AI is an omnipresent tool in daily marketing operations, from prototyping to insights generation. But how are marketers successfully using the technology to accelerate creativity and consumer insights—without losing the human-influenced storytelling that makes creative shine?.jpg?width=4000&height=2667&name=LOU47544%20(1).jpg)
From left: Swayable's Jenny Wall, Elmwood Brand Consultancy's Daniel Binns, McCann's Tina Allan, and Monks' Roni Sebastian.
Tina Allan, Global Chief Solutions Architect at McCann; Roni Sebastian, Global Executive Creative Director (Google) at Monks; and Daniel Binns, Global CEO at Elmwood Brand Consultancy joined Swayable CMO Jenny Wall at the Swayable House at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to explore how their teams are strategically using AI, creative testing data, and human insights, all of which are necessary to fuel better marketing outcomes. Keep scrolling to view three key insights from their conversation.
1. Scale is only as good as the idea behind it.
AI has made content production faster and less expensive, but speed and volume don’t necessarily equate to quality. Before racing to scale their content output, marketing teams must make sure they have something worth scaling in the first place.
Pre-testing against real consumers, and gaining insights into how creative impacts their perception of a brand, is a vital tool helping teams understand whether their ideas will land before they commit budgets.
Allan at McCann explained how data and insight sharpen—rather than constrain—the creative process.
"We have the ability to creatively activate across the places and spaces our consumers and clients are spending the most money, time, and attention,” said Allan. “With the right data and the right insight, we can redirect the team. There's nothing better than a creative getting a tight brief that says: 'Here's where we're losing and here's the landscape to reinvent right now where all the work is invisible.'"
McCann's Tina Allan on how consumer insights guide the creative process.
2. AI has raised the floor. A marketing team’s job is to raise the ceiling.
As AI makes competent creative work accessible to everyone, the bar for what it means to stand out is fundamentally shifting.
"AI has raised the floor, and for anybody in a business like ours, our job is to raise the ceiling,” said Binns at Elmwood Brand Consultancy. “Any mom-and-pop shop can do ‘good enough.’ Therefore, good enough isn't good enough. If you're Coca-Cola, Heineken, Unilever, or P&G, you cannot accept good enough because everybody's doing good enough. So how are you making sure that your quality of creative is so strong that it will work at every touchpoint?"
The brands that will win are the ones that merge data with creative strategy—not as opposing forces, but as a shared path to creative effectiveness.
Elmwood Brand Consultancy's Daniel Binns on the importance of maintaining creative quality amid the AI evolution.
3. AI will expose a weak strategy faster than it will create a great one.
The most ineffective approach that marketers can make with AI is treating it as a shortcut for strategic work, allowing them to go straight to execution. Sebastian at Monks called AI a ruthless editor: it will surface the weaknesses in a marketing foundation faster than it will generate a high-quality story.
“Just because a brand can create thousands of assets doesn't mean it should,” said Sebastian. “If you don't have great ideas or great insights driving them to begin with, you're just creating more versions of the same ideas that consumers didn't care about in the first place."
Accountability, driven by data and insights that teams gain from pre-testing, is also reshaping how creative teams work.
“With data being much more accessible and insights being so much more accelerated, it just makes us that much more accountable,” Sebastian continued. “That accountability drives more of a partnership, with data scientists bringing the insights, and strategists helping interpret the insights and guide the creative—this creates a much tighter feedback loop that can move much more quickly."
Monks' Roni Sebastian on how data and insights make creatives more accountable.
The savviest marketers are using AI to accelerate and pressure-test a strong creative foundation, rather than replacing one. And that foundation has to connect across the marketing funnel. Top-of-funnel brand building and bottom-of-funnel performance marketing are not separate strategies—they're interdependent. Data should inform both, and brands still treating them as silos are missing the opportunity to connect with consumers at every stage of the journey.
Watch the full conversation, "A Creative, Data Scientist, and AI Agent Walk Into a Bar," below: