How AI, data and technology are changing what innovation in media looks like, and where creative thinking still fits.
I recently had the privilege of judging this year’s Media Week Awards, and spending a few days deep in the market’s best work is a genuinely inspiring thing to do. It pulls you out of your own work and shows you what the industry is proud of right now.
What struck me most wasn’t the quality, which was high as always, but a pattern in what we’ve collectively decided ‘innovation’ means.
Almost everything I read under the banner of ‘innovation’ was technical. New optimisation approaches. Smarter use of data signals. Clever applications of AI. Brands being first to a new capability before the rest of the market caught up.
It was impressive work, and the people behind it clearly know their craft, but it made me think about how different that looks to the innovation I came up admiring.
How media innovation has changed
Ten years ago, innovation in media was more often a creative idea than a piece of tech. It was an unexpected use of a channel, a format nobody had thought to use that way, a game-changing partnership or a bit of lateral thinking about context and placement that made you jealous that you hadn’t done it before.
The leap was in the idea itself, not its mechanics.
Now the cleverness sits much more in the mechanics. And I’m conscious of this sounding cynical, which it’s not meant to.
Being first to apply a new capability is genuinely hard. Spotting the right tool, backing it and executing before your competitors is a real skill. Awards reward it for good reason.
There’s nothing hollow about technical innovation.
How AI is changing creative innovation in media
In fact, I’d argue that creative thinking is needed within the technical side.
Using AI thoughtfully, or reading a new data signal in a way that changes how a campaign performs, is arguably the modern creative act.
The old craft of placement and context was just the technology of its day, the newest tool available at the time. Every generation innovates with what it has. Ours happens to have an unusually powerful and fast-moving set of tools, so it makes sense that innovation clusters there.
But the extent to which the balance has tipped did strike me as stark.
Creative innovation hasn’t disappeared and technical innovation hasn’t simply replaced it. But the centre of gravity in the work I was exposed to has moved almost entirely to one side, and it’s moved quickly.
What does media innovation look like now?
I’m not sure it’s a problem to be solved. It might just be what innovation looks like now.
But it does feel like a marker of where the industry’s imagination is currently pointed, and it’s worth calling out.
The question I left the judging with, and haven’t quite answered, is how and if the creative side of media innovation flourishes again.
Whether we start seeing uses of the newest tools in service of genuinely new creative ideas, rather than as the idea itself.
Or whether the technical leap simply is the innovation now.
