Forget a reckoning, AI is providing a creative renaissance   

When Chat GPT was unleashed upon the world three years ago, Jon Williams thought to himself: “I’m going to have to retrain as a plumber … that, or a barman on a beach.” He has since had a “road to Damascus” experience with AI. In fact, he now believes that a “creative renaissance” is on the horizon thanks to the opportunities the tech has provided. 

Why have your feelings towards AI shifted from fear to freedom? 

I genuinely thought we were screwed. That’s on record, but my view has changed drastically.  

I’ve been a creative for 35 years and people have constantly said: “Yeah, that’s a great idea, Jon, but the client hasn’t got the budget. We can’t afford to make it.” 

Now, that genuinely doesn’t apply. I can bring anything to life and suddenly, my creative imagination isn’t fettered by cost. I can say, “Chopper shot? Yeah. Anything you want.” 

It’s for this reason that I think there’s a great renaissance coming - we can finally make anything we want. Sure, anyone can knock out a video of a kitten riding a tank down Regent Street - that’s interesting for a moment - and then everyone’s doing it. It becomes a sea of slop and shite. 

AI has actually made ideas - the most important thing in our arsenal - even more valuable, because they help you stand out from the slop. Suddenly, if you’re using it as a tool correctly, you can make anything you can dream up real and that’s what we’ve started doing. 

How are you using AI generally at The Liberty Guild?   

The best clients and agencies know they should be building it into the day-to-day, but everyone’s busy and no one’s exactly sure how to use it or where. 

For us, it has become a companion that makes life simple.

Everyone’s using it as you’d expect - recording meetings, highlighting them, creating notes. I was doing focus groups for a well-known global fast-food chain, and it was summarising themes. 

I think if smaller agencies use it well enough day-to-day, they will not need massive digital transformation programs. If you’re an airline and want to totally re-engineer ticketing systems, sure, go agentic. But if you’re an ad agency? You don’t need to overcomplicate. 

We’ve also started using client-specific LLMs, feeding in every meeting, email and brand asset. They’ve become knowledge repositories. I can ask a question and get whatever I want. 

Production is also a natural progression. Clients come to us for great ideas and AI helps us produce them efficiently. Earlier this year, for a holiday company, we depicted countries across Europe without leaving Ruislip - built in Unreal Engine. We filmed the foreground in real life and the background virtually - it looked great. 

Then we did our first 100% AI TV spot - a Wizz Air campaign, alongside Monks. AI helped with location scouting, casting and wardrobe - and the campaign was all from an AI storyboard, but with a real human creative team. We had a brilliant idea - a wordplay on “low cost” in the airline category and “locos” - “a little bit crazy” in Spanish. That nuance? AI wouldn’t have generated it alone. Back in the day, that would have been a 300k TV spot as well.

AI lets us knock a couple of zeros off delivery, so we can do more and work harder for clients.  

We’re using AI where it makes sense because we’re an ideas business, not a digital transformation business. There are companies that can redefine client workflows and make them agentic and future-facing. That’s not us.      

Why have you hired AI artists, and what has it taught you about AI and human creativity coexisting?  

We’ve got 500 super-smart creatives on the books. Clients often ask, “Yeah, I know you’ve got amazing creative talent, but can I access the creator economy?” It’s a massive, daunting sector - ten million creators doing crazy things. We use some very specialised people to navigate that space and ensure clients get something usable, not just random experiments. 

Hiring AI artists is a natural evolution of this. We’ve established AI as a production methodology - a tool that augments us and makes us better. Some of the best AI creators I’ve seen are photographers, directors and creatives steeped in craft. They’ve applied their understanding of technique to prompting and producing incredible work.  

Then there are new creators bursting onto the scene - maybe a kid in a basement in Brighton who’s never been classically trained. They make amazing work - as long as it has a persuasive and emotionally resonant idea behind it, I’m in - because flash alone isn’t enough - it has to land. 

Different people are coming in from different places and that’s fantastic. I got into this business because I love ideas - but I also love the slightly mad creative people. They bring in a whole new tranche of creativity and I fucking love that. 

How should agencies maintain the value of ideas in an AI-driven world? 

Preserving craft, originality and creative integrity - that’s more important than ever. Back in the day, the most important thing was the idea, and honestly, that hasn’t changed. Sure, a lot of advertising is still low quality, and the explosion of hyper-personalised content makes it harder to cut through. We can’t change that - it just means we need sharper, better ideas to stand out. 

It also means we’re in demand. Recently, two clients came to us after churning out performance campaigns and realising they couldn’t buy attention efficiently anymore. They asked, “What about the brand element we’ve completely ignored?” Suddenly, brand becomes super important in this mass world. 

It reminds me of 1999 - I was an interactive creative director when everyone was saying, “Oh yeah, let’s do digital!” Brands and agencies treated digital as a shiny new thing rather than a delivery mechanism for an idea. The medium became the idea itself. Now, with AI, it’s the same pattern.

You can’t just use AI as a shiny bauble because it’s new - novelty excites everyone, but it’s just a delivery mechanism.

What matters is the idea. AI makes it easier to get a great idea out there - and as someone who got into this business because of the love of great ideas, it’s amazing. 

Over time, conventions form. Just as with digital, AI will follow the same path. I talk to clients saying, “We want social natives, we want creators making our work, because our ad agency doesn’t understand it. They just push ads on TikTok that no one wants to see.” There are sensibilities out there that are not being understood.  

You developed an AI-powered process to help marketers write better briefs. What are marketers still getting wrong in the age of AI? And how are they embracing it?   

A lot of the time AI is used as an efficient cost-saving exercise. For others, the interest is in scale - the sheer volume and personalisation AI allows is crazy. You can put a massive engine behind it and get thousands of assets into the ecosystem, tightly targeted and hyper-personalised. That’s compelling - it sells, and that’s what everyone’s here to do. 

But for me, you still have to personalise an idea.

You can’t just personalise assets. You still need craft.

Otherwise, we’ll reach a point where the public starts pushing back. People take real notice of quality and effort, or lack thereof. 

It reminds me of what’s happening in journalism. In a world where you can’t tell what’s real anymore, the editorial halo - that journalistic stamp of authenticity - becomes incredibly important again. We’ll go through the same thing in branding. We’ll have to walk through the fire, hit that saturated, horrible place, and then come out the other side realising: brand actually matters again. 

As an industry, we have a once-in-a-generation chance to retool and re-engineer how we work. We all know it’s broken.  

Now’s the time to reboot. AI is an incredible leveller for change. You’re going to get a kid in Croydon with the same output power as a mid-sized production shop - and that changes the game completely. Stuff is shifting fast. We just need to be smart enough to course-correct as it happens.