In 2024, generative AI reigned as one of the main themes at every marketing conference, event, panel, and fireside chat for the second year in a row. But this time, the conversations have matured. While pretty much everybody still agrees AI is an essential marketing tool, the consensus is less clear on how you should use it. Or perhaps even more importantly, how not to use it.
Instead of mindlessly racing to adopt any tool with the AI badge on it, marketers have been asking: How can I use AI technology in a way that won’t stifle the bold, boundary-pushing creativity that we all crave? Is creativity, the heart of great advertising, the price you pay for speeding up the creative process? Our VP of Sales for EMEA & APAC Oliver Stewart says marketers and brands can walk the fine line between leveraging AI for creative success without letting it take over as long as they don’t forget who the master is. Discover what he thinks are the most important things to keep in mind if you don’t want AI adoption to come at the price of the main driver of campaign performance – creativity.
5 pitfalls of generative AI to avoid for creative success
Let’s not mince words: AI certainly holds the potential to stifle originality, but only if we let it. A fantasy has been floating around that AI is the savior of marketing, the magical solution to every creative challenge we face. Naturally, the reality is a bit more complex and a lot more dangerous for brands that blindly hand over the creative reins to a machine. If you’re not using it right, AI will churn out the same, safe, soulless content that drowns in the sea of sameness we’re already swimming in. On the other hand, if you know how to use it wisely, it could be the best thing that ever happened for your digital advertising. Here are 5 things you should keep in mind before you integrate AI into your creative workflows.
1. AI is designed for patterns—creativity thrives in breaking them.
At its core, AI is a pattern recognition tool. It’s built to analyze data, spot trends, and replicate what’s worked in the past. That’s great for efficiency and personalization, but here’s the kicker: true originality is about breaking patterns, not following them. AI, by its very nature, doesn’t disrupt—it optimizes. It takes the data it’s fed and works within those constraints to deliver more of the same.
That’s fine if you want to play it safe, but if your goal is to stand out, you’ve just handed over your brand’s creative soul to an algorithm programmed to fit in. Originality doesn’t come from mining yesterday’s successes—it comes from challenging them.
2. AI loves the middle ground—creativity lives on the edges.
AI works by aggregating data, finding commonalities, and producing content that caters to the broadest possible range. It loves the middle ground because that’s where the data points converge. But great brands—the ones we remember, the ones we care about—don’t live in the middle. They live on the edges, in the places where bold, risky ideas happen.
Think about the most iconic campaigns of the last few decades. The ones that made you stop in your tracks. Were they based on safe, average ideas that catered to everyone? Of course not. They were risky, polarizing, and sometimes controversial—and they pushed boundaries. If you’re relying too heavily on AI, you’re likely to end up with creatives that please everyone a little but excite no one a lot.
3. Creativity is messy—AI loves order.
The creative process is inherently messy. It’s chaotic, unpredictable, and often involves a lot of trial and error. Great ideas come from unexpected places, serendipitous moments, and left-field thinking. AI, on the other hand, thrives on order. It’s built to optimize, streamline, and remove inefficiencies. And while that’s useful for getting things done faster, it’s not exactly conducive to the kind of blue-sky thinking that leads to groundbreaking creative.
AI can help you scale your content. It can even help you refine ideas once you’ve got them. But don’t expect it to sit in a room, take a blank sheet of paper, and come up with the next “Just Do It”. Originality needs chaos, and AI is allergic to chaos. If you let AI dominate your creative process, you’ll end up with a lot of smooth, well-produced work that feels polished but says nothing new.
4. AI isn’t brave—creativity requires courage.
Let’s be honest: AI doesn’t have guts. It doesn’t take risks because it can’t—it’s a machine that follows data, not instinct. The best creative work often comes from a place of intuition, from making bold leaps that aren’t backed up by numbers but by a gut feeling that this is the right direction. Originality comes from bravery, from daring to put something out into the world that could just as easily flop as it could succeed.
AI isn’t wired for that kind of risk-taking. It’s designed to mitigate risk, stay within the lines, and deliver what’s statistically more likely to work. And while that’s valuable in certain contexts—like optimizing a landing page for conversions—it’s a death sentence for originality. If your creative strategy is entirely AI-driven, you’ll never make the kind of audacious moves that separate the great from the good.
5. AI can’t feel—creativity needs emotional nuance.
At the heart of every great creative idea is emotion. Not data. Not logic. Emotion. It’s the ability to connect with people on a human level, to make them feel something—joy, sadness, excitement, nostalgia—that makes a campaign unforgettable. And that’s something AI, for all its computational power, can’t replicate.
The emotional nuance required for originality still belongs to human beings. AI can tell you what emotions worked for a particular audience in the past, but it can’t create a truly original emotional connection from scratch. It can analyze and predict, but it can’t feel. And if your creative loses that emotional core, you’re left with content that may be perfectly optimized but utterly hollow.
The bottom line: AI is a tool, not the master
So, can AI stifle originality? Absolutely, if you let it. But the problem isn’t AI itself—it’s how you use it. AI is a tool, an excellent one at that, but it’s not the master. It can help you scale, optimize, and refine your creative work, but it shouldn’t dictate your creative strategy. That’s still the domain of human insight, intuition, and emotion. If you want your brand to stand out, you still need to be brave enough to push boundaries—and that’s something no algorithm can teach you.
Ultimately, the real winners will be those who know how to use AI to enhance their creative process, not replace it—leveraging its power to free up time for the bold, risky, emotionally charged ideas that machines will never be able to dream up.