Five hills we’d die on

Every marketer has one. 

That belief you’d defend in any meeting, even if the entire room’s against you. The approach you’d keep arguing for after everyone else had moved on. The mantra your office Secret Santa might put on a t-shirt — and everyone would know exactly who that shirt’s for. 

We asked five people at Show and Tell what hill they’d die on (in an agency context). Here’s what they had to say.

“AI will never replace a human designer.”

Jaime Cushnie, Director – Creative Services 

AI is growing in a supportive role for design, and I’m fine with that. If it saves me time on the background tasks — wireframes, photo editing, sourcing — great. That’s time I get back to work on the actual creative problem, evolve an idea, and refine it until it’s right.

But without the background knowledge and theory of design, AI can’t know why a layout holds together (or doesn’t). And it can’t infer what the brief is really asking for — it doesn’t have instincts, and it doesn’t get intangibles.

Yes, we’re in a disruptive phase in the development of these tools. But tools in this industry have been evolving since the Gutenberg press – and change is messy. 

But that’s the thing: tools change. The fundamentals needed to be a successful designer don’t.

"A website doesn’t need to wow to work."

Chris Riehl, Director of Development

I’ve spent years in the middle ground between a programming team and a design team that think about building websites in completely different ways. It usually goes like this: the creative team’s design looks great, programmers build it to match… then users get their hands on it and can’t do what they came to do. 

So: programmers are frustrated because they built to spec and now they’re refactoring. Designers are frustrated because the approved design that got the client excited isn’t performing. And clients are frustrated because users aren’t reaching the end goal.

Believe it or not, I’m with the designers — those cool designs do look cool. Heck, I used to pull practically all my inspiration from Awwwards. But look at Amazon. It’s barely changed in years and it isn’t pretty, but you always know how to find a product and place an order.

Maybe every site can look like Apple. But not every site should.

"AI slop is a ‘you’ problem."

Dean Hilario, AI and Innovation Lead

AI can generate slop. In fact, it’s really good at it. But at the end of the day, we’re fully responsible for what makes it out of our Claude — or any other AI tool, for that matter.

I don’t want to use the “t” word (taste). But we really do need to understand what ‘good’ means when we’re working with these tools, and no amount of prompt engineering is going to replace that.

And yes, I know there’s a knee-jerk reaction that any and all AI output is bad. Some of that is deserved. Most of the time, though, slop comes from a failure to direct, question, edit and improve what the tool produced. If you took the first thing it gave you from the first prompt you wrote, and moved on, that's probably slop. 

And that's on you. If you ship it, you own it.

"A great idea is only half the job."

Tom Boresky, Group Creative Director

I don’t have many ‘hills’, if any. We’re in advertising. We’re not curing diseases or negotiating a nuclear armistice. Nobody’s going to die.

That said — as someone still actively practicing the craft and not just directing it — something one of my mentors said to me has always resonated.

The brilliance is in the idea. The genius is in the execution.

Concept and execution go hand-in-hand. They are not mutually exclusive, and neither outranks the other. And since advertising is an ‘ideas’ business, this is an easy thing to forget. Your great idea isn’t worth the napkin it’s scribbled on if it isn’t executed correctly, with a deft hand.

Anybody and everybody has ideas. Sometimes — rarely — they’re great ones. And in our line of work, effectively and efficiently executing a great idea at the high level required to be persuasive can be just as rare (and I’d argue, as non-negotiable) a thing. 

"‘Create awareness’ isn’t an objective."

Jesse Cringan, VP Account Services

I could spray paint profanities on your car overnight and you’d wake up tomorrow with the “awareness” that it had happened.

Then what? Call the police? Blame one of your kids? Go next door and pick a fight with your neighbour?

Awareness on its own tells you nothing about what anybody does next. So when a brief says ‘create awareness’, it might as well say, “I want this off my to-do list.”

Great marketing works back from a KPI. Buy something, think something, go somewhere, do something — whatever it is you want an audience to do. Start with who you want to reach, and the desired action you want them to take.

It takes the same amount of investment (time, effort, and media spend), to 'create awareness' as it does to actually move a needle. So inspire your audience to take action.

What’s your hill?

Got a hill you’d die on? We’d love to hear yours (no matter how irrational your colleagues say it is). Reach out and make your case.