Pretty much everyone knows it. No one wants to acknowledge its existence. Yeah, sometimes the truth is like doggy-doo on the street. You just hold your nose and walk around it. Not this time.

The fact is, most of what agencies create, and clients approve are average ideas. Worse still, some crawl under that low threshold.

Cue the finger-pointing. Clients moan about their agencies. Who in turn whine about their clients. Not to their face of course. Neither are to blame. Really. It’s totally God’s fault.

Most of the things he created are unremarkable. Before you get all indignant on me, let me point out that stuff is relative. Grass is unremarkable when compared to an orchid. A mouse, when put against a Bengal tiger. You get the drift?

Ergo, it stands to reason that most bankers are average. Most chefs are average. Most husbands? Average. (Sorry ladies.) Sadly, that applies to marketers and advertising professionals.

And guess what average people do? Damn right, they do average things. Come up with and sign off on average ideas.

Now, some of that is not because the people involved are lacking in talent. They are either scared or lazy. A lot of times it is both.

Fear makes people colour within the lines. Do the predictable. Laziness stops them from studying the best work in the category and learning what makes it great. Then trying to do one better.

‘The client will never buy it.’ ‘I don’t like it.’ These pronouncements have choked out many great ideas. And they will continue to. If we don’t change. The pundits had it wrong. If you continue to do what you always have, you won’t get what you always have. You will get less.

Your competition and the culture you exist in keep moving forward. You must too. You must raise the bar, or you risk it falling on your head.

This takes time. Ding-dong. Wrong, again. Technology has a heavy right foot. Fasten your seatbelt because it has pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Gen AI will make the average work less so. Purely because it will have been trained on the best and most effective work ever created in all categories. And its ‘creativity’ will be enhanced if a good creative is writing the prompts and tweaking them to better the output. The more it works and learns, the better it will get. Fast.

If you doubt that AI, just compare the truly horrible video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that it created just a year back, to videos created by Open AI’s Sora recently. Only a professional can tell they are generated.

However, there remains the matter of average clients. I think they too will benefit because most people trust a machine more than other people. If you misbelieve that, tell me who are you more likely to believe will give the correct answer to what is 1.38 million divided by 3,489? The average human being? Or the average calculator?

And since a seemingly all-knowing machine has created the most optimised content that answers their brief, they are way less likely to say, ‘I don’t like it. Kuch aur creative-sheative karo bhai.’

The author is the former chairperson and chief creative officer of Havas India. Currently he likes being referred to as: a free thinker with free spirit who is generally free.