AI, creativity and agencies
The invitation IPMark a participar en el foro del creative agency colloquium seemed like a good opportunity for us to bring a reflection to the table that in MIG PRISMA we consider increasingly necessary: what value should a creative agency defend today in a context where artificial intelligence is altering the rhythms, processes, and production expectations of the entire industry.
Within this framework, our colleague Vanessa Landa, Office Manager and Director of Business Development and Client Relations at MIG PRISMA, brought to the debate a position that starts neither from the rejection of technology nor from an uncritical fascination with it. It stems from a conviction we have in the agency that AI is not emptying creativity of value; it is forcing us to distinguish much more clearly between what was mere execution and what truly constitutes criteria, direction, strategic vision, and the ability to build relevance for brands.
We are taking advantage of this context to develop here, with a little more breadth, the vision we defended at that meeting alongside other colleagues from the sector. Not so much to analyse what happened in the colloquium, but to establish our own position in a debate that will be decisive for agencies, advertisers and creative teams in the coming years.
Because, from our point of view, the important question isn't whether AI can produce ideas, texts, images or campaigns. The important question is another: what value will remain truly differential when production ceases to be scarce.
The conversation around artificial intelligence in the creative agency world is starting to mature. And that's good news.
For a time, the debate swung between two equally poor simplifications. On the one hand, an almost nostalgic defence of “human” creativity, framed as if it were enough to appeal to the soul, intuition or emotion to solve the problem. On the other, a somewhat superficial fascination with the tool's productivity, as if generating more pieces, more versions or more outputs automatically equated to generating more value.
Neither of the two positions seems sufficient to us.
Anglia MIG PRISMA We believe that AI does not force us to defend creativity out of nostalgia, but from a renewed demand. We don't believe the challenge lies in resisting technology. We believe it lies in not using it poorly, lazily, or uncritically. And, above all, we believe that this moment requires agencies to be much more honest about where their value truly lay and where it should be from now on.
Because the important question isn't whether AI can produce ideas, texts, images, or campaigns. The important question is another: what value will remain truly differential when production ceases to be scarce.
AI doesn't replace judgement.
A part of the debate is framed incorrectly from the outset. It's posed as if the threat were that a machine could create something formally competent. But that has never been the problem.
The problem is that for years, in one part of the industry, what was often mistaken for good judgement was merely production capacity, speed of response, or the ability to correctly package a reasonable solution. AI is brutally sorting out that confusion.
Because yes, it can generate many answers, open up countless paths, produce infinite variations. But it doesn't know which one deserves to be defended, which one connects with a brand's truth, which one takes the right risk, which one is culturally pertinent, or which one looks correct but is actually irrelevant.
And that's where, from our perspective, human judgment doesn't lose its value, it gains it.
The more answers available, the more crucial it is to know which one makes sense. The easier it is to produce, the more important it is to frame the problem well. The more automatable the execution, the more valuable the ability to interpret context, detect cultural tensions, understand the client's business, and take genuine responsibility for a creative decision.
AI doesn't make us any less necessary. It makes us less necessary if our value was only execution..
Beyond the AI slop
In these months, there has been much talk of the so-called AI slop, that proliferation of content that looks right but lacks real necessity, uniqueness, or value. But even here, it's worth refining the diagnosis.
The problem is not AI-generated content. The problem is content generated unnecessarily.
Technology can accelerate mediocre content, yes, but mediocre content already existed beforehand. We had already filled calendars with irrelevant pieces, there were already strategies built from the anxiety of presence and not from the logic of meaning, there were already production systems designed to occupy space rather than to build memory, differentiation, or preference.
What's changing now is that this inertia can be scaled much faster, with better finishing and less friction. And that makes it more dangerous.
From our perspective, one of the great tensions of the moment lies precisely there, distinguishing between correct content and necessary content. There is a lot of content today that is well-written, well-designed, well-adapted to the channel and perfectly aligned with the formal expectations of the algorithm. But it leaves no trace, doesn't build brand and doesn't open up conversation.
Human sonar or having something true to say
Another of the most widespread misunderstandings of this stage concerns authenticity. It seems as if the debate is being resolved in a false opposition between “handmade” content and content made with AI, as if authenticity depended on the technical origin of the piece.
We don't believe so. Authenticity doesn't depend on whether a brand or agency has used artificial intelligence or not. It depends on whether there is brand truth behind it. It depends on the consistency between what the brand says, what it does, what it represents, and what it can sustain over time. An AI-generated campaign can be much more authentic than a traditional campaign if it originates from something true. And a campaign produced in the most artisanal way can prove to be profoundly artificial if it merely imitates codes of closeness, commitment, or emotion.
This is why we believe AI can help express, but cannot invent a truth that doesn't exist.
It can find formulations. It can open formal avenues. It can accelerate tests. It can enrich exploration. But it cannot supply the absence of identity. And that will be one of the great challenges of the coming years: in an ecosystem where AI can make everything sound reasonably good, brands with less personality will suffer more, not less. Because the problem won't be sounding bad. It will be sounding the same as everyone else.
If the agency only delivers parts, goodbye
The conversation about AI is also forcing a redefinition of something that has been pending for too long: What does a brand really buy when it hires an agency.
If you only buy parts, there will always be someone or something that can do them faster or cheaper. If you buy adaptation, volume and urgency, the pressure on that model will be increasing. If you buy a decorative layer at the end of the process, the agency becomes inevitably more substitutable.
But if you buy in on judgment, direction, clarity, prioritisation, the ability to frame the problem better and to help make better decisions, then the conversation changes completely.
At MIG PRISMA, we believe that AI is forcing a necessary maturation of the relationship between brands and agencies. It compels all of us to better articulate value, to avoid confusing creativity with mere embellishment, and to not reduce the agency to the final link in a chain where the problem is already defined, the channel has already been decided, and all that's left is to dress up the solution.
Creativity cannot be claimed as strategic if it systematically accepts becoming a final layer of execution. And an agency cannot ask to be a value partner if it always enters at the end of the process, in emergency supplier mode.
Useful creativity isn't about making pretty what others have already decided. It's about helping to decide better.
Creativity doesn't compete against AI
If we had to condense our position into a single idea, it would be this: Creativity doesn't compete against AI, it competes against irrelevance..
And irrelevance can be created with AI or without AI. It can come from a big budget or a small one. It can be presented with a spectacular appearance or a sober appearance. The problem has never been the tool; it has been and is not having anything truly valuable to say, or not knowing how to find a legitimate way to say it.
AI doesn't devalue creativity. It devalues interchangeable creativity, the kind that lacks a point of view, risk, or brand truth behind it.
And that's why, far from weakening us, this moment should compel us to raise the bar. To work with more intention, to better distinguish between producing and thinking, and to better defend where our real value truly begins.
If everything can be produced faster, then thinking well becomes almost an act of resistance and survival.