Will Reynolds.
Will Reynolds, Managing Director, Windsorborn
We’ve all seen our marketing budgets tightening. Brands are now demanding effective solutions without the financial flexibility they once had. Agencies and creative teams face increasing pressure to deliver high-impact, results-driven campaigns with fewer resources. For creatives, this means stretching every dollar, every idea, and every execution to make it work.
Cost versus creativity
The challenge of balancing cost and creativity often means sacrificing the high-end polish for simplicity that effectively communicates the message. That’s not always a bad thing.
This transition can be advantageous, especially as media budgets increasingly flow towards platforms like Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Google. These platforms favour engaging content that does the heavy lifting. Think user-generated content (UGC), memes, GIFs, text-based images, and short-form videos.
However, the demand for more formats, variations, and rigorous testing on these platforms can escalate production costs unless agencies leverage tools like AI. And that’s where things get interesting. Here lies the transformative potential of AI within creative workflows.
AI is reshaping how creative teams operate by streamlining repetitive tasks, personalising content, and handling the grunt work of campaign testing. While AI may not yet be the primary idea generator, it’s a valuable production tool. Humans remain at the helm of strategy and ideation, infusing originality into concepts while AI handles execution and refinement.
The role of AI in creativity
Despite some resistance from traditionalists who may view AI as a threat to creative integrity, its integration is becoming essential for future commercial creativity. We don't think AI is the idea generator, just yet, it’s more the production assistant. Humans spark originality, AI can produce, then humans can polish.
As CMOs chase immediate ROI and quick wins it’s tempting to lean on the sugar hit of performance marketing, there is a risk of neglecting long-term brand growth. Sustainable success hinges on finding a balance between brand-building initiatives and performance-driven tactics.
In this evolving landscape, embracing AI not only enhances efficiency but also lets creative teams focus on what truly matters: crafting compelling narratives that resonate with audiences while navigating the complexities of modern marketing demands.
For our client, Police Bank, a mutual bank serving the financial needs of its members, we faced the challenge of delivering high-quality performance advertising within a constrained budget. Our creative team developed a concept featuring illustrations of their members in various scenarios. Instead of outsourcing to an illustrator, we leveraged AI technology to generate custom illustrations in-house.
We then refined these illustrations working collaboratively with the client, incorporating any feedback throughout. This approach allowed us to maintain control over the creative process while ensuring that the illustrations authentically represented their members.
This allowed us to quickly and cost-effectively produce a suite of illustrations. Using AI tools, we also generated multiple ad variations with minimal effort. We focused on adjusting CTAs, post copy, and button text to facilitate robust testing. Although the campaign is still in progress, early results are promising, showing significant progress toward our target for
home loan applications. The campaign is still ongoing, but the early results are already promising, we’re showing significant progress towards our target for home loan applications.
The future of commercial creativity
The future of commercial creativity lies in the seamless integration of human ingenuity and AI-driven efficiency. As things evolve, the best creative work will come from teams that embrace technology as an enabler. AI will handle the heavy lifting, automating production, enhancing personalisation, and powering rapid testing, while us humans focus on consulting, strategy and big ideas. We will essentially become curators. We should also start to see more out of the box thinking as human minds are untethered from the mundane and free to wander.