I was invited to talk on a panel as part of the IPA EffWeek thought leadership schedule last week – a week packed with events but just a single day conference style. Whilst there was a great line up of speakers from all walks, departments, agencies and clients there were depressingly few creatives. Yeah, yeah, yeah – we creatives are meant to be of the ‘create something beautiful and they will come’ school of thinking – however with the rise of conversations about A.I. and the march of the machines I wonder if this may result in being our Achilles’ heel.

I’ve always been taught that great creative work is only creative work that works: that gets the heartstrings or synapses to instruct the hand to pocket and starts those tills ringing. Starting in an ATL agency but with a move Down Under soon after, taught me the marriage of great idea and need to perform. Yet effectiveness and campaign performance still persists in most creative departments as a dirty after-thought rather than a true test of the idea. Creative should be judged by impact on people, rather than how many gongs you brought back from the sun-drenched terraces of Cannes.

We are being nipped at the heels by AI such as Albert, Lucy and Watson – creating and honing digital campaigns for clients without the need of an agency. They are all about the search for effectiveness. And if we are not even considering the conversations or how to evolve and respond, then we should be worried, very worried indeed.

The subject of the thinktank I sat on was ‘Is creative defensiveness standing in the way of progress’ where I spoke of the position not being as a battle field with us against machine, but as a playing field – where we still get to weave stories that move people, and use the skills and speed of machines to hone our targeting. Creativity is something to be treasured and championed as one of the high arts of being human. The art of using semiotic short cuts and narratives to ignite hundreds of years of cumulative understanding is a wonderful thing. It is also about being effective. Whether it’s the stunning white horses and low rumble of the Guinness ads, seeing and hearing statements from people like you, or simply a beautifully moving image - whatever it is that makes your message stick and garner action – its effectiveness. Not in the hard data end of the deal, but in making someone ‘like’ you, moving someone and being remembered - all marks of effectiveness. And that’s what we should be caring about.

There are so many tools being offered and we should be grabbing every opportunity to play and explore what they can do for us – how they can help us be better and more creative. Whether it’s mastering the basic principles of machine learning from tools such as Google’s Teachable machine or getting deeper under the skin we should be feeding our creative brains. Adding more possibilities to the mix. Understanding rather than ignoring. In this rapidly diverging media world it has to be about using all the tools we have to hand. And if the rise of the machines isn’t about effectiveness of creative then I don’t know what is.

Isn’t it time we started to have the conversations from creative leadership level down, about the meaning of effectiveness and importance of keeping it in mind when we go about creating campaigns. Because if we don’t start having these conversations now, you’ll be sure that Albert and Watson soon will. @IPA #EffWeek