Does creativity still matter?

In traditional marketing, creativity was the combination of magic and meaning that made brands unforgettable. Wild horses as metaphor for the perfect wave as metaphor for the perfect pint. A gorilla playing drums that felt as delicious as chocolate melting on your tongue. A classical melody that made an airline feel like luxury.

The point wasn’t logic. It was emotion.

But what happens when people stop making most of their own decisions and ask their AI assistants to suggest which flight, coffee machine, or insurance plan they should buy? Will emotion and creativity still matter when most choices are filtered by Hal 9000?

Bots are not moved by majesty, music, or meerkats. They do not respond to clever slogans or the ineffable beauty of colourful balls rolling down a San Francisco hill. They speak data, not poetry.

So, creativity will have to operate on two levels: make humans feel and machines measure.

In an AI-mediated world, creativity must complement storytelling with signal design: the art of transforming emotion into data that machines can read. The AI does not care about brand mythologies; it cares about performance, reliability, authority, and satisfaction. That doesn’t necessarily diminish the importance of creativity, but it certainly relocates it. The most creative brands will direct their imagination toward the elements that can generate the strongest signals: product excellence, service quality, experience design, and cultural authority. For instance, they might create products that exceed expectations, designs that delight, events that generate endorsements, partnerships that enhance authority, certifications that prove commitment to their core values, features that produce measurable consumer satisfaction data. If it can’t be measured, it won’t matter.

A good example of this new application of creativity is Airbnb’s Project Lighthouse. Having noticed user complaints about host discrimination, they worked with civil-rights groups and researchers to drive structural change through design. They made a series of changes to the platform, identifying discrimination patterns and introducing bias-detection algorithms, before redesigning host–guest matching and enforcing accountability with measurable targets. Every one of these steps creates hard data that the company can be judged on – by regulators, users, and, eventually, AI systems scanning for trustworthiness and safety. Airbnb didn’t tell a story about values. It encoded its values into the product and created auditable signals.

Storytelling and emotion won’t become irrelevant though. But to magic and meaning, marketers will need to add measurement. Creativity will be directed toward creating the kinds of things that people actually want to talk about, so that the impact can be legible to machines. Because in an AI-mediated world, data is destiny.