Actual Intelligence: What Human Creativity Delivers That AI Can’t

If you’re relying on bots to continuously optimize your advertising and marketing campaigns, you may be missing out??

While algorithms are great at honing messaging based on the information they’re fed—and artificial intelligence can help you create new combinations—it’s important to make room for “actual intelligence.”?

We’re referring to the creative investigation, ingenuity, and sometimes agonizing second-guessing that only the human brain can process. It takes real people to deliver unique, quirky, and risky ideas that could catapult your messaging into the cultural zeitgeist.??

AI isn’t replacing ingenuity anytime soon?

If you don’t make room in your plan—and budget—to keep pushing boundaries with human creativity and know-how, even the best campaign optimization tools will deliver diminishing returns over time.?

When everyone is excited about a product, ideas flow easily, and iterative support from algorithms will do the job—for a while. But over time, performance will wane as ideas and messaging become "played out."

And what about unknown products or “un-sexy” brands?? While AI might be able to help you generate some raw ideas with the right prompts, it takes brainstorming based on shared human experiences to develop relatable and engaging creative wins.?

Are bots going to have dinner with the company founder and dig into what motivated them to create the product? Can bots try the product for a week or a month and tell us their favorite things about it? Do they know what warms our hearts, engages belief, and drives action? Of course not.??

Here, we’ve arrived at the central limitation of AI?

AI is born from logic. That logic is so powerful that it knew how this sentence was likely to end before it ended. Likely to end. But not guaranteed to end.??

We humans often don’t make the logical choice in the thousands of decisions we make every day—and especially not in our consumer behavior. If we did, kale would outsell KitKat Bars. We notoriously begin decisions with the heart and then justify them with logic. AI begins every decision with logic and then awaits our instructions on how to give its output more “heart.”??

Unless we provide the heart, generated content can only sell with logic. Sure, algorithms will improve and make this content sound more and more human over time, but it will always start from a point of view that humans only embrace because we think we ought to.??

That's not how you drive action.??

None of this is meant to condemn AI. Algorithms and AI have their place in advertising and marketing campaigns—as long as we set realistic expectations.??

In an increasingly AI-driven marketing landscape, it’s real people who will keep your ideas clever and engaging?

The more innovative ideas you test, the better automated optimization becomes. Human creativity—no matter how “out there,” quirky, or risky—delivers ever-increasing performance across the board.??

Rely on people to deliver creative ideas and AI to make logical decisions about getting them in front of the right prospects and customers.??

If you’d like to discuss the less-automated path to ever-increasing results, DM us.?Or better yet, let’s chat offline.?

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