As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes a part of our daily routines, we’ve learned that it isn’t here to replace human creativity. Instead, it’s a useful tool to amplify ideas, streamline processes and give you a competitive edge.
In the rapidly evolving world of marketing, one question echoes louder than ever: Are you ready for the AI revolution? Our team recently attended the Agency Hackers “The Robots are Coming” event, and the message was crystal clear – You won’t lose your job to AI, but if you don’t keep up, you might lose it to someone who knows how to use it effectively.
Notice something a little different about that introduction? It was written almost entirely by AI (Claude, to be exact), minus a few tweaks. Don’t worry, we won’t be replacing all our work with AI, but it is something we’ve been finding useful here at Cracked HQ. There was a time when businesses were hesitant to bring computers in the office, and now we spend all day staring at screens. So, we’ve decided to be AI pioneers, not spectators – and we’re here to give you the insight on which tools we’re using and how we’re using them.
The Cracked AI Creative Toolkit
1. Claude: Our copy and content companion
We’ve been using Claude as our AI writing assistant, helping us to craft social captions, kick off content, support idea generation and summarise meeting notes (more on that later). We chose Claude over the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini because of its superior copywriting abilities which the leaders at the Agency Hackers conference also confirmed as the best pick. Although ChatGPT might be able to generate photos and videos which Claude can’t do, this isn’t what we needed a tool for – so for strong creative copy and content, this was where Claude comes out on top. With Claude, you can even create an ‘AI Agent’ tailored to specific department needs. Just feed the tool with a variety of resources so they become an expert in that field so that any task can be completed quickly and easily. Imagine our digital team having an SEO agent that understands a client’s exact goals and targets and can analyse strategies in real-time without having to be told from the start every time.
2. Otter AI: Taking note taking to the next level
Remembering to take notes can sometimes take all the fun out of an exciting meeting where ideas and creative juices are flowing. Well, what if you had a tool that did it for you? We’ve started using Otter AI to capture our conversations or interviews so that nothing gets lost, and it will even sit in your meetings on your behalf if you can’t make it (we don’t think it’s mastered your witty small talk yet though unfortunately). This means we can be fully engaged with our clients or others in our team without having to make sure everything is written down. Otter will send a transcript of everything that was said, and then we use Claude to generate a summary of the meeting as a whole. This then makes it even easier for our Client Services team to turn a transcript into a proposal and then a brief.
3. Visual Electric: Visualising creativity
Of course, design is fundamentally a human skill, and we’d never use AI to completely replace the finished product, but Visual Electric is a great tool for initially visualising ideas and creating mock ups that need to be done quickly. You might have heard of Midjourney as a similar tool, but after testing both, we found Visual Electric to better suit our needs as a creative agency with more accurate and reliable results. Visual Electric can easily take a brainstorming session and bring it to life with over 10 nuanced images to help visualise a concept before it gets handed to a designer. It saves an immense amount of time in the initial stages which means we can spend more time on the most important bit – coming up with bold and brave ideas. Other ways we use Visual Electric are:
- Effectively communicating design concepts to clients in the pitching process
- For rapid outside-the-box creative thinking in internal meetings
- Showing types of photography that could be used instead of trawling through stock images for hours looking for the perfect picture.
For any business, using AI should be a way to assist human creativity, save time and turbocharge processes. However, when using AI in your workload, there are still a few things to be cautious of: always be mindful of client preferences, ensure any AI work is checked, tweaked and then checked again by a human and recognise that these tools currently require investment and training. However, by freeing up our time from lengthy admin jobs, we can focus more on high-value creative work and client experience, with great efficiency and value emerging as our AI expertise develops.
Overall, our approach to AI is simple: we see it as an opportunity, not a threat, and we’d encourage you to do the same.