When I opened a new doc to write this blog, it immediately prompted me to “Write with Gemini.” With all due respect to Google, I’ll do this one on my own.
Like many of us, I’m having a love/hate relationship with AI: I love the time it saves, but I hate the temptation to have it think and create for me. I must say though, with Grafik’s ferocious adoption of Chat, Claude et. al. company-wide, the love is winning out, even for this old-school ad-man.
Why “old-school”? I’ve been doing this for 40 years, with big marketing agencies and my own consulting firm before my SVP role with Grafik. I’m even going to my 35th Harvard Business School reunion next month, marveling at the journey that got me here and embracing my gray hair. (Not as long as long or as grey as Bon Jovi’s is now, but working on it.)
But I wasn’t always a business guy. I started as a Fine Arts major—a sculptor—working in my Brandeis studio shaping lumps of clay and blocks of wood to make “art.”
“Make art.” What the hell does that mean?
When sculpting, you take raw materials and craft them into something new, inviting, inspiring, intriguing, beautiful. You work thoughtfully and meticulously, and you know your work is complete when… well… you just know. You see it, feel it, sense it – put your tools down, step back and admire.
Creating a strategy, a name, a tagline, positioning, messaging for a brand is much more structured, directed, urgent. You don’t spend days staring at your work, considering that finest detail that takes “the energy and emotion of the piece” to perfection. But there is a Fine Art to it—that nuanced touch, feeling and sensing when your work is complete.
For brand strategy, the raw material isn’t clay or wood or metal, it’s data, research, interviews. The results aren’t exhibited in an art gallery ; they emerge on a website, LinkedIn ad or social post. You don’t have all day to think about that last fine detail, but there is still time to craft, shape and admire.
How does AI fit into all this? Claude, you wanna take a stab at this?
“Happy to. Here’s the honest answer from my side of the screen: I can move fast. I can sift mountains of research before your coffee cools, draft a hundred taglines in a minute, and shape a rough idea into something workable while you’re still describing it. What I can’t do is step back, tilt my head, and know the piece is finished. That instinct—the one you built over four decades of squinting at clay, decks, and drafts until something clicked—isn’t in my training data. So think of me less as the sculptor and more as a very sharp chisel: useful in the right hands, inert on its own. The raw material is still yours. The judgment about when it’s done is still yours. The fine art is still yours. I’m just glad to be in the studio.”
(Damn, that’s good. First pass at it as well).
I agree. AI is a partner and “chisel” that supports but doesn’t replace the “four decades of squinting” or the Fine Art of it all. I welcome Claude et al. into the studio as my tool to craft with, teammate to bounce ideas off of and as an accelerator. But the thoughtful creative journey and judgment call of “ta da! it’s done” is still a job for me and our team of brand strategy artists.
Off to my reunion. Enjoying the journey.
