Soapbox 2025: Jaime McGill on Making the Most of This New Era
Our LBB community is buzzing with ideas, opinions and visions for a better advertising industry. So this year, we invited you to dig out your megaphone and climb onto our figurative soapbox to share your hopes for 2025: what change do you want to see? How can the inner workings of the industry improve? How should it adapt to the tech, social, cultural, economic, and politics shifts shaping the market?
Taking to the stand today is Jaime McGill, head of strategy at DDB Chicago, who confesses to being an “eternal optimist”, as she focuses on ways in which the industry can harness change for the benefit of creativity.
I think I can speak for most of us in saying that we are excited to see 2024 in the rear-view mirror. It was a year that stretched us to new definitions of what it means to ‘do more with less’.
We are facing 2025 with intense pressures. It's easy to look at our industry and become distracted by the pace of change and all the noise surrounding it. This new world is challenging, but in reality, we are never going back to what things used to be. Evolution is inevitable, but it’s the lens we view it through that will make all the difference. So, my hope for the year ahead is that we stay grounded in the one enduring truth that matters, because no matter how much changes, one thing will always remain the same – the power of ideas and creativity.
In this new era, it’s up to us to make the most of it.
We are trained to think of efficiency tools as creativity killers, but what if we choose to look at them as levers to increase it? Last year at DDB Chicago, we used AI to launch our new Starburst platform ‘Different Every Time’. Was it a more efficient way to produce the work? Sure. But AI was at the heart of the idea itself... enabling us to amplify our brand story by creating countless iterations of assets that delivered a different experience every time.
In a world where we have limited time and very limited resources, I’m encouraging my strategy team to start every project with AI. I’d say it would be a disaster for briefs if that’s where thinking ended, but it can be where it begins. Think about it as an 80/20 equation. In the past, strategists would spend 80% of the time understanding the category, consumer, culture, and brand, and then be left with little time to make it interesting for creatives. Using AI to handle the baseline thinking, strategists can now spend 80% of their time building upon it to craft provocative, inspiring strategies and briefs that open unexpected creative solutions. Let’s use 2025 to reframe these automation tools from time and money savers to enablers for better ideas and thinking.
I’m fortunate to work with many clients who want and need efficiency but aren’t willing to give up creative quality in the process. We can still make ideas that people notice and that the world cares about. Maybe we can even make them more interesting.
I recognise this all might sound a bit naïve, and trust me, life is hard in this industry right now (and it's getting harder). But I am an eternal optimist, and I choose to stop getting frustrated and instead, remember why I love this business in the first place – the work. Rather than fight the inevitable change, let’s make them tailwinds to our creativity vs headwinds. Navigating the future will be a lot easier if we do.
