David Patton: an adworld drowning in content but starved of ideas
2025 will be remembered as the year the advertising industry pivoted fully into AI. Suddenly, it seems every agency is talking about speed, automation, efficiency, output and scale. Every creds deck has an Large Language Model (LLM, the building blocks of AI) inside and every pitch presentation promises faster creativity at a fraction of the cost.
On paper it may look like exciting progress, but in reality, it’s creating a dangerous problem for a creative industry. We’re in danger of drowning in a sea of sameness content because the supply of original thinking is collapsing.
No one can deny that LLM creativity is a useful tool, but it is not creative in the way that humans are. LLMs do not create. They calculate. They compress decades of culture into statistical averages and they are trained to avoid risk. This means the centre of creative gravity always collapses toward the average.
Human creativity works in exactly the opposite manner. It breaks patterns. It surprises. It rewires meaning. It leaps across unrelated ideas and turns them into something new. It sees emotional truth, not just language patterns and it is shaped by lived experiences and cultural moments, not datasets. Most importantly though, human creativity challenges, whereas AI tries its very best to conform.
This is why we can’t allow 2026 to be the year creativity died. Rather, it should be the year the industry remembered why creativity matters. There has never been a better time for human creativity because AI has made the difference more visible than ever.
Great creative work has always relied on bravery. Bravery to push a client somewhere new. Bravery to sit in the discomfort of having no easy answers. Bravery to back the odd idea that makes your stomach tighten. AI cannot do that. It can only imitate the work of the brave people who came before.
The opportunity for the best clients and creative agencies is simple. Use AI to clear the noise, speed the admin and even accelerate iteration. But never let it define the idea.
David Patton has held senior positions at Jellyfish Pictures, The Mill, Y&R, Grey (both WPP) and Sony Europe.
