Robin Upshon urges the industry to evolve and embrace the opportunities created by AI.
AI. TikTok trends. Lo-fi content. It’s all a far cry from the industry I joined (quite) a few years ago.
But then again, what isn’t different than it was 20 years ago? I can’t imagine an industry that hasn’t been completely reshaped in that time.
The key thing is adapting to it.
Don’t get me wrong. I am probably one of the first to roll their eyes when I’m asked the question any creative dreads hearing- “Can’t you just knock something together in ChatGPT?” And in many cases rightly so. It’s not quite there yet. It doesn’t have the frame of reference, the nuances and the client knowledge that the human brain has.
Yet. But it’s getting there. And pretty soon it will do. And when it does, you’ll want it on your team.
You see, whereas it’s easy to feel threatened by something that has the potential to do your job, quicker, cheaper and with fewer cups of coffee than the average creative needs to achieve the same result - we need to realise that AI is not here to take your job. It’s here to help you do it better.
Take Photoshop for example. I hear stories of a time when Adobe released the now staple of any designer’s toolkit, and there was widespread resistance towards it. We were told that photographers would go out of business overnight, that designers would be redundant, and everyone would be able to create award-winning visuals at the click of a button.
Of course, they were wrong. I still work with photographers daily, I still have an entire team of designers who are very (often too) busy, and although some days we may wish it could, it can’t do anything with just one single click of a button.
But what it has done is allowed us to be more creative. It’s opened opportunities to produce work that would simply not have been possible before. It’s made budgets work harder, it’s made metaphor and exaggeration and all the wonderful tools the creative mind uses to dramatise a product benefit more achievable than ever before.
So, to me, the key is not believing that AI will ever be able to do what we do as creatives. It’s believing that it will help us produce things that up until now have seemed impossible.
Robin Upshon, Creative Director, Walker Agency
This year I’ve personally been blown away by new features such as generative fill. A single action which saves hours of tedious retouching. It’s a lifesaver, especially on tight deadlines and we all use it on a daily basis. It is in fact AI. You see, it’s already among us - and we wouldn’t live without it.
If someone launched an AI tool that saved me from drawing up entire storyboards for TV ads, from sketching, shading, and colouring up concepts, why would I not use it? Why would I not want help from something that can save me literally days of work?
So, to me, the key is not believing that AI will ever be able to do what we do as creatives. It’s believing that it will help us produce things that up until now have seemed impossible. To improve our output. To bounce ideas off. And as mentioned, to save us time and energy to use on the most important aspect of our job: ideas.
After all, it is ideas that drive our industry. And now, more than ever, ideas are king.
I often see junior creatives going straight to their Macs to work up new ideas and try and encourage them to stop and spend some time thinking. Chat with each other, spark a conversation about the brief, write down some lines, scribble some silly doodles, and go down some creative rabbit holes which might end up being completely wrong. After all, this is where the magic really happens. This is where the big ideas are formed. A well-crafted line, an insight that would have been missed, a happy accident which turns into something big, something brilliant, something beautiful. You’ll know it when you find it. It’s a buzz and it’s something you’ll want again and again and again.
So, in 2025, the year ahead, I for one will be encouraging my team to, quite literally, go back to the drawing board. To start at the beginning and build up your work in the right way - starting with a big idea. This is the one thing that will always be unique to you and your human mind.
Once they have that, I’ll be encouraging them to take any help, to use any technology, to apply any tools and tricks and time-saving resources they can lay their hands on to create the best possible work.
Embrace the changes, lean into the technology and take from it what you can.
It’s here to help us. Not destroy us.
With over 20 years in the industry Robin Upshon has a wealth of experience, yet he remains very much ‘hands-on’ in his role as Creative Director at Walker. Always striving for ‘The Big Idea’ his work has won many awards, but more importantly has proven immensely effective for his clients, time after time after time. So much so in fact, that the average client relationship at Walker is 11 years (3X longer than the industry average). Over his career he has worked through the line on a wide range of clients, including P&O Cruises, Pukka, Fruit-tella, Smint, Mentos, Chupa Chups, Monty Bojangles and Ordnance Survey. When he isn’t working, you’ll find him spending time with his family at the beach, or running in the New Forest, thinking up the next idea.
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