Rethinking Creativity: From Waterfall to Flywheel

What is a Creative Flywheel?

A creative flywheel connects traditionally siloed workstreams to improve access to knowledge. Powered by AI, the creative flywheel aligns strategy, creative, measurement, optimization, and activation functions into a continuous feedback loop. This allows marketers to bridge the gap between brand and performance creative across all marketing channels (paid, earned, and owned) for a more holistic strategy. Gone are the days of rigid, pre-planned executions. AI enables dynamic adjustments based on live performance data, keeping strategy and execution in sync. The result is greater efficiency, adaptability, and measurable impact that drives long-term growth and enhances customer experience.

This is an operational shift, not an organizational one. It is sustained by data-driven insights that fuel creativity. AI enables rapid identification of what resonates with audiences and reflects market trends, allowing creative teams to pivot quickly and refine messaging in real time. It also reduces the inefficiencies of manual dependencies in the creative process, freeing teams to focus on higher-value strategic thinking.

But this isn't just another automation story. It is about empowering creatives with actionable insights to craft messages that matter, using AI as a collaborative partner. In this future workflow, AI acts as the team, while humans serve as CEOs, guiding their agents to create brand experiences that forge deep, authentic connections and leave audiences thinking, “This brand gets me.”

AI's Role: The Lynchpin of the Creative Flywheel

AI is a prediction machine with specific rules. It can be trained with a wide array of data types and produce a wide array of data types. It evolves over time with human judgment through human input, examples, and feedback. By encoding new dimensions for intelligence enhancement, AI becomes increasingly sophisticated. And now, agentic AI combines multiple AIs to fill knowledge gaps about the customer journey, providing a more complete picture of marketing stimuli. These insights are then fed into other AI systems that generate content informed by complex market intelligence. 

These functional capabilities underpin the creative flywheel by organizing, connecting, distilling, and analyzing data from multiple sources across creative performance, media stimulus, CRM, and beyond to provide a comprehensive understanding of effective growth drivers. This unified view democratizes access to insights by breaking down silos and making insights readily available to all team members in plain language that spells out compelling explanations and fosters better adoption, collaboration, and informed decision making. 

By handling the heavy lifting of data collection, analysis, and content activation, AI frees up creatives to focus on what they do best: developing unique, emotionally resonant ideas that capture hearts and minds.This is creative intelligence in action. 

The Evolving Role of Creatives in an AI-Driven World

As AI and other emerging technologies become ubiquitous, creatives must adapt by developing new skills to collaborate effectively with intelligent systems.This shift requires moving beyond traditional ideation to systems thinking. Strategic and channel experts must begin thinking about design systems and modular ideas to prepare concepts for the creative flywheel. In other words, less hyper-focus on the :60 spot or any single deliverable, and more focus on flexible frameworks that respond dynamically to customer insights, cultural shifts, and business results. The term “creative engineer” better captures this evolving role, as creatives will design systems, manage AI agents, and expand their impact within organizations.

Creatives must rethink workflows and processes to harness AI’s evolving strengths as AI becomes even better at things like limitless output, zero fatigue, multi-modality, and prediction. Success in an AI-driven marketing landscape will depend on mastering new technologies, understanding data and intelligence governance, and ensuring AI safety. Training should also include how AI and the creative flywheel align with broader organizational goals. 

In today’s reality, however, barriers in cost, training, and tech readiness make it difficult for all creatives to move as quickly as the market demands. Asynchronous adoption is an issue when discussing a systems-level change that will affect everything from 3D scans at the shoot to storyboard design, proofs of concept, animation, video production, and even voiceovers. The required change management in creative departments will be profound, demanding strategic upskilling and operational shifts at every level.

AI Evolution, Human Adaptation and Readiness Factors

Leadership buy-in and support for AI adoption is mandatory for the creative flywheel to succeed, and that buy-in requires a mandate, investment, and a culture of enablement, but even more crucial, is that the business remuneration (business model) isn’t at odds with the flywheel system change that future business growth requires. For example, service revenue tied to billing for time utilization (human hours) is squarely at odds with using AI systems to do better, faster, and cheaper output. Alas, the market will have the last word even if many services businesses can’t overcome their innovation dilemma. Experimentation and focused innovation must be facilitated, as should measurement documenting the new behaviors and their impacts. This is not simply an off-the-side of the desk initiative. It must be greenfield, blue water, and cosmic.

Experimentation enables marketers to adapt continuously, focusing on areas requiring human judgment, such as defining strategic goals, ensuring ethical considerations, and interpreting nuanced insights. As AI rapidly evolves to handle increasingly complex tasks, this human oversight becomes even more critical. Think of it as an ongoing dialogue with your audience, where every interaction refines creative decision-making. This isn’t about algorithms dictating creativity, but empowering creatives with unprecedented insight into what moves people.This is how brands move beyond simply filling feeds to creating content people actually thank them for. When audiences say, "Brand, I love you, I'm never gonna give you up" (apologies to Rick Astley), it's because they've experienced something authentic—a connection forged by human creativity, empowered by intelligence.

The creative flywheel isn't about replacing human creativity with automation. It's about harnessing AI to transform data and creative possibilities into breakthrough ideas. It goes beyond scaling what works to uncover entirely new patterns of human connection that transform how brands create lasting change in the world. Because in the end, exceptional creativity isn’t just about reaching audiences, it’s about moving them.