So, back in 2024, Virgin Voyages got Jennifer Lopez to front an AI campaign that created personalized cruise invitations. It was, at the time, revelatory. It got talked about in all the usual places. There’s no question that it was ‘inspiring’ as an example of a brand harnessing generative AI to do something different (although, no doubt at significant cost). Which is all great.
But take a step back: when you really think about it as a B2B marketer, what could you take from this that might help you make your enterprise cyber security explainer or demo less soul-crushing? Not so easy to answer, right?
Let’s be honest. For the last couple of years, B2B marketers have been experiencing a collective fever dream about Gen AI’s creative potential. We’ve all been inundated with posts promising creative leaps, we’ve been watching consumer brands play with AI, and we’re convinced that somehow, by some means, AI is going to transform our marketing from mundane to magnificent.
Spoiler alert: It won’t… if you think that just pressing buttons triggers transformation.
It takes a lot more thinking, deep work, sweat and commitment to really create change. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your marketing was boring before AI, it’s just going to be boring faster with AI. The previous absence of technology doesn’t explain your creativity problem – your creativity is your creativity problem.
“But wait,” I hear you say, “haven’t you seen what Coca-Cola did with their ‘Create Real Magic’ campaign? That’s creative gold!” Errr… I don’t think so… the data’s in and anecdotally that thing didn’t perform qualitatively.
Sure, it got lots of eyeballs, but the aim of the ad (any ad of this type) is to reinforce brand mindshare through salience and resonance. Which in simple terms means that if the ad is working, you should associate the drink Coke with ‘happiness’ and ‘Christmas’, NOT with sparking a debate about whether the use of AI in the ad was good or not. Coke isn’t selling AI creative capabilities!
But, beyond that, it’s also completely irrelevant to most B2B contexts. Because while Coke is getting consumers to remix their brand assets for fun, you’re trying to convince a committee of seven stakeholders that your AI-generated content won’t accidentally reveal trade secrets or violate compliance regulations.
The real issue isn’t the technology – it’s how we think about creativity in B2B.
Your problem isn’t technical, it’s cultural. We’re so busy trying to figure out how to use Gen AI that we’re not asking why we’re using it. We’re treating it like a creative vending machine: insert prompt, receive creativity. That’s not how it works. It’s not how any of this works.
I swear if I see another post on LinkedIn from some smart arse who says it took them 4 minutes to make an ad that has Hollywood production standards, I’ll eat my subscription to Marketing Week and Campaign in one sitting.
Be honest with us and yourself… it didn’t take 4 minutes. The final version took 4 minutes. What they failed to share is the hours, if not weeks of prompt engineering, constraint definition, uploading source examples, going back again and again to retrain, refine, finesse… let alone the extensive examples it has referenced to create the ad that took ‘4 minutes’.
For example, the ad that emulates Studio Ghibli, or Mission:Impossible, or a Chanel runway show that only took 4 minutes to generate could only happen because of the hundreds of thousands of hours that have been invested by creatives, designers, writers, directors, producers, DOPs, cinematographers, illustrators, animators, artists, strategists, planners… without any of this, your 4 minute AI masterpiece would not be possible.
Look at Heinz’s AI ketchup campaign. Everyone got excited because AI consistently drew their iconic bottle shape. But here’s what no one highlighted: that idea worked because Heinz spent decades building a brand so distinctive that even AI can’t mistake it for anything else.
What’s your brand’s equivalent? What’s your distinctive asset that’s so deeply embedded in your market’s consciousness that AI would naturally gravitate toward it?
The Real AI Opportunity
The interesting thing about Virgin Voyages’ Jen AI campaign isn’t the celebrity factor or even the technology – it’s the thinking behind it. They understood that personalization at scale is the real prize. But they didn’t start with the technology; they started with the experience they wanted to create.
That’s the lesson B2B needs to learn. Stop asking what AI can do for your creativity and start asking what creativity can do for your business.
Because here’s what will actually fix your boring B2B marketing:
- Understanding that B2B buyers are humans first. Not algorithms, not job titles – humans. And humans respond to stories, emotions, and experiences that feel personal to them.
- Getting upstream in your creative thinking. Stop treating creativity like the last mile of your marketing process. If you’re only bringing in creative thinking when it’s time to “make it pretty,” you’ve already failed.
- Building a culture that values creative risk. And I don’t mean “let’s use a slightly different shade of blue” risk. I mean actual, meaningful creative exploration that challenges how your market thinks about your category.
Gen AI isn’t going to do any of that for you. It’s a tool, not a strategy. It’s an amplifier, not a creator. It will make your good ideas better and your bad ideas worse, faster than ever before.
“AI is a covers band… it’s a very good covers band. It’s smart, it’s fast and impressive at times. But it’s still playing someone else’s music.” - Jimmy Carr
If you want to really transform your B2B marketing, start here:
- Invest in your creative culture before your creative technology
- Build a distinctive brand voice that would work with or without AI
Create spaces for genuine creative exploration (and yes, that means giving your teams time to experiment)
- Stop trying to replicate B2C campaigns and start solving B2B problems
Gen AI is here whether you’re ready or not. But what’s become really obvious over the last 12 months is that it’s not coming to save your creativity; it’s coming to amplify whatever creative culture you already have.
So maybe, just maybe, instead of obsessing about how to use Gen AI, we should be obsessing about building marketing organizations that would be creative with or without it.
Because when you get that right, Gen AI becomes what it should be: a powerful tool in service of human creativity, not a replacement for it.
