por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
The most honest thing anyone can say about artificial intelligence and creative work in 2025 is also the least satisfying: it depends. It depends on what kind of creative work you do, what value you bring to it, how your clients understand and compensate that value, and how quickly the technology continues to develop in directions nobody can fully predict. If you were hoping for a confident narrative — “AI will free creatives to do their best work!” or “AI will replace most creative jobs within five years!” — this piece will disappoint you. Both of those narratives are being sold by people with financial interests in one conclusion or the other, and both are probably wrong in the ways that matter most.
What is not in doubt is that AI has already changed creative work, is changing it further as you read this, and will continue to change it in ways that require the creative industry to think carefully — more carefully than it has so far — about what it is actually selling. Because the answer to the collaboration-versus-displacement question depends entirely on what you believe the value of creative work actually consists of. And that’s a conversation the industry has been avoiding for decades.
What AI Is Actually Good At (So Far)
Current AI systems — language models, image generators, video tools — are exceptionally good at producing competent, fluent, contextually appropriate creative output at high speed and very low cost. This is not a small capability. “Competent, fluent, and contextually appropriate” describes a significant portion of what the creative industry produces every day: the social media caption, the product description, the email newsletter, the banner adaptation, the stock-photography-style brand image, the first draft of the press release.
This work has always existed at the lower-value end of the creative spectrum — it was competent rather than distinctive, efficient rather than resonant, correct rather than surprising. AI performs it well precisely because “correct” and “contextually appropriate” are things that can be learned from enormous amounts of training data. The pattern recognition that underlies most language and image generation is a genuine form of intelligence. It is not, so far, the form of intelligence that produces work that surprises you, that makes you see something you hadn’t seen before, that changes how you think about a problem. But it is very useful for everything below that threshold.
What AI Is Actually Bad At (So Far)
AI systems are poor at genuine novelty — at producing ideas that aren’t recombinations of patterns in their training data. This is sometimes masked by the fact that humans also produce mostly recombinations of existing patterns, but humans can draw on lived experience, embodied knowledge, cultural context, and emotional intelligence in ways that current AI systems do not. The experienced creative director who has worked in a specific category for fifteen years brings knowledge that can’t be extracted from text and image corpora. That knowledge is worth something. The question is whether it’s worth enough.
AI is also poor at the relational and judgment dimensions of creative work — at understanding what a specific client in a specific organizational context actually needs, at navigating the human dynamics of a creative process, at knowing which battle to fight and which to let go, at building the trust that allows genuinely risky creative work to be commissioned and approved. As we’ve explored throughout this journal, from the stakeholder syndrome to the art of saying no, creative work is not only a technical act. It’s a relational and political one. And that dimension is not something current AI systems can replicate.
The Value Conversation the Industry Isn’t Having
The arrival of AI has exposed something the creative industry should have been examining more honestly for years: a significant portion of what it charges for is commodity, not craft. The brief adaptation, the format resize, the copy variation, the stock-library-adjacent visual — these have been priced and positioned as creative services when they are, in many cases, administrative tasks that require creative skill but not creative judgment. AI can do them. And clients know it, even when agencies and freelancers haven’t yet fully updated their pricing conversations accordingly.
The creatives who are navigating AI most successfully are the ones who have been honest with themselves — and their clients — about which parts of their work are commodity and which parts are genuinely differentiated. The commodity parts can be augmented with AI to increase efficiency and reduce cost. The differentiated parts — the strategic insight, the original concept, the cultural knowledge, the relational skill, the judgment that comes from experience — remain human, for now, and remain valuable precisely because AI’s ability to replicate them is limited.
As we’ve argued in the context of what makes creative work actually effective, the value of creative work has never been primarily in its production — it’s been in the thinking that precedes production. AI can accelerate the production. It cannot yet replicate the thinking. Which means the most important thing any creative professional can do right now is invest in the thinking: in the strategic, cultural, and relational skills that make production worth doing.
The Displacement That’s Already Happening
Let’s be honest: displacement is happening. Not in the dramatic way the most alarming headlines suggested — mass creative unemployment, agencies collapsing, the end of the profession — but in the quieter, more structural way that matters more over time. Entry-level creative work is being reduced in some organizations because tasks that used to require a junior are now being done by a senior with an AI tool. The hiring pipeline at the bottom of the creative industry is narrowing in ways that will affect the development of the next generation of senior talent — because seniors come from juniors, and junior creative work is where foundational skills are built.
This is a real problem and it doesn’t have an easy solution. The industry that fails to invest in developing new creative talent because AI can handle the entry-level work will find itself, in ten years, without the experienced senior talent it needs — because that talent wasn’t developed at the junior level when it should have been. It’s the same logic as the burnout problem: systemic short-term decisions with long-term costs that aren’t visible until they’re very expensive.
The Collaboration That’s Actually Worth Building
The most useful version of the AI-creativity relationship isn’t the one where AI generates and humans approve. It’s the one where humans do the thinking and AI handles the execution of decisions that have already been made through genuinely human judgment. The creative director who uses AI to rapidly visualize five different directions from a strategy they’ve already worked out is using the tool well. The creative director who uses AI to generate the directions and then picks the one they like is outsourcing the part of their job that was worth doing.
The distinction matters because what we’re building, in how we use these tools, is a set of habits and capabilities that will define what creative professionals are and are not able to do in the next decade. Build the habit of using AI to execute human thinking, and you end up with faster, more capable human thinkers. Build the habit of using AI to replace human thinking, and you end up with a generation of curators rather than creators. Both can survive in the short term. Only one produces work worth caring about in the long term.
Still figuring out where AI fits in your creative practice? Our shop is for people who care about making things worth making — with or without the machines. Probably both. Definitely on your own terms.
por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
Every generation that enters the workforce gets misread by the one that preceded it. Millennials were called entitled when they were, in many cases, simply the first generation to articulate out loud what all workers had always wanted but been conditioned not to ask for. Gen X was called slackers when they were often being pragmatic about a labor market that had broken the implicit contract that had operated for their parents. Now Gen Z is entering creative industries at scale, and the discourse around them is remarkably consistent with what came before: they’re lazy, they’re fragile, they can’t take feedback, they don’t understand how the industry works, they want everything without having earned it.
Some of this is intergenerational friction that reproduces reliably in every era. And some of it is something more specific and more worth paying attention to: a genuine difference in how Gen Z understands work, creative practice, and professional identity — differences that reflect real shifts in the industry and the broader culture, not just personal preferences or poor character.
The Things Gen Z Actually Understands Better
Gen Z grew up with the internet as a native environment, not as a tool adopted in adulthood. This sounds like a trivial observation but has profound implications for how they think about audiences, channels, and creative work.
They understand how digital attention actually works — not how it worked in the planning documents of 2015, but how it works now, in the actual current environment of short-form video, algorithmic curation, parasocial media relationships, and the specific vocabulary of each platform’s culture. The senior creative who learned digital advertising when Facebook ads were revolutionary is working from a mental model that may be significantly outdated. The Gen Z junior who has been actively participating in these platforms as a creator, not just a consumer, often has better intuitions about what will land and what won’t.
They also understand authenticity in a more nuanced way than the corporate definition that pervades most brand guidelines. As we argued in our analysis of the LinkedIn personal brand trap, the performance of authenticity and actual authenticity are very different things. Gen Z, having grown up watching influencers perfect the aesthetic of realness, is remarkably good at distinguishing between the two. When they tell you a brand campaign feels fake, that’s not aesthetic sensitivity — that’s market intelligence.
The Things Seniors Interpret Wrong
The Gen Z professional’s directness about working conditions is consistently misread as entitlement. When a junior creative asks what the advancement criteria are, or asks why a meeting couldn’t have been an email, or says directly that a project timeline isn’t realistic, senior colleagues frequently read this as a lack of deference rather than as a reasonable request for clarity or efficiency.
This is worth examining. The request for clear advancement criteria is a request for the kind of organizational transparency that most workers would benefit from but most organizations fail to provide. The observation that a meeting could be an email is usually correct. The timeline concern is, more often than not, accurate — as we’ve explored in our post on urgency culture and its costs, teams that flag impossible timelines early are doing their organizations a service, not a disservice.
The Gen Z tendency to set clearer boundaries between work and personal time is also routinely pathologized as lack of commitment. What it actually reflects is an accurate understanding, often developed watching older colleagues, of what chronic overwork produces: burnout, compromised quality, and a career that consumes the life it was supposed to support. Gen Z didn’t invent the insight that sustainable work produces better long-term outcomes than heroic unsustainable effort. They just act on it more consistently than their predecessors did, partly because they’re less conditioned by the mythology that overwork is virtue.
What Doesn’t Transfer Automatically
This isn’t a defense of everything about Gen Z’s relationship to professional creative work. Some things don’t transfer automatically, and pretending they do doesn’t help anyone.
The deep craft knowledge that takes years of intentional practice to develop — whether in design, copywriting, strategy, or production — doesn’t shortcut. Platform fluency is not the same as creative craft, and the junior who is excellent at understanding what will perform on TikTok still needs to develop the foundational skills that will allow them to be excellent across contexts, over time, as platforms and formats continue to change.
Feedback tolerance, applied skillfully rather than defensively, is something that takes time to develop regardless of generation. The ability to receive substantive creative criticism — as we explored in our piece on receiving feedback gracefully — and use it to make the work better rather than defending the work as-is is a professional skill that develops through experience. Gen Z isn’t exempt from that development curve; they’re on it, like everyone else at the beginning of their careers.
The Synthesis That Actually Works
The creative teams that navigate generational differences most effectively are the ones that are explicit about what each party brings and what each party is still developing. The senior who acknowledges that the junior’s platform intuition is genuinely valuable, and builds that into how work gets developed and validated, produces better work than the senior who dismisses that intuition as inexperience. The junior who acknowledges that craft and strategic experience take time to build, and actively seeks that knowledge from people who have it, develops faster than the junior who treats everything they know as sufficient.
The creative industry has always been a mentorship economy: the skills that matter most are transmitted between practitioners over time, through close working relationships where expertise flows in both directions. Gen Z hasn’t changed that fundamental structure. They’ve just made visible some of the ways that structure was failing — and that visibility, uncomfortable as it sometimes is, is the beginning of improvement.
Managing a team that spans multiple generations and somehow making work worth caring about? Our shop is for everyone on that team. Yes, even the seniors. Especially the seniors.
por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
Of all the documents produced by the marketing industry, the results report may be the one that requires the most creative skill to produce and the least to understand. Not because it’s well-written — most aren’t. Not because it’s visually sophisticated — most look like a spreadsheet had a mild aesthetic crisis. But because the craft involved in constructing a results report that tells the story the author intends, using data that may or may not support that story, is genuinely, uncomfortably impressive.
The results report is where the creative industry’s relationship with measurement reaches its most revealing expression. Marketing exists to create value; measurement exists to prove that value was created. When the campaign works — when the numbers tell a clear story of cause and effect — the results report is simply a narrated version of good data. When the campaign doesn’t work — when the results are ambiguous, disappointing, or simply impossible to connect causally to the campaign activity — the results report becomes something else entirely: a work of interpretive fiction, sophisticated enough to look like analysis and optimistic enough to ensure the relationship survives for another campaign.
The Metric Selection Process
The most important creative decision in any results report is which metrics to feature. This decision is rarely explicit — nobody writes in the brief “select the metrics that make us look best” — but it is almost always operative. The campaign that didn’t drive sales will feature reach, frequency, and brand awareness lift. The campaign that didn’t drive brand awareness will feature click-through rates and engagement. The campaign that didn’t drive engagement will feature sentiment analysis. There is almost always a metric that went in the right direction, and that metric will be in the executive summary.
This is not exclusively bad faith. Sometimes the nominated metric genuinely is the right one for the objective. But the pattern of metric selection across the industry — the consistent tendency for the featured metric to be the one that performs best regardless of whether it was the agreed KPI — reveals something uncomfortable about how marketing accountability actually works.
As we’ve noted throughout the Insurgency Journal, from KPIs that mean nothing to the award-effectiveness paradox, the creative industry has a persistent difficulty connecting the work it makes to the business outcomes it was commissioned to create. The results report is where that difficulty becomes most visible — and most artfully managed.
The Benchmark Shuffle
The second major creative technique in results reporting is benchmark management. A 2.3% click-through rate sounds underwhelming until you learn that “industry average is 1.8%” — at which point it becomes a 28% outperformance of benchmark, which sounds considerably better. The choice of benchmark is as significant as the choice of metric, and it receives proportionally less scrutiny.
Industry averages are blunt instruments. They aggregate performance across campaigns with vastly different objectives, audiences, channels, and creative quality. Comparing a carefully targeted, high-quality creative campaign to the industry average for all digital advertising is a comparison of apples to a very large number of highly varied fruit. But “outperformed industry average by 28%” travels better in an executive presentation than “performed as expected for a campaign of this type and quality.”
The Correlation-Causation Special
The third great technique of creative reporting is the correlation-causation elision. Sales went up 12% in the quarter the campaign ran. Brand awareness scores improved 8 points over the period of the sponsorship. Customer satisfaction metrics rose during the product launch campaign. These are real numbers. Their relationship to the campaign activity ranges from proven to plausible to entirely coincidental, and the results report typically presents them with a confidence that the underlying analysis rarely supports.
Attributing business outcomes to marketing activity is genuinely difficult. External factors — economic conditions, competitor behavior, seasonal patterns, product changes, pricing adjustments — all affect the same metrics that marketing campaigns claim credit for. Isolating the campaign’s contribution requires experimental design, control groups, and statistical rigor that most campaigns neither have the budget nor the organizational patience for. In the absence of that rigor, the results report fills the gap with correlation and calls it causation. And most readers don’t have the statistical background to notice the difference.
How to Read a Results Report Honestly
If you’re on the receiving end of a results report, here are the questions that cut through the narrative:
What were the agreed KPIs before the campaign launched, and how did those specific metrics perform? Note which metrics in the report were not agreed in advance, and ask why they’re featured. Ask for the primary agreed KPI explicitly if it’s buried or missing.
What’s the basis of the benchmark comparisons? Whose performance is being compared to what, for which kind of campaign, in which channel, in which time period? Benchmarks that aren’t sourced and contextualized aren’t benchmarks; they’re assertions.
What changed in the market during the campaign period? Any honest results analysis should acknowledge the external factors that affected the metrics, because any analysis that doesn’t is either naive or selective.
If you’re on the producing end and you genuinely care about doing this honestly — which is rarer than it should be — the most useful thing you can do is agree on measurement methodology before the campaign launches. What will we measure, how, against what baseline, with what controls? That conversation is uncomfortable precisely because it limits the post-hoc narrative flexibility. Which is exactly why it’s worth having.
Writing a results report that requires more creativity than the campaign it’s reporting on? Our shop is for people who’d rather do honest work and report it honestly. They exist. We know they do.
por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
“No” is the most underutilized word in the creative professional’s vocabulary. The industry runs on an implicit assumption that the correct answer to most client requests is “yes” — yes, we can do that, yes, by that deadline, yes, within that budget, yes to the scope change, yes to the revision outside the agreed range, yes to the feature that wasn’t in the original brief, yes to the timeline that doesn’t allow for the work to be done well. The constant yes is sold as service excellence. What it actually is is a progressive erosion of both professional standards and personal sanity.
Learning to say no — professionally, strategically, without damaging the relationship — is one of the most valuable skills in any creative business, and it is almost entirely absent from formal professional training. You can get a degree in advertising, a master’s in design, a post-grad in marketing communications, and never once have a serious conversation about how to manage a client relationship honestly when the client is asking for something that isn’t in their best interest. The curriculum teaches you to make things. It leaves the hard part of professional practice entirely to experience.
Why Creatives Don’t Say No
The reasons for the reflexive yes are understandable, even when they’re not good. Fear of losing the client — and the revenue they represent — is the most obvious. In freelance or agency contexts, where pipeline management is a constant anxiety, the client relationship often feels too fragile to risk by introducing friction. Saying yes feels safe. It feels like relationship maintenance. It feels like the professional thing to do.
The second reason is that “no” requires an argument. You can say yes to anything without explanation. To say no, you need to explain why, which means you need to have thought it through, which means you need enough professional confidence to defend your position in the face of potential pushback. That confidence takes time to develop and is often not there in the early years of a career — precisely when the patterns of client management are being established and are hardest to break later.
The third reason is organizational culture. In many agencies and marketing departments, accommodation is rewarded and friction is penalized. The account manager who says yes to everything is seen as “good with clients.” The creative director who pushes back is seen as “difficult.” These cultural labels have real career consequences, and people learn quickly which ones to avoid.
The Real Cost of Saying Yes When You Should Say No
Every professional yes that should have been a no has a cost. Sometimes it’s a direct cost: work done outside scope that wasn’t charged for, a deadline met at the expense of quality, a scope change accepted that required invisible overtime to deliver. Sometimes it’s an indirect cost: the precedent set that this particular client can get more without paying more, the reputation built on delivering to impossible timelines, the creative standards compromised to accommodate a revision the brief never envisioned.
As we argued in our analysis of urgency culture in marketing, the costs that organizations fail to account for always get paid eventually — just in currencies that don’t show up on the invoice. The burned-out team, the compromised work, the precedents that shape every future engagement with that client: these are real costs, even when they’re invisible.
The Anatomy of a Professional No
A professional no has three parts, and the order matters.
First: acknowledge what the client is asking for and why it makes sense from their perspective. Not performatively — actually understand what they need and name it. “I understand you need the campaign live before the competitor launch, and I get why that timing matters.” This is not weakness; it’s the foundation of a real conversation. The client who feels heard is a client who can hear back.
Second: explain clearly and specifically why the answer is no — or why it’s “not as you’ve described it.” “We can’t deliver this in three days without compromising the quality that makes this kind of campaign work. Specifically, we’d need to skip user testing, which means we’re guessing on the headline and copy rather than knowing.” Specificity matters. “We can’t do it in that time” is an assertion. “Here’s specifically what would be skipped” is an explanation that the client can evaluate.
Third: offer the real alternative. “What we can do is deliver a first version in three days that has the core visual identity and primary message locked, with secondary elements following two days later.” The no that comes with a genuine alternative isn’t a refusal — it’s a negotiation. Most clients, given a clear-eyed explanation of the trade-offs and a genuine alternative, will work with it. The ones who won’t are the ones worth losing.
The Client Worth Losing
Not all clients are worth keeping at any cost. The client whose demands are structurally incompatible with the production of good work — impossible timelines, insufficient budgets, constant scope expansion, chronic bad faith — isn’t a client you can serve well. And a client you can’t serve well is a client whose relationship will deteriorate regardless of how many yeses you give them.
As our taxonomy in the seven types of clients every creative has suffered makes clear, some client relationships are recoverable with the right communication and the right boundaries. Others are not. The skill is in knowing the difference early enough to act on it — either by establishing the boundaries clearly and seeing whether the client respects them, or by having the harder conversation about whether the relationship is right for both parties.
The professional who has learned to say no with dignity and with alternatives has also, not coincidentally, usually built a roster of clients who are worth working with. Because clients who respect a well-reasoned no tend to be the clients who respect well-reasoned creative decisions. The relationship that can hold a no can hold a lot more besides.
Have a “no” you need to say but aren’t sure how? Our shop is for people developing the professional vocabulary to advocate for their work. Including the most important word in that vocabulary.
por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
Somewhere in Cannes every June, advertising’s most enduring paradox gets dressed up in formal wear and celebrated with remarkable enthusiasm. The campaigns being given Lions, Pencils, and Grands Prix are almost universally gorgeous: beautifully crafted, emotionally resonant, technically impressive, conceptually daring. They are also, with a consistency that stops just short of statistical significance, not the campaigns that moved the most product, drove the most subscriptions, or grew the most market share for their clients. That work rarely makes it to the stage.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It isn’t corruption (usually). It isn’t even, entirely, vanity. It’s a structural misalignment between what the award-judging process optimizes for and what commercial effectiveness actually requires. And understanding this misalignment is arguably one of the most important — and least discussed — pieces of education available to anyone trying to make creative work that matters rather than creative work that wins.
What Awards Optimize For
Creative awards are judged by creative professionals. This sounds circular because it is. The people deciding which campaigns deserve recognition are, in most cases, people whose primary professional identity is creative excellence — they are moved by formal innovation, craft at the highest level, conceptual ambition, and originality of expression. These are legitimate and valuable criteria. They are just not the criteria that determine whether a campaign achieved its commercial objective.
The award entry process compounds this. Entries are presented with the best possible version of their results — the reach numbers, the earned media value, the social conversation metrics. But these are proxy measures for attention, not for the underlying business outcomes the work was commissioned to drive. A campaign that generated billions of impressions and significant cultural conversation may or may not have sold anything. The entry rarely tells you which.
The judging panel, looking at beautifully produced case videos showing enormous numbers, is assessing impact through the lens of creative quality and apparent scale. They’re not in a position to assess the actual return on investment, the actual sales lift, the actual customer acquisition cost relative to industry benchmarks. That data isn’t in the entry. Often it isn’t shared publicly at all.
What Commercial Effectiveness Actually Requires
The research on advertising effectiveness — real research, conducted by people who track business outcomes rather than creative quality — tells a consistent story. The campaigns that work hardest commercially tend to be emotionally resonant, broadly appealing, and relatively simple in their message. They are more likely to feature real people than stylized imagery. They are more likely to name the brand prominently and early than to build to a reveal. They are more likely to use familiar creative structures than to subvert them.
These characteristics are, in many cases, the opposite of what the creative award complex prizes. The jury looking for “breakthrough” work is specifically looking for work that departs from familiar structures. The jury looking for “craft” is looking for visual and technical sophistication that real people, watching on their phones while doing three other things, are unlikely to notice.
This isn’t an argument that beautiful, original work can’t be commercially effective — it can, and occasionally the same campaign wins the Grand Prix and grows the client’s business significantly. But these cases are the exception rather than the rule, and treating them as the template for commercial creative work is a systematic error with real consequences.
The Agency Incentive Problem
Creative agencies have a structural incentive problem that the award paradox exposes rather than causes. The agency’s reputation — which determines its ability to attract talent and clients — is built significantly on award recognition. The creatives who make award-winning work are promoted and celebrated. The account managers who manage award-winning clients are showcased in case studies. The work that wins awards is featured in the agency’s new business pitch.
The work that doesn’t win awards but grew the client’s business by fifteen percent doesn’t make it into the pitch. It rarely makes it into the portfolio. Nobody at the agency gets promoted because of it. It exists in a budget spreadsheet somewhere and in the CMO’s annual report. Which means the agency’s creative culture is systematically incentivized to make work that wins awards, regardless of whether that work and commercially effective work are the same thing.
As we explored in our piece on creativity by committee, incentive misalignment is one of the most reliable predictors of dysfunctional creative output. This is just a particularly prominent example with a very glamorous awards ceremony attached.
The Practitioner’s Dilemma
The working creative who has understood this paradox faces a genuine dilemma. Making award-winning work is good for their career. Making commercially effective work is good for their clients. These goals sometimes align and often don’t. The honest answer is to be transparent with clients about this distinction — and to have the strategic clarity to know which you’re being hired for.
The client who wants their brand to win awards should be told what that requires and what it costs. The client who wants their campaign to grow their business should be told that the metrics for success are different from the award entry case video. Both are legitimate briefs. Very few clients are given the choice explicitly. And as we’ve argued throughout this journal, from the brief to the forty-page document, the failure to have honest conversations at the beginning of the process always has costs at the end.
Made something genuinely effective that will never see a Cannes stage? Our shop is for you. The work that sells is the work that matters. Even if nobody gives it a glass trophy.
