real question isn’t what we can make quicker and easier, it’s what’s the point of making it at all?
Execution is cheaper and faster, so the value now sits in deciding what should exist. The brands moving fastest aren’t making more work they’re getting clear early and using tools to express a point of view, not search for one.
In a world of infinite output, the advantage doesn’t come from making more. It comes from knowing who you are and why you’re making anything in the first place.
Craig Matchett, Creative Director, Saffron Brand Consultants
As tools like Apple’s Creative Studio and AI-driven ecosystems prioritise speed and scale, the creative landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift. We are moving away from an era where the speed of a creative or the technical wizardry, the ability to master complex 3D or intricate photo manipulation, defined creative executional excellence. Today, these outputs are increasingly automated, turning once-rare spectacle into a common commodity.
But accessibility is a double-edged sword. While modern ecosystems have revolutionised collaboration and broken down silos between mediums like motion, 3D and sound, they often exist within walled gardens that dictate the limits of expression. If every brand uses the same prompts and presets in temptation to reach the previously unreachable, we risk a flattening of creativity: a soup of high-quality ingredients that fails to form a satisfying and succulent meal.
In this automated future, human judgment doesn’t disappear; it evolves. When speed and technique are no longer competitive advantages, taste, curation and craft become the primary differentiators. The value of a creative professional is shifting from the execution of the work to the intent behind it.
Brands now stand at a crossroads. The optimistic path offers hyper-relevance, allowing brands to connect with niche audiences at the speed of culture. The risk, however, is losing a brand’s soul or devaluing recognition to the temptation of instant expression available to us on a whim and a button click away. Ultimately, tools will scale the output, but only human judgment can ensure that what we do actually matters.
Today, brand cohesion or consistent expression is still a priority for brands. But in the future, will relevant expressions become the new normal? Will we mourn the loss of brand systems or celebrate the closeness we could gain with audiences?
