AI is reshaping agency work, but where's the line?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
We are going to be completely full today, so please utilize all space on board the aircraft.

**Kamiko McCoy** (0:07)
When I boarded my flight to this year's CanLion International Festival of Creativity, I had one question. Where do people draw the line around AI in advertising?
I figure there's no better place to ask that question than not just a festival of creativity, but the Festival of Creativity. For five days, thousands of marketers from all over the world descend upon this little one-mile strip in the south of France to celebrate creativity in all its different forms. But this is not an episode about creativity. It's not even about the festival itself. Can is just where I posed my question to the people most equipped to handle it. People who make the ads.
If AI is able to replicate things faster and cheaper, what then happens to human creativity?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:11)
I don't want it to take away what my true essence is. It should never take away my vision or my creativity.

**Kamiko McCoy** (1:20)
How will AI change jobs in the advertising industry?

**Kai Teer** (1:23)
I think there was a lot of fear around AI replacing the role of creativity, but we're seeing a change in what that role is, but it's kind of been empowering.

**Kamiko McCoy** (1:36)
Will it create new jobs? What is an AI art director?

**Alexander Ortiz** (1:40)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's a thing.

**Kamiko McCoy** (1:44)
Who's paying for AI tools and what's the return on investment?

**Jeff Blackman** (1:47)
We're in a place now where we're not looking too hard at the metrics of the ROI.

**Kamiko McCoy** (1:54)
What if someone doesn't want to use AI at all?

**Evan Schuett** (1:57)
To me, that'd be similar to being like, I don't want Gmail. It's a tool that we use.

**Kamiko McCoy** (2:09)
I'm Kamiko McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday, and this is a special episode of The Digiday Podcast.
The rule on yachts is to take your shoes off. It's a boating rule. Not because yacht owners like to see toes, I assume, but because it keeps the floor free of scratches and scuffs. At Canlion, there's a stretch of boats along the pier called Yacht Row. Here, ad tech companies, media companies, and agencies rent out private yachts for luxury brand activations, networking, and executive meetings. Outside, the entryways are lined with these trendy wooden boxes full of shoes. I know this because I was asked to slip off my own sandals and put them in one such box to climb aboard the Chale Agency Network Yacht. I'm here to meet with Jeff Blackman and Kai Teer from Barbarian Creative Agency.
Jeff currently serves as Managing Director at Barbarian, and he's part of the Foray's AI committee. Kai is the agency's Executive Director of Creative Technology and AI. The agency is based in New York with Chale Worldwide as its parent company. They were responsible for a viral ad campaign back in 2004, Burger King's subservient chicken. Users could type commands into a text box, prompting a man in a bizarre chicken costume to act them out. Twenty years later, it's hard to imagine Claude coming up with something like that.
But that is what Jeff and Kai are hoping to do. Figure out a way to use AI tools to create the next groundbreaking ad campaign. And as executive leadership, they are in charge of writing the rules and setting expectations for how employees use AI. The expectation is that everyone uses the tools. The agency leadership team sets the overall direction, but they rely on staff to experiment, meaning learning AI tools is a job requirement.

**Kai Teer** (4:19)
There's an expectation that people innovate in the work, and so that is part of how employee reviews are undertaken. And the other is that they're innovating in their workflow.
So, you know, how are you looking for ways to make client work better, and how are you looking for ways to make the way that you work better with these tools?

**Kamiko McCoy** (4:43)
That's Kai. Meanwhile, Jeff told me that employees' AI usage is even part of the evaluation when it comes time for performance reviews.

**Jeff Blackman** (4:54)
There's an expectation at a talent level that there's an application, or you're thinking about how it can help you innovate your work, not innovate your workflow. In terms of how we look at performance evaluations and how we're quantifying how teams are performing, we have to work that into our systems of evaluation.
We have to think about our managers ensuring that they are not only requiring that their teams use these tools, but also a part of the process to enable and empower them to. So we're providing the trainings and education that gives our teams more confidence in being able to leverage the systems.