Episode 221: High velocity, low spark? Karen Cooper on saving creativity from AI overload

At Ignite, you're going to be talking to delegates about how they can sustain creativity in high velocity marketing teams.

And as we know, marketing at the moment is very go, go, go.

You know, as soon as you finish one thing, it feels like we're straight onto the next thing.

So I suppose my question, because I don't want to go over the same ground of what you're going to cover at the event, but my question is around what have you actually seen happening in marketing teams that made you want to talk about this at Ignite in the first place?

Yeah, it's very personal to me.

I've seen it multiple times at multiple different companies and different positions.

And as we expand our goals, as we increase our goals as a company, combined with adding in different tool sets like AI, adding into, you know, the ever-increasing political climate changing and things like, or ever-changing political climate, things like that have really, have really... change the scope of a creative team.

I've also gone back and forth with where, you know, I've been in companies where they've outsourced it, but in companies where it's in a house and it's kind of cyclical, it goes, okay, we're going to save money.

We're just going to have an agency.

And then it's okay.

We're going to save money, not have an agency and pull people in house.

And then all this time of this kind of back and forth, the work just keeps increasing.

And what we're asking of our teams keeps increasing.

And yeah, last fall it kind of reached a point where of frustration for me because I love the, the, uh, bringing on new tool stacks and especially AI and incorporate AI into existing tools.

Um, I think that's just really fun and it's exciting for me, um, as a creative and it's exciting for my team, but there's this push to have, um, these tools solve everything and be able to scale and do more when it's, um, That's just not how they were made.

We still have to have the human element.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I think creativity in order to thrive, you kind of need that space.

You need the ability to breathe.

And it feels like if you've got a checklist of 300 things to do in a day and you've got five minutes set aside to come up with that million dollar creative idea, it's probably not going to happen.

So I suppose then, you know, before we go any further, it'd be really good to know what you think the cost of having a marketing team that's lost its creative spark is.

I appreciate that's absolutely not an exact science, but I'd love to know, you know, in what ways do you think those teams lose out?

So with my own research, reaching out to industry peers, talking with my team, as well as my husband's a graphic designer.

And so just looking and listening to the team around me, it really, we're really sacrificing some morale.

We're sacrificing the ability to be who they want to be whenever they're developing an actual project.