AI Didn’t Kill Creativity. Confused Roles Did.

The Dinner Party That Fell Apart

Advertising once worked like a well-planned dinner party. The strategist decided the seating plan, the topics of conversation, and when to change the subject. The creative lit the candles, poured the wine, and told the story that made the whole evening worth remembering.

Now the party has collapsed into chaos. The strategist is in the kitchen fiddling with soufflés. The creative is scribbling seating plans on napkins. And the machine, our shiny new sous-chef, has prepared twenty main courses at once, none of which anybody particularly wants to eat.

It looks lively. In truth it is cannibalism. Everyone is trespassing into everyone else’s garden. And when everyone does everything, nobody does anything well.

The strategist loses the depth of thinking that once made them valuable. The creative loses the craft that once made them indispensable. And the idea, the very heartbeat of advertising, is left without a clear owner.

The Result of the Collapse

For Agencies
Agencies now resemble karaoke bars. Everyone is singing, but the tune is borrowed and the lyrics are hollow. The flood of AI-generated mockups dazzles in pitch rooms but collapses in the real world. Timelines do not accelerate because of efficiency but because confusion creates the illusion of speed.

Without role clarity, agencies drift into performance theatre. They produce mountains of content but little of it connects. They mistake volume for value. And as they try to be everything at once, they slowly become nothing in particular.

For Clients
Clients are promised brilliance but delivered decoration. They receive work that looks like advertising but lacks the spine of strategy and the soul of creativity. They are drowned in outputs yet starved of ideas.

This confusion erodes trust. Clients cannot tell who to hold accountable. Was it the strategist, the creative, or the tool? In the absence of ownership, everything feels disposable. The brand pays the price in irrelevance, sameness, and wasted budgets.

Sooner or later, clients will stop seeing agencies as partners in meaning and memory. They will treat them as suppliers of cheap, forgettable content. Once you become a supplier instead of a partner, the game is already lost.

The Mirage of AI

The industry loves to blame AI. But AI did not kill creativity. It simply handed us a mirror.

AI is not the executioner. It is the accomplice. It exposes our professional insecurities with embarrassing clarity.

Strategists, anxious about irrelevance, spend hours fiddling with Midjourney prompts, writing their own scripts and slogans and call it “ideation.” Creatives, equally anxious, hide behind pseudo-intellectual decks and sprinkle jargon about “cultural tension” like salt on a bland meal. The machine obligingly produces endless outputs. All style, no spine.

The real problem is not the tool but the abdication of responsibility.

We have built an illusion of abundance. Agencies flaunt hundreds of mockups as though volume equals value. Clients nod approvingly, dazzled by the spectacle, only to wonder six months later why nothing shifted in the market. It is like serving twenty desserts while forgetting the main course.

Here lies the paradox. AI makes it easier than ever to generate what something might look like. But it does nothing to answer why it should exist at all. Without the “why,” the “what” is nothing more than decoration.

Once you mistake decoration for strategy, you are no longer an agency. You are a content farm with better lighting.

Who Owns the Idea?

This is the question we dare not ask. Who owns the idea now?

The Strategist
Knows the market, the culture, the numbers. Can explain why something matters. But too often delivers skeletons without flesh.

The Creative
Knows craft, taste, instinct. Can make an idea sing. But without direction risks producing viral fluff shareable, forgettable, meaningless.

The Machine
Generates speed, scale, and surprise. Produces endless options in seconds. But cannot decide meaning. It has no skin in the game.

Today everyone points at everyone else, and the idea becomes orphaned. Nobody claims it, nobody defends it. And if nobody owns the idea, then nobody owns the outcome.

The Missing Role

What agencies need is not blurred roles but sharper ones. Someone must guard the idea. Someone must hold the “why” steady while the “how” evolves. Call them strategist, call them creative, call them lunatic it does not matter. But without a custodian of meaning, the machine will multiply nothing into infinity.

The great irony is that advertising was always about ownership. Someone had to stand in the room and say, “This is the idea. This is what we believe.” Without that moment, there is no risk, no courage, and no chance of resonance.

The danger of AI is not that it replaces us.

The danger is that it tempts us to replace ourselves. We confuse output for ideas, iteration for invention, role-swapping for collaboration.

We tell ourselves that cost-cutting justifies confusion. That speed justifies shallowness. That abundance justifies emptiness.

But every brand is built on memory, meaning, and commitment. And memory, meaning, and commitment do not emerge from machines. They come from people willing to own ideas.

So the question remains. Should we really let this continue just because it cuts costs?