My old chairman had this bloody annoying habit of shouting, “IN OR OUT!”
Usually when one of us stood in a doorway, cigarette in hand, chatting to a colleague, with the door half open.
I used to think he was making some grand point about commitment. Looking back, I suspect he was mostly worried about the air-conditioning escaping. Fair enough. Electricity wasn’t free.
But lately I’ve been hearing his voice again.
Because that’s pretty much where the advertising industry is standing with AI. In the doorway.
Some of us are experimenting, creating things we couldn’t have produced a year ago. Others are arguing about whether AI-generated work counts as creativity. And a few are quietly using it while publicly expressing grave concern about it. Very advertising.
We don’t have to love AI. It gets things wrong, makes convincing rubbish and sometimes produces work with all the personality of a hotel conference room.
But refusing to understand it isn’t protecting creativity. It’s protecting familiarity.
Being ‘in’ doesn’t mean handing every brief to a machine and calling yourself an innovator. It means learning what it does brilliantly, where it falls flat, and how to use it to make better work.
We could use the time AI saves to think harder. Or produce 400 variations of a bad idea before lunch. Knowing the difference is still our job.
And staying ‘out’? Nothing dramatic happens tomorrow. The briefs still arrive. The meetings still happen. Someone still asks whether we can make the logo bigger.
But gradually, clients expect possibilities, speed and ways of working we haven’t bothered to explore. What once looked like experience starts to look rather like reluctance.
Perhaps somebody needs to shout it again.
IN OR OUT?
At least this time there’s rather more at stake than the electricity bill.