The ad angles AI would've missed

We're running three new ad concepts at VIBAe this week.

First one: a postpartum and pregnancy angle. Swollen feet, changing bodies, shoes that don't fight back.

Second one: unisex messaging. Our shoes fit men and women, and we're leaning into that directly.

Third one: suitcase Tetris. How easy our shoes are to pack because they're lightweight and flex flat.

Which one do you think AI would've given me if I'd asked it to brainstorm ad angles?

The unisex one. Probably without much prodding.

The postpartum angle? The suitcase Tetris?

Not a chance. Not without me basically writing them myself and asking the AI to polish.

Both of those ideas sit way outside the obvious context of our brand. Adjacent but unexpected. Which is exactly where the best performing creative tends to live.

They came from humans who noticed something specific in the world and connected it back to the product. You can't brute-force that kind of leap with a prompt. At least not easily.

AI is genuinely good at a lot of things. Volume. Iteration. Polishing an idea once you have it. Taking a decent hook and spinning twelve variations.

But ideation that actually lands? The kind that makes someone stop scrolling and think "oh, this is for me"?

That still comes from a human who noticed something.

I've been in the trenches on paid media for years. Before AI was a thing anyone talked about. And one of the weird things about this era is that brands are now outsourcing the part AI is worst at, which is creative instinct, while doing the executional stuff themselves.

It's backwards.

We already had an S-tier creative team before this wave hit. The AI tools didn't replace any of them. They just made each of them faster, sharper, more prolific. One great creative with good AI tools now does what a team of five did three years ago.

That's the compounding edge.

Not AI replacing humans. AI multiplying the humans who were already good. The brands winning right now aren't the ones with the best AI stack. They're the ones who had real creative taste going in, and now have tools that let that taste scale.

At least, that's what I'm seeing from where I sit. Running the spend, growing the brand, running the tests. The view from inside one operation only goes so far. But the pattern is consistent enough across the accounts I touch that I'd bet on it.

—Eddie