AI is the inspiration for a new frontier in creativity

In the past decade, marketing has increasingly become obsessed with efficiency and optimisation as the digital era added new dimensions of performance tracking, conversion metrics and scalability. The benefits of delivering relevant advertising and content — at scale — are high, but the pressure to deliver faster and cheaper has not gone without consequence. This drive to efficiency has resulted in much of the marketing output disappearing into a world of grey sameness.

But there is a next step in this evolution, and I think it is going to benefit our industry in surprising and fundamental ways. We are about to unlock new frontiers as we move beyond efficiency and optimisation with the primary driver being a renewed focus on creative expansion and breakthrough.

The acceleration of hyperpersonalisation at scale

With big brands owning terabytes of customer data, marketers have to make it count. Hyperpersonalised consumer content is growing exponentially — with content demand expected to multiply enormously in the next two years — and yet very few brands have felt ready to scale that effort. That’s a content crisis in the making. Brands are under pressure.

And with an adoption curve never witnessed before, generative AI tools have burst onto the scene and sent many marketers into a tailspin. It is in-the-moment learning: how to harness GenAI’s potential, how it helps, how it can harm. Everyone is playing with it, but very few know how to really wield it yet. It’s a leveller of sorts.

One thing we are starting to figure out as marketing and brand people is that GenAI is capable of achieving much greater scale, structure and speed than we can in the often overly complex and hurried campaign planning process. Agentic AI — where a beehive of differently skilled AI “agents” come together to tackle big jobs with lots of moving parts — is revving up this potential even more. It is certainly taking efficiency and optimisation beyond what was predicted.

AI will impact the future of work in ways we don’t yet understand, but where it is most powerful is in the heavy lifting: it can take information from internal and external sources and turn it into deep data analysis, market research, insight consolidation, workflows, timelines, asset tagging, translations and versioning. All of it. At the same time. Where the standard process is linear, AI can consolidate everything simultaneously.   

That’s not creativity. That’s the grunt work. And if we get that off our plates, we free up time and money and cognitive space. We can take the 10 ideas that AI brings us and whittle it down and sculpt it, using our local knowledge and emotional intelligence to make it relevant.

Marketing reinvention is already here — and it’s rebirthing The Big Idea 

Marketing reinvention is under way and it isn’t theoretical. At Accenture Song, we’re harnessing AI tools in the marketing value chain at various intervention points to deliver better results and drive efficiency. We’ve seen local telecoms and retail campaigns, for instance, go from labour-intensive, manual Black Friday campaigns to AI-powered rollouts with double the return on investment in the space of a year. AI can help with generating the creative brief, consolidating internal data and third-party research, mapping channels to content formats, customising content and producing fully localised assets for different regions — all from a single centralised creative environment. 

But the most exciting part? AI is bringing back play. It’s enabling teams to experiment with wacky, joyful, surprising ideas and campaigns. We can explore so much more, because AI is very good at collating information we can review. Interacting with AI also produces fun and unexpected results. Just think of the recent AI-generated action figure selfie trend. Someone who had the mind space and playful mood kick-started the fad. The point is that we can make AI bring us what we need so that we can go off and do what AI never can — finding those brilliantly creative, effervescent and even risky human creative ideas. I think it’s going to spark a new boom in creativity: The Big Idea.

Let it split so that the cream can rise to the top 

For the past decade, marketing has been stuck in the grey zone between efficiency and originality. There has been a great blurring of lines between repeatable tasks and real creativity.

GenAI is splitting those streams again. Let the humans be irrational. This is the moment where big, bold creative thinking can rise to the top again — and that’s where the true value will be. Lateral, original, culture-tapping creativity is about to become premium again.

It’s time to get brave 

Of course, there are real barriers we still need to overcome. We’re still afraid of AI, and rightly so, because insights or ideas generated by AI can be tainted by bias; it can lack nuance and produce work guilty of cultural misappropriation. Humans are still needed to sense-check and guide the work.

Teams are also nervous about job losses, about skill shifts, about the unknown. Those are valid concerns, because some marketing roles will disappear or change. Junior creatives won’t need to spend their careers doing the donkey work any more. But that doesn’t mean the end of opportunity. It just means we’re entering an era of reskilling and refocusing for a future that looks quite different from the past. 

Corporate and marketing leaders need to invest now to get maximum benefit and early momentum out of GenAI. Build safe-to-learn cultures. Provide training. Set responsible AI guardrails. Make space to explore. Encourage experimentation. Let your people play with AI. If you don’t, your competitor will. The good news is that no-one is head-and-shoulders ahead at this AI game yet. This is a rare moment where everyone’s still figuring it out together. Jump in now. 

This also means investing in quality data and smart infrastructure and bringing the right people with technical and analytical skill sets on board to help drive this process, in collaboration with AI and human marketers. Because without clean, structured data, even the best AI tools are just guessing. Businesses that are already winning are the ones that took data seriously early on. They’re not experimenting with AI because it’s trendy. They’re already immersed in it because they were ready when the GenAI moment arrived. 

If you’re in marketing and you’re nervous about GenAI, you’re not alone. But here’s what I tell our clients: don’t run away from the machines — run towards them. Keep an open mind and push yourself to imagine the extent of what is possible. Build teams of diverse humans and tools that collaborate. Let AI take care of the repetitive stuff and enable your human teams to think bigger and bolder. 

Here’s the thing: the brands that will win won’t be the ones that create more volumes of work, flooding all channels with cheap AI-generated content. In this stage of great change, our best work is going to be the bold, original, playful and deeply human — work that we are now freed up and empowered to do.

Let the machines do the grunt work while we use creativity to truly unlock powerful, impactful ideas. 

Claire Cobbledick is associate director at Accenture Song, South Africa. 

The big take-out: Let AI take care of the repetitive stuff and enable your human teams to think bigger and bolder.