Ogilvy’s working position on AI in creative work is that it belongs at chosen points along the way, not at the end. Carol Reed, the agency’s global chief innovative officer, laid it out at EMARKETER’s Future of Digital summit in September 2026. She considers the industry’s focus on automation too narrow for creative and strategy. “Let’s reframe the conversation from automation and more about augmentation,” Reed said.
So rather than asking a model to turn a brief into a finished campaign, Ogilvy looks for places where it makes people quicker or lets them attempt more: fast storyboards, catching and sorting ideas in workshops, coaching a team through a process, nudging people about compliance. “Don’t ask it for the end result,” Reed said. “Humans should always be in control.” The distinction carries more weight as marketers are pushed to produce more with fewer resources, where treating efficiency as the goal can skip the question of whether the creative is any good.
Generative tools are good at variations. Hand one a framework and it will swap copy, imagery and other elements across dozens or hundreds of ads to test. “It’ll never tell us why it works,” Reed said, and that is the job she reserves for strategists, creatives and marketers who understand the consumer and the product. Creatives also differ from one another (some observant, some empathetic, some contrarian by instinct), while the software is designed to spot and finish patterns. “You have to keep AI in a box. It’s a tool,” she said.
The aim may be for AI to recede into production the way CGI and green screens did. Reed quoted David Ogilvy’s line, “If it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative,” and added an AI-era condition: the work also has to make someone feel something or want to act. “You can’t compromise the craft and you can’t compromise the quality,” she said.
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