Creatives Can Be Creatives Again

I love brands, I love design, I love beautifully crafted things, I love great advertising, I love creativity..

The above, a remake of a legendary song, as an end to a legendary trio, powered by Volvo, turned into a commercial. Incredible video/commercial, it gives me chills until this day.. I can talk about an hour why this collaboration, is nothing but pure magic.

The big question for many now is though, is it all under attack because of technology? I don’t think it is under attack, I think it is changing and it definitely will evolve.

While I was traveling last weekend, my mind went to a very simple question: what will a brand look like in 10-years? I didn’t have an answer immediately but after letting the question sit in my mind for a few days I came to an interesting insight that I want to discuss with you today.

Let me start with describing the situation as how it is today and let’s focus, for the sake of the conversation, on fashion brands specifically. So from now on, when I refer to “a brand” I will mean a clothing focused brand.

During my time at .Monks (formerly Media.Monks) I had the pleasure to work with some of the biggest brands in the world. I have been in rooms with brands like Nike, Tommy Hilfiger / Calvin Klein, Gucci, Adidas, Mugler, BMW and many more. It was the first time that I got an insight look into how these brands really operate. To be honest, sometimes it was shocking (and disappointing) to see. These brands have become so big, thousands of people working for them, all trying to add a little piece to the gigantic puzzle. The honest truth? Not a lot of creativity, disconnection between teams, executers instead of innovators, with obviously some incredible exceptions.

Let’s take a closer look at leadership at our favorite brands. Because the thing most people don’t realize: the leadership layer of big fashion and FMCG brands is rarely, if ever, creative. Just look at who’s actually running the show. CEOs almost always come from operations, finance, or general management. Take Chanel, for example. Its current CEO, Leena Nair, came up through Unilever’s HR department. Kering just announced their new CEO which comes over from car brand Renault. Yes, he has some marketing experience it seems but I don’t think Kering is bringing him in for his creativity. Further more, at LVMH, and most major houses, top roles go to former consultants or industrial CEOs, not designers. These brands are businesses first, built to scale, not studios for artistic vision.

Creative leadership, when it exists at all, is often symbolic. Roles like Chief Creative Officer or Chief Design Officer rarely sit at the same table as the CEO, CFO, or COO. They might shape the aesthetic, but they don’t steer the company. And even within their domain, creative leaders are highly replaceable. According to a Bernstein report, creative directors at top luxury brands last an average of just five years, with many signing contracts of only three. In the past year alone, 13 major fashion brands including Gucci, Celine, Chanel, and Valentino have swapped out their creative heads.

I have personally seen it many times that a CMO does not really have the power to change the brand at the highest level. The pattern is clear: creativity defines the brand’s face, but not its future. The people with power are operators. The people with taste are accessories.

That’s the paradox. The bigger a brand gets, the more creativity becomes cosmetic, something to “review,” not to lead with. The amount of times I was frustrated because ballsy, out of the box, crazy ideas got killed because nobody could justify the potential ROI in direct sales etc. It sucked.

Don’t get me wrong. I fully understand that all of these people are needed to run these brands, a business is a business. I am all for it, I am very entrepreneurial minded myself and hard decisions need to be made sometimes. It is not all rainbows and butterflies 🤣.

But what if this can change?

What if the very technologies people fear, AI, agents, automation, are exactly what will give creatives their power back?

Right now, the reason operators rule is because scaling a global brand is insanely complex. You need to manage supply chains, inventory, logistics, legal, compliance, customer support, performance marketing, retail planning, the list is endless. And for decades, solving those problems required hiring more people, building more layers, and bringing in people who knew how to “run the machine.”

But what if, in ten years or so, AI can do all of that?

Suddenly, things that required entire departments, like finances, demand forecasting, market entry analysis, dynamic pricing, customer service, can be handled by agents or automated systems. Not perfectly yet, but we’re getting there fast. And once those operational tasks are handled by machines, what’s left?

Vision. Taste. Culture. Emotions.

The core of a brand becomes the part that can’t be automated. The human layer. The creative layer.

There is so much fear, especially among creatives. Massive pushback against AI generated art, content, ads. Fear that the internet will be flooded with heartless bullsh*t (which is probably true). But I find it too easy to dismiss the tech completely because of these fears.

Digital designers claiming that AI generated stuff is not art. Wait what?

There were 100% people saying the same thing when digital design became a thing, aka your art now. The same goes for music, photography (I shoot both film and digital now), movies, animation and the list goes on and on.

I am more than positive that AI will evolve human creativity in ways that we can’t see at the moment. It is so hard to understand what this will all turn into that there is no way we can say all it could bring and how it will change us, our children, our world, our creativity. Again, it is easy to go to the negative side of it. But it can’t all be dark and horrible.

In the same way drum machines didn’t kill music, AI won’t kill brand-building.

So how could a brand in the future look like? Continuing with the train of thought that we started above. A brand, run by a handful of creatives with a certain vision and taste.

They don’t need a massive HQ. They don’t need a thousand employees. What they have is clarity of direction and a set of AI agents that do the rest.

One agent handles production and supplier coordination. Another manages customer service across time zones. A third is trained on the brand’s voice and generates campaign ideas, copy, and content variations. A fourth keeps track of inventory, forecasts demand, and handles e-commerce optimisation. And the creative team? They focus on what they do best: storytelling, design, product, emotion, vibe.

Suddenly, the bottlenecks that once required layers of bureaucracy, meetings, approvals and middle management are gone. Gone. You don’t need to dilute vision to scale. You don’t need to hand your soul over to operators just to run the business. You can scale soul.

This isn’t a call for every designer to become a founder, with a goal to build a billion dollar brand. But it is a call for those who want to express their creativity their own way, without corporate boundaries. Back to my earlier article, maybe creating something for a small community can be enough for you to enjoy the life you want.

There is already amazing stories happening right now, not specifically because of AI, but it shows small teams with a dream can do something amazing. Look at Corteiz, they didn’t launch with a massive media plan. He started by producing and distributing screen‑printed crewnecks and tees directly from his home or from the boot of a car People lined up in London because they believed in the vibe, in the hype, it became culture. Created a movement and now hit one million units sold.

And tools keep getting better. You can now prototype your entire brand, from logo to product line to lookbook without writing a single line of code or hiring a team. Want campaign assets? Flora. Want your online store built? Shopify Magic. Want customer service that sounds like you? Voiceflow. Want a hype video in 10 minutes? Veo3 w/ Higgsfield AI. This used to take hundreds of thousands of euros. Now? Maybe a few hundred.

This isn’t to say operations disappear overnight or that brands will fire 95% of their people tomorrow. For now, we’re entering a hybrid era where AI handles more, which could result in more short term excitement for creatives working at these brands. Why?

At the moment bold ideas die in boardrooms because they come with a price tag and no guaranteed return. But when the cost of creating is near zero, the cost of experimenting is too. You can try ten creative routes, launch five micro-campaigns, drop six collections. Not all of them need to work. Because when creativity becomes cheap to scale, the risk of failing gets cheaper too.

The tools aren’t perfect and aren’t ready for scale so a billion dollar brand, built by a few people, won’t happen in the next few months, I know that. But the goal of (most) of my writing is to open up minds to what could be possible in the future. With what these tools can already do today, what could be possible in 5 years? Or 10?

Anything. If you have a vision, drive and ambition.

This doesn’t mean it will be easy. Taste still matters. Strategy still matters. But it does seem like all of this innovation is driving power back to the hands of the creatives, the visionaries, the crazy ones (as one famous brand used to say, talking about great advertising 😉).

So instead of working for Dior, Gucci, or Nike… why not build your own? F*** all of them who decide to kill creativity because they are afraid it will hurt conversion numbers. Soon you can decide completely for yourself.

That’s the real revolution. AI won’t replace creatives. It will replace the people who replaced creatives. So when people ask what a brand might look like in ten years, my answer is this:

It will be smaller. It will be smarter. It will be more human.

Built by creatives. Run by agents. And owned by culture.

I can’t wait to see what will be created by awesome humans in the next few years. Maybe we should start proving the point with the people in our WhatsApp community, who is down? 👀 

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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