What’s the golden rule in marketing and design? Steal from the best. It’s a loose “steal”, obviously… you’ve never danced through lasers to nab a color scheme. But when you want results, you listen to the ones who’ve already got them.

In that spirit, we’ve got over a dozen creative and marketing experts dying to share a few things you desperately need to know about working with AI.

Put the balaclava and lockpicks away, but keep your lootbag out.

It’s nice to throw a ball into someone’s court and have them catch it. Literally or otherwise, it feels good to hand the duty to someone else knowing they’ve definitely “got this”.

This logic does not apply to working with AI. It’s not a ball you can hand off; it’s an 800-page instruction manual. It needs to be read in shifts by different team members, probably over many months.

To get the results creative and marketing leaders are hoping for out of AI, they need to do more than leave the ball in their team’s court. They need change management.

Some of us take easier to AI than others. Some are slogging along, trying to make the most of the new tech and demands that follow. Others seem to have a suspiciously intricate understanding of the machine mind.

Karen X. Cheng (hold for applause) is in the latter camp, but not for the reasons you’d think. Cheng is as successful as she is because she knows when to call the bots, and when not to.

This is the kind of outlook that many creative leaders could stand to learn from: An AI creative model that acknowledges but doesn’t depend on AI.

Imagine a world where creatives and marketers love each other. Where a marketer looks at a designer and feels the same camaraderie they have for their own team, and the Same-Page Club gains another member.

You can have it. Join our upcoming Gather & Grow on July 23rd at 12:00 PM ET/9:00 AM PT, where a creative from Reddit and a marketer from Adobe will show you their model for total harmony between disciplines.

A few weeks back (and against my better judgment), I told you the golden rule in marketing and design is to “steal from the best.”

This week, I would like to revise that statement to, “If Nike spends money on it, you probably should too.” 

You’re right, we might not all have Nike-sized marketing budgets. But, we can all learn from brands that are using immersive marketing campaigns to deliver 3x (three times) the brand lift at half the cost.

In other words, it might be time to unearth some of those “ungodly,” “absurd” and “I don’t see how this works as a Google Ad” creative concepts that you previously had to shelf.

What if I told you that not all manipulation is bad?

Before you call your therapist—hear me out.

I’m not talking about the not-so-nice Machiavellian type-stuff, I’m talking about data manipulation and creating structured data sets for AI inputs. According to the experts, it’s going to be a vital skill in the AI era.

We’ve also got a BIG update from Meta to share, an eye-opening Microsoft report (no joke!), and more AI shenanigans.