John F Kennedy Jr once said “conformity is the enemy of growth”. We probably should have paid more attention.
It’s never been easier to conform. Broadly speaking, companies have access to the same technologies and the same data, using the same channels to target the same consumers with the same products. All too often they hire from the same talent pool to action the same advice from the same consultancies to the same problems.
Small wonder, then, that they get the same result. And that result, across the largest players in most major categories, has been slowing organic growth over the past 30 years.
Conformity only works as a strategy when you’re in a dominant market position with high barriers to entry, but those days are gone. It’s never been easier to access markets, capital, manufacturing, distribution or sales channels, which is great for consumer choice but not great if you expect to charge a premium, steal market share or keep a customer loyal.
Creativity is the antidote to conformity. It prevents brands from descending into a primordial ooze of sameness. To put it another way, it helps brands to build relevant differentiation and, in that differentiation, create value. Our own brand study, BAV, has shown that brands with a reputation for creativity grow revenue 2.4 times faster than those that don’t.
The business case for creativity has been made compellingly in the past by the likes of Forrester and McKinsey and, in truth, few CEOs I know question the value of creativity. Where they struggle is in understanding how to effectively embed it into the ways they work and prove its impact on the day-to-day business.
All of which brings us to artificial intelligence.
For fear of pointing out the obvious, intelligence (artificial or otherwise) and creativity are not the same thing but they are related. An academic study in the publication Intelligence looked into that relationship and had two clear conclusions:
1) Higher intelligence has a strong correlation with creative potential.
2) Higher intelligence has no correlation with creative achievement.
Which is to say, intelligence is necessary but not sufficient to “be creative”.
I believe this is as true of artificial as it is of human intelligence. In the hands of people who understand both sides, AI is the force multiplier of creativity, it can create better insights, stronger ideas, world-class execution and proven impact across all touchpoints, BUT it is neither a replacement for creativity nor is it a guarantee of it.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say that AI will need creativity as much as the other way around if it’s going to be used as a sustainable competitive advantage in the future. In 2023, Noam Chomsky described AI as “plagiarism software” and, while I wouldn’t go that far, I do believe that AI without creativity will ultimately be a race towards greater conformity.
AI doesn’t dilute the business case for creativity, it strengthens it, making creativity more valuable, more achievable and more necessary than ever before
At WPP, we are investing £250m a year in data and technology to support our AI strategy because we know that it will supercharge what our people are capable of, spending less time on lower-value tasks and more time developing the ideas that will help our clients break free of the gravitational pull of conformity and create the growth they’re looking for.
We’re investing because (to go back to JFK) we understand that “change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”.
AI + creativity is our future. And we’re not going to miss it.
Mark Read is the chief executive of WPP