For leaders navigating a world that has changed faster than their organisations.
The new role of creativity in the age of AI.
ReadThis is not a marketing problem.
It is not a creativity problem.
It is not an AI problem.
It is a structural problem. And it starts at the top.
Marketing was built for a world with a centre. A mainstream. A shared culture that one message could reach.
That world is gone.
Today every person is unique. A combination of experiences, beliefs, identities and references that belongs to no one else. People can be who they want. Refuse what doesn't reflect them.
There are as many worlds as there are human beings.
A brand built on a closed point of view will only connect with a fraction of the people it could reach. Not because the message is bad. Because it isn't theirs.
And yet organisations still run on a structure designed for that disappeared world.
Finance. Operations. Product. And then, at the end, Marketing.
The function that exists to understand people arrives last. After the decisions. After the budgets. After the strategy.
In that structure, a brand can only speak. It cannot listen. Creativity — the one capacity that could read what people feel — is pushed to the end of the chain. Where it can only execute what was already decided.
That structure is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership problem.
Over the past decades, the pressure to measure everything redefined what mattered. Performance became the dominant logic. Speed. Volume. Conversion.
Human became data. Culture became content. Creativity became production.
Briefs arrived with the answers already inside them. Dashboards measured everything except the quality of a human insight.
Organisations kept producing. But they stopped understanding.
Machines generate. They do not interpret. They cannot understand what a person feels, what a culture is going through, what makes something true rather than just plausible.
AI is not the threat. It is the mirror.
Creativity is the human capacity to interpret the world and transform experience into meaning. When a brand understands people before it decides what to say, people see themselves in what the brand creates.
They don't just hear the message. They recognise something true.
Most organisations operate like this:
Strategy → Brief → Creative execution
Creativity arrives last. It decorates decisions already made.
Organisations that want to remain relevant must operate like this:
Creativity stops decorating strategy. It begins to reveal it.
Three movements: Reveal the organisation's real identity. Interpret the cultural environment. Align identity, strategy and expression.
Build from people outward. Not from brand inward.
The mainstream no longer exists.
Marketing was built for a world with a centre. That world is gone. A brand with a closed point of view now excludes most of the people it is trying to reach.
The structure is obsolete.
Finance. Operations. Product. Then Marketing. The function that understands people arrives last. In that structure, a brand can only speak. It cannot listen. That is a leadership problem.
Creativity must move upstream.
Not as execution. As cultural intelligence. Before the brief, before the strategy, before anyone decides what to say. That is the only shift that rebuilds the system.
It is not about you.
It is about the people you exist for.
How did we get here?
Instead of starting with a brief, a small group of young creatives were invited to explore how they actually experienced dating. No message to deliver. No campaign to produce.
What emerged was a powerful insight: dating was no longer simply about meeting someone. It had become a process of self-discovery.
Two years later, Tinder repositioned the brand around identity and emotional connection.
Creative exploration had revealed the shift before strategy recognised it.
Over the past decades, marketing moved through three phases: Information. Persuasion. Performance.
The digital era introduced measurement at scale. Everything became measurable. And what could be measured could be optimised.
Performance became the dominant logic. The brief replaced the question. The metric replaced meaning.
Culture became a resource to extract. Not a system to participate in.
People can sense the difference. And increasingly they reject the gap between what organisations claim and what they truly are.
When creativity is reduced to execution, it becomes replaceable.
When creativity interprets culture, it becomes strategic.
The organisations that recognise this shift allow creativity to operate upstream — before the brief, before the strategy, before anyone decides what to say.