NORTHERN PLANNER

When I started in agencies, most creative reviews involved a layout pad and a Sharpie.

There would usually be a handful of ideas.

Not twenty-seven routes.

Not twelve territories.

Not seventeen executions of roughly the same thought.

A handful.

And nothing got into the room unless the creative director thought it was worth discussing.

This could obviously be brutal.

Sometimes unnecessarily so.

But it did have one useful consequence.

By the time you were talking about the work, somebody had already done quite a lot of the editing.

And because the work was usually just marker pen on paper, the idea had nowhere to hide.

No beautiful typography.

No motion.

No atmospheric soundtrack.

No AI-generated world in which the product appeared to have been photographed by Annie Leibovitz on Mars.

Just the thought.

If it worked in black marker on white paper, there was probably something there.

If it didn’t, polishing it wasn’t going to help.

That feels increasingly rare.

Today, ideas often arrive looking suspiciously finished.

They appear in decks.

They have art direction.

They have mock-ups.

Sometimes they move.

Increasingly, AI means an idea conceived at 10.17 can look like a finished campaign by 10.23.

This sounds like progress.

I’m not completely sure it is.

Because finished-looking work is strangely difficult to review.

Psychologically, it feels harder to question.

Someone has clearly spent time on it.

Choices appear to have been made.

It no longer feels like the beginning of an idea.

It feels like the decision.

So instead of asking the most important question—

Is there actually an idea here?

—we start discussing typefaces.

Or crops.

Or whether the product should be slightly bigger.

Polish changes the conversation.

Worse, it can disguise the absence of an idea completely.

Art direction can be seductive.

So can tone of voice.

So can motion.

So can a beautifully crafted case-film treatment explaining something that, when you strip everything away, isn’t really a thought at all.

Sometimes you don’t notice until quite late.

By which point a lot of people have become emotionally and financially invested in the thing.

The Mac created another problem.

It made producing stuff incredibly easy.

Which means we now produce an extraordinary amount of it.

Creative reviews that once contained six ideas can contain fifty slides of variations.

A line changes.

An image changes.

The line moves to the image.

The image becomes a carousel.

The carousel becomes social.

Someone adds a TikTok execution.

Suddenly everybody is staring at an ocean of work trying to work out whether an idea is swimming around in it somewhere.

More output has somehow created less clarity.

And I sometimes wonder what this does to creatives.

If the standard becomes not the quality of the thought but how finished it looks, then of course people learn to optimise for finish.

A rough but brilliant idea can feel weaker in the room than a mediocre idea rendered beautifully.

Which is backwards.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in pitches.

I once worked with a client after a pitch where the CMO went to some lengths to explain that he had wanted to appoint the other agency.

Why?

Their deck was prettier.

To be fair, this is a visual business.

Clients should expect agencies to communicate well.

Presentation matters.

Craft matters.

How something feels matters.

But there is surely something wrong when an agency spends more time making the deck impressive than making the thinking good.

I’ve seen strategy presentations that were extraordinary pieces of theatre.

Beautiful design.

Perfect prose.

Great storytelling.

Clients loved them.

Everyone left the room excited.

Then came the work.

And gradually everything fell apart.

Because beneath the story there wasn’t actually much of an idea.

Polish had created confidence that the thinking couldn’t support.

I should probably declare an interest here.

I am slightly dishevelled.

More than a little shy.

My design skills are middling.

My presentation “presence” is unlikely to trouble the TED conference.

So perhaps I would say all this.

But the easier polish becomes, the more important it becomes to resist being seduced by it.

AI will make almost anything look good.

Which means looking good will tell us less and less.

The scarce thing will not be execution.

It will be judgement.

Editing.

Discernment.

The ability to recognise a strong thought before it has been dressed up to look like one.

Perhaps we need more reviews with Sharpies again.

Not because the old days were better.

They weren’t.

But because sometimes removing the polish is the easiest way to see what is actually there.

A good idea survives being ugly.

A bad one often depends on being beautiful.