Who Killed Creativity? A true crime investigation

Who Killed Creativity?

Something happened to advertising.

It got bigger. Richer. More sophisticated. More measurable. More efficient.

But did it get better?

For the return of The Fuel Podcast, Keith Smith abandons the traditional business interview and turns investigator in a 48-minute documentary examining what happened to creativity in advertising, and who’s responsible.

Inspired by Steve Harrison’s provocative book Adland’s Progressive Gaze, Who Killed Creativity? assembles the witnesses, examines the evidence and lines up the suspects.

Did advertising lose sight of its original purpose: selling?

Did corporate short-termism and procurement turn creative ideas into commodities?

Did HR professionalise the industry while inadvertently filtering out some of the unconventional talent that once made it extraordinary?

Did purpose and virtue signalling replace persuasion?

Did data make advertising smarter, or simply more cautious?

And now, having spent decades pursuing efficiency, is the industry about to make its most consequential trade yet: human creativity for artificial intelligence?

Featuring advertising legend Dave Trott, author and creative director Steve Harrison, psychologist Rachel Laws, BLUP founder and creative director Dines, former Saatchi & Saatchi and GGT advertising executive Simon Derungs, and Paul Grubb.

This isn’t a nostalgia trip. And it isn’t an argument for returning advertising to some imaginary golden age.

It’s an investigation into how an industry built on extraordinary ideas became increasingly concerned with process, measurement and efficiency, and whether the pursuit of all three has become a Pyrrhic victory.

Because perhaps there isn’t one murderer in this story.

Perhaps this is Murder on the Orient Express.

Maybe we all had a hand on the knife.

The Fuel Podcast: Who Killed Creativity?

Show notes

Show notes and further reading

Buy the book that inspired the show – ‘Adland’s Progressive Gaze’ by Steve Harrison: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0957151543
Forrester: The Cost Of AI Productivity Is Less Creativity
Forrester’s Jay Pattisall and Keith Johnston examine the industry’s emphasis on AI-driven productivity and cost reduction, and the danger of sacrificing creative effectiveness in the process.
Read the Forrester article
IPA: The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness, Peter Field
Field’s analysis of almost 600 IPA Effectiveness Award cases found creatively awarded campaigns had become less effective than at any point in 24 years of data, with short-termism identified as a major cause.
Read/download The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness
D&AD + System1: Conditions for Creativity
Their research looks at the conditions behind commercially effective creative work, including trust, long-term client-agency relationships and the ability to protect bold ideas.
Explore Conditions for Creativity
D&AD: AI & Creativity Report 2025
Based on contributions from 300 industry leaders, this examines AI’s effect on creative work, talent, agency economics and the question of what remains uniquely human. It provides a useful counterpoint to some of the programme’s criticisms.
Explore the D&AD AI & Creativity Report
TechCrunch: The AI jobs debate just got messier
Research covering nearly 22,000 companies complicates the simple assumption that increased AI adoption automatically means fewer employees.
Read the TechCrunch article
TechCrunch: Satya Nadella’s warning to companies using AI
Nadella argues businesses potentially pay for AI twice: through token costs and through the proprietary knowledge required to make the systems useful.
Read the TechCrunch article
VentureBeat: AI’s capacity crunch and the coming surge-pricing breakpoint
WEKA’s Val Bercovici argues that today’s AI prices are effectively subsidised and predicts that real market pricing will emerge as enormous capital expenditure meets finite energy and compute capacity. Importantly, I’d describe this as a prediction, not evidence that AI companies have announced surge pricing.
Read the VentureBeat analysis