Is craft becoming a luxury good?

We’re about to live through an explosion of perfectly competent creative work. And I think it’s going to make competence worthless.

I started thinking about this while judging D&AD this year. There was AI everywhere in the work, certainly, and an extraordinary amount in the case studies. Everyone is using it. We are too.

But after 40-plus hours sitting in a dark room looking at work, the stuff that had been really cared about became incredibly easy to spot.

It made me think that craft is about to become our industry’s luxury good.

Not because you can always tell what was made with AI. We’re all already bored by that conversation. You notice because there are decisions everywhere: the casting, the writing, the weird-but-perfect piece of music, a performance, an edit, some small obsessive detail nobody consciously notices but without which the whole thing would be less good.

It made me think that craft is about to become our industry’s luxury good. Not because it’s expensive, but because it’s scarce.

Above: Justine Armour at the D&AD Awards presentation.

Competence is about to become worthless

This is the part of the AI conversation that’s fascinating to me. 

We’re heading towards an infinite supply of competent images, competent copy, competent films and competent ideas. Perfectly composed, perfectly rendered, perfectly targeted and perfectly fine. And when everyone can make competent work, competence has no value.

Taste does. Surprise does. Audacity does. So does the slightly irrational decision to make something better, do it harder, than it technically needs to be. 

That’s craft. And I suspect we’re going to become more attuned to high quality precisely because we’ll be surrounded by so much work that is basically fine.

Some friction is good

The opportunities we have now are extraordinary. We can move faster, try more things, make things we couldn’t make before, kill things and remake them without losing weeks or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Great. But somewhere along the way our industry developed a religious belief that efficiency is the goal. We’ve become obsessed with removing friction from the creative process: fewer people, fewer handovers, fewer production days, fewer dollars, more versions, faster smoother everything. The problem is, some of the friction is the work.

Friction isn’t cost effective, but it’s often where the magic comes from. 

It’s the argument about the line, casting 50 people before finding the one, the director seeing something you didn’t, the editor trying the bonkers cut, someone spending an unreasonable amount of time finding exactly the right piece of music.

None of this looks efficient on a spreadsheet. It’s also what often injects energy into the work.

AI doesn’t threaten craft because machines can’t make beautiful things. Of course they can. The danger is that efficiency becomes the ambition. That because we can make more things, faster, with fewer people, we think we should. Let’s not.

Friction isn’t cost effective, but it’s often where the magic comes from. 

You can feel the people in it

At D&AD we awarded Apple’s holiday film with the handmade forest puppets. I’d loved it when I first saw it, not as a copywriter dissecting the work, but as a civilian encountering something lovely in the world.

It’s very definitely an ad. The iPhone is right there. It’s not subtle.

The puppets were made by hand, the performances were wonderful, the storytelling was beautiful. Even the story of making the thing was beautiful. You could feel the people in it.

Maybe I have a huge bias because I still love making things, and I don’t think this job is very interesting without production as its own creative process. But I came out of D&AD more convinced of the value of that, not less.

Craft isn’t slow

Working with e.l.f. has cured me of the idea that caring takes time. They move incredibly fucking fast.

A platform idea can come from a community comment. Leadership is in the chat. Something happens in culture and everyone is ready to go. There isn’t a stately advertising procession where strategy hands something to creative, creative hands something to production, and everyone reconvenes three weeks later to discuss.

I’ve spent months making average work and I’ve seen teams make brilliant work impossibly quickly. The difference isn’t time, it’s having and holding a standard.

We’re all getting up in each other’s shit all the time. It’s messy. It works. We are learning, energized, and grateful for a client that keeps us on our toes. When you move quickly, everything becomes one process and the work can still be well made, because time isn’t craft. Care is.

I’ve spent months making average work and I’ve seen teams make brilliant work impossibly quickly. The difference isn’t time, it’s having and holding a standard.