Can AI create a marketing strategy? Do I still need an advertising agency if I have ChatGPT? Can artificial intelligence design a logo, a visual identity or product packaging? And if AI can prepare dozens of proposals in a few minutes, what exactly am I paying a branding or advertising agency for today?
These are entirely legitimate questions. And I don’t think it makes sense for an advertising agency to avoid them. Quite the opposite. AI is fundamentally changing the way we work, and many tasks that only a few years ago required hours of work from a graphic designer, copywriter or strategist can now be done much faster. Clients should clearly benefit from this change – through better pricing, a broader scope of work, more options explored and, ultimately, a higher-quality result.
At the same time, I see a paradox. The more powerful the tools at our disposal, the more important the right decision of the person using them becomes. Creating a proposal is getting easier and easier. Deciding which proposal is right, why it is right, and whether it will still work for the brand in five or ten years is not getting any easier.
And this, I believe, is where the real value of experience begins.
AI and marketing strategy: creating a strategy isn’t the same as making the right decision
If you ask AI today to create a marketing strategy for you, you’ll probably get a result that looks very good at first glance. AI can analyse information, define target groups, prepare a SWOT analysis, propose communication channels, positioning, tone of voice, a content strategy or the basis of a marketing plan. And it can do all of this extremely quickly.
But a marketing strategy is not a document.
A marketing strategy is a series of decisions.
You decide who the brand is for and who it isn’t for. How it wants to stand out. Which product attributes it will communicate and which it will consciously play down. Whether it should be conservative or provocative. Whether it should follow its category or position itself against it. Which trend is worth using and which will look ridiculous in two years. And sometimes you decide that something the entire competition is doing, you won’t do.
There is no single mathematically correct answer to these decisions.
That’s why real experience is so important when building a strategy. If you’ve worked on dozens or hundreds of brands over twenty years, you’ve seen plenty of decisions that looked right at the start but didn’t work in reality. And conversely, you’ve experienced decisions that weren’t obvious at first but over time proved to be exceptionally good.
Experience isn’t the ability to know everything. It’s the ability to recognise the consequences of decisions before they happen.
And that, in my view, is exactly the ability worth paying an experienced advertising agency for.
AI and branding: anyone can create a logo, but not a good brand
In branding, this difference may be even more pronounced. Today, practically anyone can use AI to create dozens of logos, names, claims, colour combinations or visual identity proposals. The technical barrier that once separated a professional from someone without design experience is dropping dramatically.
That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s easier to create a good brand.
Quite the opposite. When you have five hundred options instead of five, the ability to choose the right one becomes even more important.
Branding isn’t a competition for the prettiest logo. A brand has to work in a specific business environment, among specific competitors and for specific people. It has to work on the web and on a small phone screen, on social media, in print, on packaging, in store, on a billboard or on a vehicle. And above all, it must have the potential to work in the long term.
When we create a brand at MAISON D’IDÉE, we don’t want to design something that will look modern next week. We want to create something that will look good in five or ten years.
That’s a crucial difference.
By its very nature, AI is extremely good at recognising what exists today. It can identify the visual language of a particular segment and produce a very convincing interpretation of it. If you ask it for a modern premium brand, it will probably create something containing many of the elements that modern premium brands use today.
The result can be beautiful.
But that is precisely why it can also be dangerously average.
If you want to create a brand that stands out from the average of its category, you can’t always opt for the most probable solution. Sometimes you have to consciously take a step in a different direction. And for that you need not only creativity but also the experience to know when being different is a strategic advantage and when it’s merely an experiment for its own sake.
AI and packaging: good packaging is more than a pretty picture
Packaging is a great example of an area where AI can dramatically speed up creative work, but which also shows the limits of design without real experience.
With AI, we can now very quickly create visual directions for packaging, try out colour schemes, illustrations, photographic styles or different product forms. We can show the client much sooner how the product might look on the shelf or in a specific setting. That’s a huge advantage.
But packaging design isn’t a picture of a package.
Good packaging has to work in the real world. It has to be visible among competitors, work from different distances, handle the hierarchy of information correctly, and at the same time respect production technology, materials, printing, mandatory information and often very specific economic constraints of the product.
And then come dozens of small decisions that may never appear in a presentation but will determine whether the packaging works in reality.
This is where years of practical experience are enormously valuable. Not because an experienced designer can draw a box faster. AI may well draw it faster. Their value lies in being able to anticipate problems that someone without experience will only see once the product has been manufactured.
And by then, mistakes tend to cost considerably more than the agency’s work.
Branding for five to ten years: how to tell a trend from a timeless solution
One of the greatest values of long-term practice, in my view, is the ability to distinguish between a trend and genuine change.
In the creative industry, we’ve seen countless visual trends. Some fundamentally changed the way we communicate; others flooded Behance and Instagram and disappeared within two years. But at the moment a trend peaks, it can be very hard to tell the two apart.
Once you’ve lived through many such cycles, you start to see them differently.
That’s why, in branding, we don’t just think about whether a design looks good today. We ask whether it will feel dated in three years. Whether we can keep building on it. Whether it allows the brand to expand its portfolio. Whether it will work in new media and formats. Whether it relies on a visual effect that’s popular right now but that half the market will soon be using.
Years of experience won’t give you a crystal ball. But they will give you much better judgement.
And in strategy, branding and packaging, judgement is often the most valuable thing of all.
How AI helps an advertising agency lower prices and raise quality
None of this means we should keep AI out of the creative process. At MAISON D’IDÉE, we do the exact opposite.
We use AI wherever it allows us to eliminate mechanical work and devote more time to work that truly requires experience.
If we can prepare research, develop a visual idea, create a large number of alternatives, produce initial visualisations or turn materials into a presentation in a fraction of the time, I see no reason why we shouldn’t take advantage of it.
The client benefits twice.
We can keep prices down and at the same time do more for the same budget.
Instead of three basic directions, we can explore a much wider range of options. We can develop the selected proposals in greater depth. In packaging, we can visualise different variants faster. In branding, we can test how the identity works across many situations before final production begins. And we can identify dead ends before they cost the client significant money.
Paradoxically, AI allows us to be a more human agency.
Less time on presentations, more time face to face with the client
I don’t want an experienced person at MAISON D’IDÉE to spend half the day clicking together a presentation if technology can help with a large part of that work.
I want them to spend that time with the client.
To sit at the same table, ask questions, listen and understand the client’s company. To go to the store and see the customers. To look at the competition in a real-world setting. To understand why one product sells and another doesn’t. To be able to tell the client something uncomfortable when they’re convinced that the decision the client is about to make isn’t the right one.
Because even the best AI won’t help you if you asked the wrong question at the start.
And conversely, the right decision at the beginning of a project can save the client many times more money than any savings in production itself.
An experienced advertising agency doesn’t sell production. It sells the quality of decisions
I think this is where the way we perceive the value of an advertising agency will change in the coming years.
Production will keep getting cheaper. Creating an image will be easier. Creating a video will be easier. Writing a text will be easier. Preparing a hundred variations will be easier.
All of that is good news for the client.
But a hundred options isn’t a strategy.
The value will lie in knowing which one to choose. And sometimes in knowing that none of them is right and you need to start over.
That’s why I believe an experienced agency won’t be selling the ability to produce something in the future. It will be selling the ability to make better decisions.
Decisions built on real projects, real successes, but also real mistakes. On decades of experience of people who have seen trends come and go, brands grow and age, and designs succeed and fail.
AI can multiply this experience. It can give us more options, speed up execution, reduce routine work and help us reach the result more efficiently.
But it shouldn’t make decisions for us.
That’s why at MAISON D’IDÉE we don’t see AI as a replacement for an advertising agency. We see it as a tool that allows an experienced advertising agency to give clients more for less money, while devoting more time to what has the greatest value – the right decisions.
Because if in a few years anyone will be able to create a beautiful logo, packaging, visual or advertising campaign in ten seconds, the question will no longer be:
“Who can create it?”
The question will be:
“Who can decide which of it will work?”
And that, I believe, is where real experience, human judgement and years of practice will matter even more than they do today.
