AI might be the future, according to many in the industry. But have we spent enough time reflecting on what makes our intelligence, not the artificial kind, special in the first place? Showing that she is not just alive and kicking but very much alive and thinking (“I think therefore I am,” and all that) Kate Smither, AKA The Tall Planner, reflects on that most human of issues.
The debate about what AI can and can’t do or will or won’t has become the background music of 2025. The one constant in a changeable world. Even as recently as last week, a Guess campaign in Vogue created a new beat for the soundtrack, with the use of an AI generated model. Debate raged about aspirations, beauty ideals and photography.
The argument from the campaign creators, was that “We are here to co-exist together… This is meant to just supplement and to add… a new avenue of marketing.”
That seems to be a common theme—AI as additive, augmenting, supplementing, enhancing, co-existing… not replacing. The conversation has shifted. It’s not about whether it is on the rise or not, whether it is useful or not, it is about what the limitations of it are and how to use it at its best so you can be yours.
As humans we are carving out a place for AI, not the other way around.
Beena Ammanath, the US Technology Trust Ethics leader at Deloitte, said in an interview, “I don’t think it’s AI that’s going to take away your job. It’s the people who know AI and how to use AI effectively that’s going to take away your job.”
When it comes to any kind of intelligence, the most interesting parts are the edges. Thinking in the edges of ideas and possibility is how boundaries are pushed and how limits are tested. It is how discovery is made, on the edge, not in the expected.
And AI doesn’t do unexpected.
In a BBC interview about the difference of brain function versus AI function, Xaq Pitkow, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, made the difference plain.
“A grand mystery in the study of intelligence is what gives us such big advantages over AI systems… The brain has a lot of deep neurological structures related to different functions and tasks, like memory, values, movement patterns, sensory perception and more. These structures let our minds dip into different kinds of thinking to solve different kinds of problems… the mind is built for levels of reasoning, flexibility, creativity and abstract thinking that AI still hasn’t replicated.”
As we dive into the Effectiveness season of our industry, human understanding that connects the dots in unexpected ways to uncover powerful insights, gains a whole new respect in this AI era. The work that works best will celebrate what the human brain can do as it dips into different areas and is pushed to the edge.
This insight renaissance was evident in the work awarded at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this year. Three brands stood out, Coca Cola with ‘Meet me at the Coke sign’, Vaseline with its ‘Verified’ campaign and finally, Dove. All three brands co-created their creativity and built their brands with cultural and human insight combined.
On the 20th of June, Dove won the Grand Prix Cannes Lion Glass: the Lion for Change. It won for its long standing platform documented in a case study entitled ‘Real Beauty: How a soap brand created a global self esteem movement.’
No amount of AI could have done that.
Working on Dove was a career highlight. Proudest work of my life and proudest time working. Being part of the brand’s narrative and success and being counted in amongst the many, many brilliant people who were too, from client and agency teams globally was nothing short of a privilege.
Dove has been the poster child for purpose in our industry. Written up and studied by cohort after cohort of marketers and advertisers over decades. And now in the era of AI It is fast becoming the poster child for human insight and genuine empathy in brands too.
At its core, Dove, is a beauty brand on a mission to make beauty a source of confidence not anxiety. Fighting the stereotypes, standards and expectations that make beauty unachievable for women for over two decades.
As a clear brand mission, this allows Dove to take a point of view, to provoke conversation, to take a clear stand and to connect to women.
Dove’s is a mission born of a data insight, that only 2 per cent of women globally saw themselves as beautiful. It is the kind of data insight and analysis that AI could get to fast today, crunching, analysing and summarising global data. But critically, the data doesn’t tell you that beauty is a personal relationship, it doesn’t tell you what the 2 per cent means or why it is such a stark, stop you in your tracks truth. It doesn’t tell you the reasons, it doesn’t talk to a relationship women have with their own beauty, the human insight does that.
The data identifies a job to do in the beauty category, the human insight lets the brand be a champion of self-esteem.
In Dove’s report The Real State of Beauty, Nina Schick, a global expert on generative AI, “predicts that in the next few years as much as 90 per cent of all online content could be AI generated. We’ll no longer be wondering whether an influencer has doctored their images, we’ll be asking ourselves whether the influencer is a real person at all.”
A new era and a new enemy.
The danger of letting “AI just do its thing” and exist without human insight, nuance and intervention is that it lets this 90 per cent of content default to what AI tends to do – reflect the stereotypes and biases of society that brands like Dove have been fighting against. If the Guess ad is anything to go by, AI puts stereotypes front and centre as they are what it has to go on. What it’s trained on.
AI is not co-existing with the diversity of the real world at all. It is in danger of removing it.
So as smart as AI is, as useful as it is, it is only as effective and smart as humans let it be. The part we have carved out for it, is as another tool in our tool kit. An increasingly essential tool sure but one more focused on efficient analysis and predictive patterns. And that leaves the insights, the unexpected, the effective, emotional and nuanced understanding of the world up to us. And as a strategist, that’s a great place to be.
