On brands that defy AI
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (which sounds quite nice at this point), you’ll know AI is coming for the creative industries. Every brand and their dog mascot is slashing budgets, resources and talent. Replacing writers, designers and art directors with average bots and calling it “efficiency”.
Or so it would seem.
At The Clearing, we take real pride in working with clients who champion good branding, and care about protecting their people and creative output. Clients who make our work a genuine joy, because they see the value in brave and distinctive branding that’s guided by original thought and a deep understanding of what it means to be human - with all our intricacies, icks, quirks and ticks.
The kind AI couldn’t understand, predict or replicate convincingly, but which we at The Clearing rely on to cut through mediocre content, pave the path to more humanity in marketing and command a creative premium.
So we’re going to hero these heroes. Our brave and rule-breaking clients, and the industry-defining, AI-devoid work we create together. Starting with the world’s biggest secondhand camera platform, MPB, and their Global Head of Creative & Content, Mick Watson.
Q: Mick, how did our rebrand help MPB stand out?
A: It made us really confident and distinctive, especially within our category. The secret sauce is it now reflects what MPB is like internally. The people that work here are photographers and filmmakers, just like our customers. So our tone of voice feels like it’s much more reflective of that creative community now - and we’re not that cold retailer selling you a tech product.
Q: How does that insight show up in your everyday work?
A: Well because we’re part of the community, we understand them. So we can tip them a nod. Include a funny reference here and there. Show them we know them, what they’re thinking and what they really need. It’s coming out more and more as we play with the new brand.
Q: We steered well clear of AI during the brand refresh. Why do you - and MPB - continue to invest in human-made creative work, when so many others are cutting costs and turning to AI?
A: We’re really fortunate to work for a company that sells physical products which people use to create art. We know that many photographers and filmmakers don’t like AI. So that buffers us a bit from the rising pressures, because we fundamentally respect our audience.
On a personal level, I think AI is a really short-term win. It seems efficient. Maybe it is. But real creativity comes from talking to other humans and really understanding them. You can’t fake the magic that comes out of that interaction, by prompting AI with half-baked ideas. There’s a process. It leads to happy accidents and weird, unpredictable interventions that often make the richest work.
Q: Do you think we’ll get to the point where AI can talk or ideate like a human?
A: It would make my job really easy! But the truth is, it can’t. We can feed it loads of stuff to mimic us, but it hasn’t yet come up with any great lines. It can’t make connections like we can. If we’d used AI in our Danny Welbeck ad, which went live just after he’d signed a new contract, it would’ve spewed out something flatter and more predictable.
So it still feels really far away. Further away than anyone is seemingly saying. I mean, I’ve been testing it relentlessly with our tone of voice and two years in…no. Just no.
Q: Even if AI did end up sounding convincingly human - would you use it?
A: There’s a subconscious social contract when you’re reading something: that it took longer to write than it took you to read it. AI has flipped that on its head. It’s deeply unsatisfying and it feels disrespectful to your audience because it’s tearing that subconscious agreement to shreds.
I sincerely believe in human creativity. You can’t just replace people and let a machine finish off their ideas. And I’m sure people can make tempting use cases for creative AI output, but I believe everything the audience experiences has a brand implication, so I’m really mindful of that.
Q: Coming back to the new brand, which elements are you fiercely proud of?
A: F*cking all of it. It’s so simple and yet gives us so many options to play with. We talked a lot with you at The Clearing about fixed and flexed elements and we’re just beginning to see the benefits of that now.
After 7 months in the market, our brand tracker results are super positive. And the more work we put out into the world, the more I think we’ve smashed this brand. It’s just really bold, distinctive and easy to use. We have so much fun playing around with it. Pushing it. Seeing how each member of the team interprets things slightly differently and how that shapes their point of view and all the things they try.
AI doesn’t have a point of view.
Q: Will we all lose our point of view if we keep relying on AI to give us one? Will our brains simply rot?
A: Yes. We’re told to “use it as a sparring partner”. But my suspicion is that over time, our prompts will become smaller and the gaps that AI fills will become bigger. We’ll stop doing the thinking or taking in information.
When you think about it, AI represents the middle. The average of everything. So that “sparring partner” has lots of information at its fingertips but it’s not special. It’s just what it infers. And thinking involves so much more than that.
Q: Can AI ever be helpful to us?
A: There’s juice in it for workflows, but not as an output or to create the finished product. Nike just did that. They launched a huge campaign featuring Jannik Sinner. Beautiful visuals but a clearly AI-generated caption - and the audience didn’t appreciate that at all.
That single line was a huge AI tell. And they were flooded with comments about how rubbish and lazy they were being, in direct contrast to the star they were platforming. So to me, those details are important because they chip away at trust. And clearly, humans pick up on them.
Q: If you could send one message to every brand currently copy-pasting AI output and calling it creative content, what would it be?
A: Two things. Firstly, don’t f*cking do it. You’re educating your audience that the thing you care about most is speed and saving money. That’s a slippery slope and not helpful long-term.
Secondly, please keep f*cking do it so we can keep standing out against you.
Q: We actually fed AI your rebrand brief. What do you think?
A: That’s burned into my brain. I love it because it’s so mid and average. It’s a gently refined version of where the brand was. On the face of it, it looks thoughtful and well presented. But when you read it, it’s guiding us to be ‘natural’ and ‘unposed’...right next to photos of people posing.
It’s just really dull. It’s so far from where we ended up. And I’m so, so, glad because our brand is far better. And it’s made by humans.
Q: It’s now seven months into the rebrand, what’s surprised you the most?
A: The tone of voice. We always knew it was going to be part of the rebrand but never its entire engine. I remember when you came down to see us in Brighton, about half way through the process. We stood on the street after our meeting and it was so clear to us all that the anchor piece of the brand was going to be the tone of voice. We were all so surprised and excited by that. It really felt like it was the right direction. But you would never have gotten there through AI.
It was a surprising development that evolved through conversation and experimentation. The really interesting thing is that MPB sells equipment that makes visuals. So most of the category either heroes that equipment or the visuals that come out of it. And sure we do that too, but our new tone of voice provides the context and a perspective.
Q: It’s definitely unexpected for the category. Did you ever doubt the direction?
A: I remember walking away and saying, “I hope it’s right”. It felt like completely new territory. And it’s just so nice seeing it come alive. Living and breathing it outside of brand guidelines and sticky notes on a wall.
I love signing off great copy that comes out as a result of all our work. Simple, contextual and really bespoke lines that have unleashed our creativity.
Q: Given all of that, why do you think copy is often an afterthought for brands?
A: Brands can get into the habit of broadcasting to their audiences. So they think of copy as functional messaging: “we need to get this message out today and we need a million people to see it”.
I see messaging as the underlying layer of copy, and you have to craft the thing on top of it. At MPB, we’re always obsessively thinking about who we’re talking to, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking about. It’s easy to lose sight of that but it informs every part of the copy.
Q: Right. Good thinkers make good writers.
A: Absolutely, and good ideas make good copy. One of the things I asked you at The Clearing was to steer far away from borrowing other brands’ ideas. There’s a lot of that in our category. I wanted us to do something that would make our competitors really, really uncomfortable.
The overall result, including the writing, feels like a real stake in the ground.
Q: Speaking of regurgitating ideas - we’re seeing a lot of similar messaging across all kinds of industries. “From X to Y”, “Welcome to the home of…” and “It’s not just X, it’s Y”. Is that entirely down to AI? And how can we champion originality?
A: You’ve got to fight for it and it’s tough. Like Rory Sutherland says, it’s easier to be rational and wrong than irrational and right. But you have to push past your comfort zone, because businesses are conservative by nature and they avoid taking wild risks. These tools theoretically make things faster and cheaper, so that pressure will always be applied. But AI isn’t capable of original thought. It can only connect obvious things. And yet all the best creative work is a sort of soup of weird things that don’t go together.
There’s a great video that I always reference in my creative decks. It’s Dave Grohl talking to Pharrell Williams about drumming. How he connected drum beats from totally different types of music and brought them together on Smells Like Teen Spirit. AI couldn’t do that.
Q: So we fight. But surely we fight for more than just the creative work? What about the creators?
A: Two sides of the same coin. The best work we’ve seen, the work that’s really changed us, was made by humans. So for me, you have to protect both.
You also need businesses that trust in people to try new things and experiment. Not just what your competitor is doing or what you’ve seen before but giving teams a chance to zig when others zag. Fully knowing it’s not all going to work, but when it does, it’s magic.
I really believe everything is cyclical and comes back around. If everyone is going to water their voice down with AI, there’s such a huge opportunity for brands to be brave and go against the grain. Will there be fewer opportunities? Maybe. But I'd like to think that it’ll even out. We’ll always need humans for creativity.
Q: Any final word for those of us who continue to defy AI?
A: Just keep going. Keep fighting the good fight.
Believe that everyone has got a really unique perspective. Know that’s where the beauty, ingenuity and magic lies. It’s not in the f*cking middle.