By Marie-Céline Merret Wirström, Co-Founder MC&V
Advertising has embraced a future in which the person who conceives the campaign also prompts the AI, edits the video, versions the assets, and publishes the work.
Leaner teams and faster delivery are celebrated as progress, but in optimising the workflow we’ve silently stopped protecting the one thing no platform can generate: sustained attention to the idea itself.
The operator trap
Creative work has always involved tools, but there is a difference between understanding the craft and carrying every part of the production. At some point, operational responsibility stops adding value and starts taking attention away from the creative thinking that matters most.
We’re currently producing a hybrid television campaign where the creative director summed up the reality perfectly: “We want to make this properly. But if the budget doesn’t stretch, I’ll sit in a room for a week and build it myself.”
That wasn’t enthusiasm for AI; it was compromise. An experienced creative director was preparing to spend a week executing production rather than directing the idea because specialist craft had become the expendable line item.
That is the operator-trap conundrum in all its glory. The tools exist, the pressure is real, and the people who should be shaping ideas are increasingly responsible for producing them.
The invisible cost
When creatives spend their time operating production pipelines instead of developing ideas, quality doesn’t disappear overnight. It slowly gives way to speed, leaving less time to question, refine and strengthen the work.
The result is content that fulfils the brief but rarely creates lasting impact.
The industry already recognises the problem – ADMA research found that 48% of Australian marketers see oversaturation of AI-generated content as a growing concern, while 41% worry creativity is declining.
For brands, the risk is crystal clear, and the efficiency gains are measurable, but the loss of quality is often invisible. When everyone is producing, nobody is protecting the idea anymore, as the brief becomes a prompt and accountability for creative vision slowly disappears.
One Australian consumer brand replaced its longtime designer and motion artist, bringing production in-house using Canva and generative AI. Campaigns kept shipping, but the brand gradually lost consistency, distinction and craft. What looked like an efficiency gain became a performance cost.
Producing assets is not the same as designing a brand.
What brands should ask
The question isn’t whether your agency is using AI, it’s whether someone still has the responsibility and the time to protect the idea.
If that role no longer exists, you’re taking on commercial risk. Brands built on generic AI-generated aesthetics become increasingly difficult to distinguish from competitors using the same tools. When everything looks produced, but nothing feels considered, audiences stop paying attention. The cost is brand equity and market share lost over time.
Give time back
The most valuable asset a creative has is not their ability to use AI, but their ability to generate ideas that surprise, shift perception and create cultural impact. Those ideas come from curiosity, human soul, experience and instinct, and they disappear when creatives spend their time producing assets instead of thinking.
There is a fine line between creative development, where “images become ideas”, and a senior creative having an aha moment in the shower for the most award-winning idea.
AI is an extraordinary creative partner, accelerating exploration and execution, but it cannot replace creative direction. Like directors, designers and editors before it, the technology still needs people with vision and craft to shape the work with intention.
The creative process now needs more protection than ever because execution has become faster while thinking has become more valuable.
Give creatives the time to think and let the production specialists bring the ideas to life – that’s when magic happens, regardless of gen AI or any other tools.
The organisations that protect that time will create the work that stands apart.