Clients, agencies and AI: Who really killed creativity?

I have spent enough time in marketing to have sat on both sides of the table as an agency partner developing ideas, and as a client evaluating, defending and funding them. That experience has taught me that neither side has a monopoly on good ideas, or on bad decisions.

At a recent marketing forum convened by Cannes Lions jurors, an old argument resurfaced. Agencies say clients kill creativity by demanding endless revisions and denying ideas the time they need to mature. Clients counter that agencies too often misread the brief, arriving with exciting concepts that fail to solve the business problem.

Both sides have a point. But the problem usually begins earlier than either admits. Many briefs are overloaded; a single campaign expected to build awareness, generate leads, increase sales, improve reputation and trend online, all at once. Agencies then compound the problem by presenting three creative directions, even when only one has been properly interrogated.

Three routes look like choice. In practice, they dilute the agency's thinking. Instead of investing deeply in the strongest response, teams produce three half-built ideas and hand the job of creative judgment back to the client.

Call it conviction over choice: the agencies that win consistently are not the ones offering the most options, but the ones with the nerve to back a single idea supported by customer insight, strategic reasoning and a clear line to commercial objectives.

It is tempting to romanticise an earlier era of Kenyan advertising. Niko na Safaricom, Equity Bank's Mimi ni Member, Blue Band's “Energy to Grow,” Tusker's “Baada ya Kazi,” and the still-talked-about Mpango wa Kando public-awareness campaign all became part of popular culture.

Those campaigns had the benefit of strong insight, memorable storytelling, sustained media investment and time to build recognition.

Marketers today are trying to recreate that cultural impact in a much harder environment: tighter budgets, fragmented audiences, and customers drowning in information. The same idea is expected to work on television, radio, print, outdoor and a six-inch phone screen and every campaign is expected to “go viral,” as though virality were a strategy rather than the unpredictable outcome of a good one.

Digital media did not kill creativity. It changed the conditions creativity has to work under. A modern campaign cannot simply be resized across channels. It needs one organising idea, expressed differently depending on how people actually behave on each platform. What stops traffic on a billboard will not necessarily work as a social video, a search ad or a newspaper execution. Integration should mean consistency of thought not duplication of format.

AI raises a version of the same challenge. It can accelerate research, generate alternatives and compress production timelines. What it cannot do is substitute for human insight, cultural fluency or strategic judgment. Used without those foundations, it produces work that is polished but forgettable content that looks right and says almost nothing.

The marketer's job has also expanded well beyond campaigns. Marketing departments are now held accountable for growth, acquisition, retention and revenue, and the question from the CFO is no longer whether the campaign was liked, but what it delivered.

That makes return on ad spend a legitimate measure but a dangerous one if it becomes the only measure.

Les Binet and Peter Field's long-running IPA research is instructive here: brands that lean too heavily on short-term activation tend to win the quarter and lose the market, while those that hold a disciplined balance between brand-building and activation compound advantage over years, not weeks.

Performance marketing captures demand that already exists; brand building creates the demand that will exist. Marketers who can only do one are only doing half the job.

The future will not belong to the most creative agency or the most commercially aggressive client. It will belong to the teams that combine customer insight, creative courage, channel fluency and financial discipline in the same room, at the same time.

Clients can help by writing clearer briefs, protecting promising ideas from death by committee, and being honest with agencies about commercial context. Agencies can help by understanding the business behind the campaign and defending fewer, better ideas instead of hedging with three. And AI should be treated as an amplifier of thinking, never a replacement for it.

Creativity in Kenyan marketing is not dead. It is simply being asked to work harder and marketers on both sides of the table need to get better at leading it.

The writer is Category Manager, Nation Media Group