We came away from Runneth with plenty to think about, but one theme kept resurfacing throughout the day: the role of the creative strategist is changing.
Organic, paid and creator content are increasingly competing for attention in the same feed. AI is making it easier to produce creative at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the person responsible for deciding what actually makes good creative has a bigger job than ever.
Here are the three ideas that stuck with us, and what they mean for brands trying to make an impact in an increasingly crowded feed.
1. Integrated media is everything
Organic, paid and creator content aren’t three separate lanes anymore. They’re living and breathing in one feed, and audiences don’t care which bucket your content comes from. For brands, that means thinking about these channels as part of the same creative strategy rather than planning them independently and trying to connect everything afterwards.
When they’re planned together from the start, each channel can inform what happens next. Organic content gives us an early indication of what resonates, creators help bring those ideas to life in ways that feel natural to their audiences, and paid media gives us the opportunity to put more investment behind the strongest creative.
We’ve seen this approach work particularly well with creator-led campaigns. One beauty brand seeded a concealer launch through organic creator videos before scaling the strongest performers through paid media. A finance app took a similar approach, amplifying creator content that was already resonating organically and reporting a 70% higher click-through rate, 30% higher return on ad spend and 20% lower cost per click. While those results weren’t established through a controlled experiment, they’re encouraging examples of how organic performance can help inform paid investment.
The real advantage of taking an integrated approach to creative strategy is that we’re able to learn from everything happening across the feed. Insights from organic can influence paid creative, paid performance can inform what gets produced next, and creator content can contribute to the wider strategy rather than existing as a standalone activation. When these channels work together, we’re in a much stronger position to understand what’s resonating and where to invest.
2. The best creative strategists don’t mind their own business
Another conversation that stuck with us came from Motion’s CEO, Reza Khadjavi, who made the point that the strategists who matter are the ones who shake things up and stay in the trenches.
For us, being in the trenches means being in the feed and the data constantly, rather than waiting for a brief to tell us what’s happening. We’re scrolling the platforms the way our audiences do, keeping an eye on what competitors are running and paying attention to the conversations and creative formats gaining traction. By the time a client asks what’s happening in their category, we should already have a pretty good idea.
But being culturally aware is only part of the job. We’re also looking at performance data alongside the creative itself, because a number can tell you what happened, but the ad can help explain why. If a video has an unusually strong completion rate, for example, we want to understand what’s keeping people watching. Was it the opening hook, the creator’s delivery or something happening halfway through the video?
That understanding also needs to carry through to production. There’s little point identifying a great audience insight if it gets lost somewhere between the initial brief and the final asset, which is why we believe creative strategists need to stay close to the work as it’s being made.
Reza’s point resonated because it reflects the kind of strategists we aspire to be. The ones who are curious enough to keep digging, who notice something interesting in the feed and want to understand why it’s working, and who bring that thinking into the room before anyone has even asked for it.
3. AI might be the easy part
One of the most memorable moments of the day came when a speaker showed the room two ads and asked us to guess which one had performed better. What we hadn’t expected was the revelation that both ads were AI-generated, and neither of us could tell.
One featured an amateur investigator speaking directly to the camera, with the kind of casual, creator-style delivery we’ve all become accustomed to seeing in our feeds. Nothing about it immediately gave away that it had been generated by AI, which was particularly surprising given that the room was full of people who spend their days looking at creative.
It certainly challenged our own assumptions about what AI-generated advertising can look like. There’s still plenty to learn about how audiences respond to it, but seeing those examples made us question how much we might be limiting ourselves by assuming AI-produced creative will always feel artificial.
That conversation tied in nicely with another point from Alysha Boehm that stuck with us: “You have to have a skill to make a skill.”
We loved that, because it captures something we’ve been seeing in our own work. AI has made it remarkably easy to generate creative variations, and the tools are only becoming more accessible. But having a hundred versions of an ad doesn’t necessarily bring you any closer to knowing which one will perform best.
It’s why we think the real value of a creative strategist increasingly lies in their judgment. You need to understand the audience and the data well enough to make an informed call about what might work, but there’s an element of taste involved too. You develop an instinct for what makes good creative by spending time making it, studying it and understanding how people respond to it. That experience becomes particularly valuable when you’re using AI, because you need to be able to recognize a strong output and articulate what makes it worth pursuing.
And perhaps most importantly, you need to know what to ask for in the first place. AI can generate an impressive response to almost any brief you give it, but if you haven’t properly identified the business problem or the customer insight, you’re simply producing more variations of an idea that might not have been particularly strong to begin with.
We see this regularly when reviewing AI-generated creative. Something can look perfectly good at first glance, but once you start questioning whether it speaks to the right audience, communicates the right message or addresses the actual business objective, the limitations become clearer.
As generative AI becomes more embedded in creative production, we expect the strategist’s role to become increasingly focused on directing, evaluating and refining the work. Alysha’s observation was a timely reminder that the craft and experience behind good creative decisions still matter enormously, even when the tools executing those decisions look very different.
Where does that leave creative strategy?
Looking back on the day, we came away feeling that the opportunities for creative strategists are getting bigger, but so are the expectations. With organic, paid and creator content increasingly operating in the same feed, understanding what resonates requires a much more connected view of how people engage with brands. And as AI makes creative production easier, knowing what deserves to be made, tested and scaled becomes an even more important part of the job.
If anything, the conversations at Runneth reinforced just how much there still is to learn. The tools will keep evolving, audiences will keep changing their behaviour, and the creative that works today might look very different a few months from now. For us, that’s what makes the work interesting. There’s always something new to understand, challenge or experiment with, and being a good creative strategist means staying curious enough to keep up.
Bonus takeaway: Great merch really does make the event. We won’t name names, but whoever was behind the “My agent will talk to your agent” tee deserves a raise. Genius.
