Marketers may not be using AI in the way they should be. Zambrero CMO Bronwyn Heys believes that chucking a prompt in and accepting the first answer, or not “debating with the technology”, is a complete waste of time.
Heys, who has been Zambrero CMO for the past six months, believes marketing teams going all in on the technology should ensure they’re using it in a way that delivers the most impressive results, and often that’s not focusing on the front or end of the process.
Speaking with B&T at the humAIn conference in Sydney on Tuesday, Heys said marketers must approach AI with humans (themselves) on either side of the process, like two pieces of bread in a sandwich.
Her approach? What she calls the “human sandwich”, where people provide the creative thinking and direction at the beginning, use AI to accelerate the process, then step back in to question, refine and improve the output.
What is the bread made of?
“The human is the bread and the middle is AI,” Heys said. “The human puts great inputs into the AI, the AI does its work, and then the human is the other side of the sandwich.”
Heys moved to the Mexican food chain after serving for four years as CEO of the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI). Previously she has held the CMO role at Mars and worked as senior director of marketing and menu at McDonald’s Australia.
Heys said marketers who simply feed prompts into AI and accept the first response risk producing “generic work” with little to distinguish one brand from another. This is otherwise known as “AI sameness”.
Heys said she’s hearing more and more examples of “AI sameness” within agency pitches.
“I have spoken to a few marketers, and they are saying they are seeing, particularly in pitches, some similar things from agencies,” she said.
And some agencies are also aware of it. Earlier this year creative agency Messy wrote a blog post addressing “the new slide” appearing in agency pitch decks.
The slide features a list of logos including the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, Firefly, and sometimes some obscure ones – arranged to signal technological fluency. The headline above them parrots cliches like: “AI-powered creativity” or “The future of brand” or “Human intelligence, amplified”.
“While the logos on the slide tell you which tools the agency has subscriptions to. They say nothing about how those tools are used, by whom, in which phases of work, and – most importantly – what they actually change about the quality or speed of what gets delivered,” Messy wrote.
“The agency uses AI to generate options quickly in pitches, presenting more work in less time to win the business, then reverts to standard workflows in delivery. Or it uses AI for production tasks – image generation, copy variants – without any corresponding change to the strategic quality of the work. Or it describes AI as part of the process without disclosing which specific decisions AI touches and which remain human.
None of this is necessarily dishonest. But it produces a pitch that overstates the operational reality of how the work will be made. The client buys AI-accelerated strategy and receives standard-pace execution with a Midjourney image in the deck.
The fundamentals can’t be overlooked
According to Heys, the fundamentals within the creative process are more crucial than ever.
“I think one of the things that I love about my profession is that marketers have great pride in the work that they do. They work really collaboratively with creatives to get to great work, and I wouldn’t ever want to put something out that I thought people would laugh at,” she said.
And while she believes “the ability to do storytelling in AI is enormous”, driving the insight behind an idea, the storytelling and the ability to differentiate a brand is increasingly important.
“A bad marketer is still going to be a bad marketer. A good marketer is still going to be a good marketer, and they’re going to put AI over the top of it,” she said.
“To me, a good marketer has all those fundamental skills and understands everything … brand, insights, data analytics, commerciality, all of these skills and how all of that brings together an idea or a program. AI goes on top of that to help make that happen.”
‘If you’re not curious, go home’
Heys also warned that marketers who are not curious when using AI technology are wasting their time.
“If you are not curious and if you do not have that in your DNA as a marketer, you might as well go home,” she said. “You need to actually say ‘That’s not quite right’, because as we know, AI is designed to make you look good.
“Strategy still needs to be developed at the beginning. A creative idea still needs to be developed. So, you know, maybe those pieces need to be still a lot more of the human, and then iterations of the creative idea are through AI.”
Marketers should be prepared to “repeatedly question and refine” AI-generated work, rather than accepting a finished product too early on.
“It’s got to be one of the hardest working employees,” she said. “I would do things five to 10 times on it, I’d walk away from it, then I would look at it, and then I’d come back and use it again.”
New skills required
Heys said marketers need to tool up for the AI era. This includes skills such as prompting, questioning and digging deeper, while critical thinking skills are needed to ensure teams recognise when AI output was wrong or simply not good enough.
The challenge, she said, was ensuring younger marketers learn to interrogate ideas and understand the strategic thinking behind them, rather than relying on technology to do the work for them.
“You have to lead by example and show them that things are not acceptable the first way they come out,” she said. “You need to have more, still have strategic discussions about things. You need to challenge AI output, and you need to ask them and set them up and give them those skills.”
And when it comes to using AI, she said it shouldn’t just be about efficiency, but about effectiveness too. AI should allow marketers to spend more time understanding customers, developing stronger insights and delivering commercial outcomes.
“We can actually do the stuff that we all signed up for, and that you really want to do,” she said. “And that’s exciting for marketers. How do I engage with the customer? How do I really get an insight that engages with them? And how can I actually deliver something about my brand and my product?”
Does the size of your budget really matter?
Heys also suggested AI could help level the playing field for smaller businesses, allowing them to create content more quickly without necessarily needing the production budgets traditionally associated with large campaigns.
Rather than being judged primarily on the size of their budgets, she believes marketers will increasingly be assessed on their speed, agility and ability to connect with culture.
“I actually don’t think that [the budget] is going to give you a big advantage. I think it’s going to be nimbleness, reactiveness, ability to connect with culture, and your ability to really understand the insight and make that happen very, very quickly.”
“How quickly can we do things? I think that will be much, much more important in 2030.”
