Ad Legends Weren't Geniuses in a Vacuum. AI Shouldn't Be, Either

Testing a platform that lets you collab with agency greats of the past

There’s an old saying: “It takes a village to raise a child.” The same could be said for a creative idea.

True, we love to hero-worship the stalwarts of the advertising industry. But what the Ogilvys, Bernbachs and the Wieldens of our past all had in common was that none of these legends worked in a vacuum. They benefited from collective greatness. Culture.

All to say that the idea to train an AI model on ad legends is as oversimplified as it is misplaced. Said platform recently bowed to some fanfare. But choosing to focus only on the legend means we’ll miss out on the unsung minds and supporting actors—the strategists, researchers, client whisperers, visualizers, creative teams, designers and more. Each of whom contribute to the brief, the ideation and arguably the most valuable part: The selling in of legendary ideas.

I get it: It’s not sexy to celebrate the finance person who signed off on the additional creative overburn it took to craft “Just do it.” But let’s give credit where credit’s due.

These legends created environments and cultures where great ideas flourished and got made. That said, it’s a gross oversimplification of creative leaders if you think they came up with every notion their agency’s names were attached to. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think I’m breaking any sort of honor code here.

Any of these greats would proudly share that a collective effort drove greatness. Even our best and brightest minds are lucky if they see more than a handful of their ideas become iconic campaigns. If it were that easy, we would have found a guaranteed, repeatable formula years ago.

These legends existed in a different era of our industry. A time when advertising was arguably simpler. Fewer channels, less audience fragmentation and audiences who trusted and loved the medium more, ultimately giving it more of their attention. I’m not sure how Dan Wielden would have tackled a Nike Discord brief, a three-second skippable ad format for Levi’s, creator content, a subReddit copy ask, or personalization at scale equalling 10,344 automated assets. Let’s not even imagine asking him to use AI to replace his own thinking.

If we’re trying to bottle the secret sauce of legendary advertising creativity, I’d rather use it as a means to understand how we retain creativity in the face of oncoming headwinds. How can we use AI to protect our value? How should we use creativity to solve bigger problems on a global scale?

But to prove my point—that the aforementioned mission is a fool’s errand—I gave it a try. The task: hype a fictitious spicy snack brand aimed at Gen-Alpha gamers. Perhaps I was hoping for pushback and a refusal to work on my ask until the brief was sharper. Or for radio silence for a week until literally the last minute—and then the algorithm swooping in with the perfect campaign during the client meeting (just like flesh-and-blood teams so often performed in these legends’ golden years).

Alas, I got my Cannes Grand-Prix answer in less than 30 seconds. No fuss and zero begging from me to see the work before the meet.

As for the ideas, well, to be polite, they were reassuringly awful. As my old CCO would have said, “Err. Keep going.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m someone that believes AI can help us. But I also believe that we’re training it on the wrong things and giving it the wrong steer.

We’re capturing outputs while ignoring process, environment and the messy collaborative reality of how great work actually gets made.

If we want AI to make us better, we need to teach it what creativity really looks like—not just the legend, but the entire village.