“I told my Creative Director he had to work faster,” said a CEO from a tech startup after hearing a presentation on “creating a brand in 5 minutes!” at HumanX. Hiding my horror, I asked the CEO what she meant. I hated her answer. So will creatives everywhere.
Downsides of Speed-Obsessed Branding
What the CEO said…
“Creative design just takes too long. I needed some support materials for this conference. Our CD gave me way too many options for things like stickers. There were multiple rounds of revisions, and each one took time. I wasn’t even happy with the final creative. But maybe I’m not the target. They are the creatives, and it’s their call. But after seeing the presentation on brand creation via GenAI, I just know they could create everything 5-10x faster.”
What I was thinking…
The notion that you can create a differentiated and enduring brand in 5 minutes is sheer lunacy and an unfortunate takeaway from an otherwise brilliant conference.
The focus on speed, above all else, has horrendous implications. First, it has the potential to burn out employees, especially creative people. While some stress (like deadlines) is helpful to the creative process, every single project can’t be a fire drill. That leads to burnout. Second, emphasizing speed will impact quality. “Good enough” will become the rule. Which is fine or disastrous, depending on the deliverable. [“Don’t worry, I’m sure our AI-generated design plans for the spaceship are good enough” won’t go over well with the astronaut about to board!]
What Can CMOs Do About Rising CEO Expectations Around Speed of Delivery?
Pick your battles.
There are multiple opportunities to increase the speed of creative development without sacrificing quality (too much). A marketing leader at a $400 million SaaS brand shared, “We’re using GenAI to crank out 120 localized iterations of 20 different digital ads.” “The time savings is enormous, and our creatives cheered since that stuff is tedious,” she added. [LMK your speedy wins w/GenAI]
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services, emphasized three big categories for applying AI during his presentation at HumanX:
- Workplace productivity (they used AI to reduce new hire training time by 67%)
- Business workflows (they saved 4000 in development hours automating multi-step tasks like compliance workflows)
- Innovation and research (they radically accelerated R&D cycles saving “nearly 5 years of work”)
Efficiency ≠ Effectiveness
CMOs need to keep their eyes on the prize. That means focusing on impact, not output. For example, helping Sales improve and accelerate their close rates by a few %points will dramatically impact the entire org. Do that, and you’ll buy some time to think through how your brand and GTM may need to evolve over the next 18-36 months in order to increase your pricing power.
Even with the help of AI, that will take more than 5 minutes!
[Note: This editorial "rant" with all its flaws was 100% human-generated.]
Written by Drew Neisser
