in conversation with John Mescall, Global Chief Creative Partner, Dentsu Creative, as part of dentsu's The Big Q podcast series

Why pattern-breaking creativity, held to the standard dentsu calls outrageous impact, has to become the industry's real answer to AI-driven sameness.

Every conversation about creativity right now begins with the same two letters, and there is very little to be said about the industry that isn't shaped by them. AI is the default subject, the operating context, the lens through which every trend and brief and pitch is now examined. Fair enough. The technology is remaking how work gets made faster than any shift in the last twenty years.

However, an increasing number of conversations at Cannes Lions this year kept coming back to what the machine can't do.

The ideas that broke through on the walls at the Palais had a common quality. They didn't look like anything else. They weren't tighter versions of familiar formats. They were structurally strange, and they broke a pattern their audience didn't know they were following.

When AI can produce competent work at zero cost, competent stops being somewhere anyone can compete. The bar has to move to what dentsu calls outrageous impact: creativity ambitious enough to break the patterns AI is trained to reinforce, and forceful enough to move people at a human level.

Key takeaways

• The machine's job is to follow patterns. The industry's job now is to break them. That difference is what the next decade will be decided on.
• When everyone can produce competent work at zero cost, competent stops being a competitive position. The new standard is outrageous impact: work with the emotional force only human ideas can carry.
• Pattern-breakers do not decide the answer before they understand the question. They put the problem in charge and follow it wherever it takes them.
• Oddness is a permission structure. Familiar work gets overlooked; odd work opens the door of a person's mind and gets let inside.
• The agencies that don't invest in human creativity will lose. And they will not lose to other agencies. They will lose to Google, Amazon, Meta, and to clients doing the work themselves.

What is the great flattening?

Five years ago, agencies existed in part to get work out the door. Solid, decent, reliable. That functional service was a real reason for a client to hire an agency.

That reason is dissolving.

The bar moves. When generative tools let almost anyone, regardless of skill or resource, produce work that is competent and on-brief and instantly available, what used to be billable output turns into an ambient utility. When everyone can make good, good is no longer a competitive position. It is the floor.

The result is what people in the industry are starting to call the great flattening. Every brand, every category, every campaign begins to look and sound like every other one. If AI outputs converge on the same tonal and structural norms, because they have all learned from broadly the same corpus, then the market drifts toward a sea of sameness. Distinctive brands become statistically harder to build.

The question used to be can we make it? Now the question is can we make it different enough to matter?

Why the ambition has to be outrageous

If the great flattening is the problem, outrageous impact is the standard that answers it. The phrase is dentsu's, and the word is chosen very carefully. It is not about giant impact, or size, or volume, or share of voice. It is about emotional force, the difference between work that lands functionally and work that leaves the room changed.

That is why good work is no longer a defensible target. Good work, meaning work that is solid and on-brief and correct, is exactly what generative tools now produce by default. The ambition has to be for work that could not have been generated. Work designed from the start to have disproportionate emotional effect on the person who encounters it.

Most attempts will fail. That is what a genuinely high bar does; it filters most attempts out. The trade-off of aiming for outrageous impact instead of incremental gain is that the average outcome becomes more variable, but the extraordinary outcome becomes available. Incremental ambitions cannot produce extraordinary results.

Why AI can't break patterns

The mechanism matters. AI aggregates. It follows patterns from the past, even the very recent past, and it gives those aggregations to you. That is how it works. Even the most impressive generative outputs are, structurally, extrapolations of things the model has already seen. It cannot want to be unlike itself.

Human creativity is unique. It sees what is, and then sees what it could be. It does not like the status quo. When creativity is in search of a competitive advantage, it has to break the status quo, which means the work is unfamiliar, challenging, a little scary when you first see it, because it is designed to be unfamiliar. And the unfamiliar is always frightening. That is how we are wired as humans. It is how we survived.

Think of a stand-up comedian. The joke works because the audience is being walked down a familiar path, and then the punchline goes somewhere the pattern did not predict. That small structural rupture is what makes the room laugh. It is also, in miniature, what every good piece of creative work does. It sets an expectation, and then breaks it, on purpose, in a way that reveals something the audience did not know it was looking for.

Follow the problem, don't impose on it

The most common failure mode in creative work is starting with the answer. A team gets a brief, decides quickly what shape the solution will take, and spends the rest of the process refining that early guess. The output is polished, and predictable.

Pattern-breakers work the other way around. They follow the problem wherever it takes them. They are in service of the problem, not imposing themselves on it. If the problem is in charge, the destination is a surprise, which is the whole point.

That is why the best work often looks like it could not have been briefed. In a sense, it wasn't. The brief was where it started. The problem is what carried it the rest of the way.

Spotting the spark

Most ideas do not arrive fully formed. They arrive as a mess. People have what they call ideas, and normally those ideas are not tight; there is a lot going on in them, and they are messy. Creative direction is seeing the soul, the spark, the heart of the idea inside that mess, and then getting rid of everything else that is working against it. Once the spark is isolated, everything gets built out from there.

The Reverse Media Schedule, one of the standout ideas at Cannes this year, started with an insight worth the awards on its own. Branded litter on a beach is, in effect, bad advertising for the brand. Say that out loud, and the idea almost writes itself: brands can pay to remove their branded litter from public spaces, turning what everyone thought was trash into a media channel. Insight and idea are equally strong here, and neither works without the other. That is what pattern-breaking creativity looks like in the wild.

Why oddness is a superpower

Oddness has always been a superpower, and it matters more now than it ever has. Consider how many messages, how many themes, how many things any person is exposed to in a day. It is getting worse and worse. Audiences are beyond overload. When you need someone to open the door of their mind and let you in, the work has to be different. It has to be odd, and it has to be charming.

Oddness is a specific creative quality: work that feels charming, unexpected, or slightly off in a way that signals it was not made by a formula. Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables, Marcel's campaign that gave misshapen produce a home on the shelf, was odd. Harvey Nichols' Sorry, I Spent It On Myself, which offered shoppers a Christmas range of paperclips and elastic bands so they could spend the real money on themselves, was odd. Both worked because their oddness gave the audience permission to let the message in.

Leading the machine

The relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence is not a partnership of equals, and it cannot become one. AI will take mediocre roles and tasks. That is already happening, and it will keep happening. It is no different from a car manufacturing line, where highly trained people run the whole show, and the machines do the mechanical work: the riveting, the bolts.

The task now is to be better than the machine, and to be in the lead at all times. The more powerful the machine gets, the more powerful the human creativity leading it has to be. Speed, cost, and volume are battles the machine will win. What agencies bring to the relationship is the pattern-breaking, insight-driven, outrageously impactful work that AI, by design, cannot produce.

Five principles for outrageous, pattern-breaking creativity in the AI era

The principles share one ambition: to produce work with outrageous impact on the person who encounters it.

1. Put the problem in charge. Do not decide what the answer looks like before you understand the question. Follow the problem to wherever it takes you. The best solutions land somewhere the team did not plan to go.

2. Cut everything that isn't the spark. Most ideas arrive as a mess. Creative direction is finding the soul of the idea, and getting rid of everything working against it.

3. Chase oddness over polish. Familiar work goes unnoticed. Odd work opens the door of the mind. Choose oddness on purpose.

4. Trust the insight, then build the idea. A strong insight is already half the work. The Reverse Media Schedule did not need embellishment. It needed to be said out loud.

5. Lead the machine. The relationship with AI has to be defined, and defined with human creativity leading and the machine executing. Anything else surrenders the advantage.

FAQ

What is pattern-breaking creativity?

Pattern-breaking creativity is work that deliberately disrupts an audience's expectations instead of confirming them. AI outputs tend to follow established patterns because they are trained on past work. Pattern-breaking creativity introduces the structural surprise, the punchline, the twist, the reframe, that human audiences recognise as genuinely new.

What does dentsu mean by outrageous impact?

Outrageous impact is dentsu's language for the ambition creative work should now hold itself to. The word is chosen carefully: it does not mean big impact or loud impact. It means work with enough emotional force to change how the audience feels. That kind of impact is something only human ideas made for human audiences can produce.

Can AI be creative?

AI can generate output that is competent, coherent, and often useful. What it cannot do is break the patterns it was trained on. Creativity, in the sense that matters commercially, is the ability to produce something the audience did not know it was looking for. That remains a human capability.

What is the great flattening in advertising?

The great flattening is the industry-wide effect of generative AI making baseline good work cheap, universal, and instant. As every brand and category converges on similar tonal and structural norms, distinctiveness becomes harder to build. The result is a sea of sameness in which pattern-breaking work stands out disproportionately.

How should agencies use AI?

Agencies should use AI to take mediocre roles and mechanical tasks, the equivalent of the machinery on a car manufacturing line, while investing more, not less, in the human creative capabilities the machine cannot replicate. Human creative judgement leads the relationship at every stage.

The future of creativity in the AI era

For fifteen years, the perceived value of creativity in the industry has been shrinking. Media optimisation, algorithmic distribution, and the belief that showing up was enough all pushed creativity toward the margins. That period is ending. The tools are cheap enough, and the outputs similar enough, that the industry is being forced to remember why creativity mattered in the first place.

Whether to embrace AI is no longer a real question. The market has answered that one. The question that matters now is what kind of creativity the industry chooses to defend, invest in, and build around, once the machine can make everything else.

Human creativity is what agencies still get to own. Whether they win with it is, to borrow John's own closing question, the real big question for the future. Will human creativity win?