Four years in, here's what I've actually learned—and why the most powerful thing a brand can do is to believe in something.
James L. Brooks said, and I quote from S3E4 of The Comeback, "that great comes from a group of writers beating themselves up to make a better joke—those broken, beautiful souls is what make something great, and you didn't see it coming."
He was talking about TV writers. He might as well have been talking about every creative team in branding and marketing who's ever stared at a brief at midnight, pushed an idea past the obvious, and found something true.
That's the thing about great creative work: it comes from somewhere. From lived experience, from unexpected collisions of insight, from the kind of brainstorm that feels more like a therapy session than a strategy meeting. The result gives audiences an "oh shit" moment—a flash of recognition so specific it feels personal.
That is not the same thing as generating options.
If you watched The Comeback on HBO, you know it has an antagonist in its third season: AI, aka AL. A writers' strike has shuttered the room. The algorithms have moved in. The broken, beautiful souls have been replaced by something faster, cheaper, and utterly unable to make you feel seen.
I can't stop seeing the parallel to my own work in branding.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, our industry has been in a sprint—reading every book, taking every course, experimenting with every tool. And I'll admit it: I was all in. Four years later, I feel less like a master and more like a recent college undergrad—full of energy, humbled by how much there is still to figure out. The difference is that this time I'm not 22. I've been around long enough to have watched technology reshape creative work before.
Remember when design software democratized polish? Suddenly, everyone could make something beautiful. The problem was that slick and ideas are not the same thing. Ideas started disappearing inside aesthetics. The work looked better and meant less.
My response then, and now, was the same: go back to the fundamentals. I pushed my designers to pick up pencils again. To sketch with their hands, to sit with an idea before executing it, to let the concept lead the craft.
AI has created the same seduction on a much larger scale. The feeds are already flooded with slop—content that is derivative, statistically average, trained on everything. It is fast. It is abundant. And it is making it harder to hear the signal through the noise.
My job, as someone who runs a creative practice and has spent years teaching, is to insist on balance. Not to reject AI, but to refuse to let it replace the thing it cannot do.
It cannot generate meaning. It can generate options.
The insight that unlocks a brand story comes from somewhere deeply human: a tension the client has never articulated, a cultural moment that nobody's claimed yet, an emotional truth that lives in the space between what a product is and what people actually need it to be. Our best brainstorms look messy and feel personal. The good news? Unlike a psychoanalysis, they have a deadline.
The future of creativity in marketing isn't about making more content faster. It's about the most superhuman act available to a brand: belief.
AI is a powerful tool for brands that know what they stand for. It is a hall of mirrors for the ones that don't.
The brands that figure that out first won't just survive the AI moment. They'll own it.