If AI is the engine, clarity is the steering wheel

In a recent talk with Boston Consulting Group, Brandtech boss David Jones called artificial intelligence, “the new language of creativity.”

This is the world marketers now find themselves in. AI isn’t nibbling at the edges of efficiency: it’s tearing into the centre. Tools like Pencil, Brandtech’s generative advertising platform, already pump out hundreds of thousands of ads for global clients: 62% faster, 55% cheaper and, Jones insists, 40% “better.”

The figures are seductive for an industry hooked on horsepower. Faster platforms, bigger datasets, more scale a fraction of the cost — but acceleration without direction is a cul-de-sac. MIT Research shows AI-generated work may look slick, but rarely sticks in consumer memory.

That’s the trap Tom Evans, creative partner and co-founder at BigSmall, calls moving “beautifully towards irrelevance.”

When we spoke about Jones’ comments on the growing tension between craft and commodity, Evans pointed to a third C many brands forget: clarity.

“AI can make you go faster,” he says. “But if you’re heading in the wrong direction, what’s the point?”

Excavating the point

For Evans and his partner Ben Cleaver, the conversation isn’t about whether humans or machines hold the quill. It’s whether anyone knows the story they’re writing.

“You can’t have a business where strategy is so complicated it requires people to interpret it,” says Cleaver. “Everyone across the organisation must instantly understand what your brand stands for.”

That clarity doesn’t vanish overnight. “Usually when a business starts out, it has a really clear idea of its role in the world,” Cleaver notes. “Over time, that gets layered until the conviction is diluted.” It erodes: buried under years of consultant frameworks, sub-brand launches and executive pivots.

The work, then, is archaeological: stripping back years of complexity until the point is clear again. Because organisations with clarity don’t burn hours in committee. They know what fits, what doesn’t and act with a precision others can’t match.

Change starts with water

BigSmall’s approach is best demonstrated in their work with WaterAid.

For decades, the NGO built a reputation around direct intervention: installing pumps, constructing facilities, delivering clean water access. Vital work, but finite.

Infrastructure alone can’t change hundreds of millions of lives. The real leverage lay upstream, in influencing government budgets, reframing water as infrastructure for health and climate and inserting it into the conversations that set policy.

The challenge, then, was articulation. Forty country offices, each with their own priorities, all needing to rally around a single organising idea.

And that idea was distilled into four words: Change starts with water.

“It spoke to everyone, from case workers on the ground in Madagascar to a minister in Geneva,” Evans explained.

Those words lit up trading screens at the London Stock Exchange and punched through COP climate dialogues. They underpinned a reception hosted by King Charles at Buckingham Palace, where the iconic East Gallery was transformed into an immersive installation — rallying climate activists, celebrities and world leaders to experience a single truth: the climate crisis is a water crisis.

The message ricocheted across social media too. WaterAid’s report on shifting weather patterns made a huge splash in the FT, Guardian, ITV and BBC, while TikTok creators and celebrity ambassadors carried the message into millions of feeds.

For the first time, the NGO had pulled financial markets, policymakers and popular culture into orbit around a single idea.

Inside the organisation, that clarity rewired perspective. Staff stopped thinking about what could be patched up this week and started asking what could be built for the next decade.

Far from narrowing WaterAid’s possibilities, the simplicity of those four words multiplied them. Work became more consistent, experiments more meaningful and decisions less fraught.

“People need to feel it in their bellies,” Cleaver says — and now policymakers, donors and case workers all do.

Rising to meet the reset moment

The pressures on brands to keep up are, of course, constant. New CMOs are eager to redraw the map, investors demand novelty to signal momentum.

The temptation is always to reframe, reset or repackage — and AI dangles the promise of infinite iterations at the push of a button.

Evans sees it as a reset moment. “Execution is going to be completely reshaped,” he says. “You can’t fight the logic of a CFO going, ‘It’s good enough for less money.’”

But AI doesn’t create coherence: it magnifies what’s already there. A sharp organising idea will be amplified. A muddled one will unravel faster.

“It’s a snake eating its own tail,” says Evans. “Until we get AGI, everything is just learning from what already exists. It all ends up looking the same.”

He views clarity as the catalyst that transforms AI from a cost-saver into a growth engine. “With it, you’re scaling purpose, precision and performance. Without it, you’re just automating noise.”

In this context, clarity is a commercial unlock: protecting spend, multiplying returns and accelerating decision-making across the business.

And it isn’t hard to test whether you have it. When we asked if there’s one question businesses should start every brief with, Cleaver’s answer was simple: What’s the one thing you have that no one else can take away?

“Everyone throughout the business and external to it should understand why it's in their lives.” Evans adds. “That’s the ultimate goal — what are you there to do? And the language we use to find that is ‘the point’. Get to the point.”

As for the future of AI, he predicts a bifurcation: independents leaning harder into craft as a premium marker, while holding companies industrialise output at frightening speed.

Both can work, but only if they’re anchored in a point of view. Without clarity, you’re not choosing a path so much as drifting between them.

The freedom in limits

The irony is that clarity is often mistaken for constraint. In practice, it works the other way round. “Once you’ve got a point of view, you actually have more freedom to act in fresh ways,” says Cleaver. AI can spin forever. Having a defined point tells you when to stop.

It also sharpens taste. As Evans notes, “twenty years of knowing what good art direction looks like — you can’t replace that.”

The skill isn’t in producing more: it’s in deciding what deserves to exist at all. Pair that judgment with AI, and you don’t just scale output. You scale meaning.

Organisations with clarity don’t watch campaigns collapse in evaluation loops, don’t bleed creative energy across contradictory objectives. They move faster because their filters are obvious. They say no more easily and their yes carries weight.

Which is why competitive advantage no longer sits in execution. The tools are too widely available, the efficiencies too easy to replicate. Advantage moves upstream, into clarity of point.

Which makes clarity the most valuable investment any marketing department can make right now.

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Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor

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