In March 2024, Sam Altman predicted that AI would soon handle 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists and creative professionals for, \u201ceasily, nearly instantly, and at almost no cost.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A year and a half later, the first ad campaign OpenAI made for itself was shot on 35mm film, with a full human crew on set.<\/p>\n
It’s the kind of contradiction that’s become an industry punchline. But for Fernando Machado, Chief Brand Officer at Chipotle and the marketer behind some of Burger King’s most talked-about campaigns, it confirmed something he’s been arguing for a while.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a marketing era obsessed with efficiency, optimisation and AI-driven speed, creativity has become the growth engine brands are quietly abandoning – and someone needs to fight for it.<\/p>\n
Machado made that case at length in a keynote at Cannes Lions 2026, walking the room through why he thinks the industry keeps mistaking cheap and fast for good, and why he’s built an entire framework around refusing to make that mistake.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought it was beautiful,\u201d Machado said of the OpenAI ad, before he found out how it was made. \u201cWhat the – they shot it on 35mm? Are you kidding me?\u201d The point, he said, wasn’t to mock OpenAI, it was that even the company whose CEO predicted AI would replace creative professionals chose old-fashioned human craft when it was its own brand on the line.<\/p>\n
The wind-tunnel problem<\/p>\n
Machado’s larger worry is convergence. He invoked a presentation he’d seen years ago by BBH planner Charles Wigley, “The Anti-Wind-Tunnel” – built on the idea that because every carmaker tests and optimises its designs in the same wind tunnel, every car eventually converges on the same shape.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BBH was working on the Mini Cooper account that year, and pushed the opposite case: put a Mini Cooper in a wind tunnel and it actually goes backwards – it fails the very test every other car is optimised to pass.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Instead of being a flaw, that refusal to conform became the car’s signature, and the launch went on to become one of the most successful in the category’s history.<\/p>\n
AI, in Machado’s telling, risks becoming marketing’s wind tunnel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He pointed to a deliberately mischievous experiment, asking ChatGPT what colour Nike should put on its World Cup boots for maximum visual stand-out. The answer – hot pink – was the same color he said is already everywhere on social feeds and pitch decks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt converges, right? Everyone gets a similar recommendation,\u201d he said. \u201cI don’t think Nike actually did this. I hope they didn’t. But the point stands.\u201d<\/p>\n
His diagnosis for why leadership keeps mistaking cheap, fast AI output for the real thing: most CEOs have no creative criteria to judge it against.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Citing Spencer Stuart data that only around 10% of CMOs ever become CEOs, and that roughly a third of Fortune 500 CEOs have any marketing background. Machado argued that without that lens, AI-generated work and agency work simply look identical from the top. He borrowed a line from ad veteran David Abbott to make the point: \u201cS**t that arrives at the speed of light is still s**t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Creativity is becoming harder to defend\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reflecting on how marketing has evolved, he recalled a time when marketers were primarily responsible for producing a television commercial. Today, the job involves managing AI workflows, attribution models, platform fragmentation, conversion metrics and endless demands for measurable ROI.<\/p>\n
“The CEO’s funnel is usually more like: sales, sales, and more sales.”<\/p>\n
According to Machado, that expectation fundamentally conflicts with the role of marketing.<\/p>\n
“One of the key jobs we have as marketing people is to build differentiation for our brand. And the more different what you’re doing is, the more uncertainty there is, and the harder it is to predict perfectly.”<\/p>\n
He argued that businesses often expect marketers to predict outcomes with complete certainty, even though genuinely original ideas are, by nature, difficult to forecast.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven when you get it right, you still get crap\u201d<\/p>\n
Machado didn’t pretend the case for creativity is an easy sell. He pointed to research showing creative quality is the single biggest variable in sales performance, ahead of brand, ahead of everything else, yet even his most decorated work, like Burger King’s Moldy Whopper, still draws backlash years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery week someone posts a link throwing shade at it,\u201d he said, noting the campaign moved real sales and brand-quality metrics with almost no media spend. \u201cWhat other campaign are people still discussing five years later?\u201d<\/p>\n
That tension – proven results, persistent criticism – runs through his five-point framework for marketers to “fight” for creativity (a word he insisted on keeping, after being advised to soften it):<\/p>\n
Be curious about the future, but master the fundamentals. Play with AI, but don’t let it replace learning to write a brief or judge an idea. \u201cIt’s the same as thinking I could play guitar well because I’m good at Guitar Hero.\u201d<\/p>\n
Measure everything.Not because data convinces a CFO in the abstract, but because only your own data does. Machado argued that leaders are ultimately persuaded by their own business data. \u201cMeasurement is your friend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fear is not your enemy. Every campaign he’s known to be called \u201cfearless\u201d was, in the room, terrifying. \u201cWe were all afraid, and we did it anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grow a thick skin. Doing relevant work means accepting criticism as the cost of relevance – the alternative is irrelevance. \u201cI know exactly how to minimise the risk of people saying bad things about your work. Make something irrelevant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Remember it’s a journey. None of Burger King’s biggest swings – the Moldy Whopper, the Google Home of the Whopper – happened in year one. Great brands don’t become creatively courageous overnight<\/p>\n
He closed with a story from his Unilever days in Mexico, about the cliff divers of Acapulco’s La Quebrada – men who’d been diving for decades and were, every single one of them, still afraid every time they jumped.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFear is what makes me pay attention,\u201d one told him. \u201cIf I get injured, I can’t dive. And if I can’t dive, I can’t put food on the table.\u201d It’s the closest thing Machado offered to a definition of professional creative courage: not its absence, but acting in spite of it and climbing one metre at a time.<\/p>\n
His message to the room, distilled: AI can be a tool, efficiency can be a discipline, but neither is a growth strategy on its own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cCreative can be a multiplier on your investment,\u201d he said. \u201cAI at its best is a tool for humans to use, to make things they maybe couldn’t make before.\u201d The fight, as he framed it, isn’t AI versus creativity – it’s whether brands still have the judgment, and the nerve, to tell the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In March 2024, Sam Altman predicted that AI would soon handle 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[175,24,9534,46293,46300,46295,44130,580,46298,46294,6313,46297,46296,14872,174,28571,46299,157,13951,370],"class_list":["post-86621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-advertising","tag-ai","tag-ai-in-marketing","tag-brand-building","tag-burger-king","tag-cannes-keynote","tag-cannes-lions-2026","tag-chatgpt","tag-chipotle","tag-creative-effectiveness","tag-creativity","tag-differentiation","tag-fernando-machado","tag-human-creativity","tag-marketing","tag-marketing-strategy","tag-moldy-whopper","tag-openai","tag-performance-marketing","tag-sam-altman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}