Leo Burnett, the grandfather of human-centric advertising, once said, “Curiosity about life, in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” I think about this quote a lot.
Back in 2008, I worked on the Creative team at a startup that sold personalized stationery. One day, the team crowded around our designer’s desk, staring at an ad that highlighted a five-year-old’s birthday party invitation. None of us early twentysomethings had kids yet. We had stock photos to choose from to feature in the design. Which kid looked four, on the cusp of turning five? We had no clue, and we didn’t want to get it wrong.
We started calling in people with kids from other teams to get their take. This led to a few parents making suggestions and giving us more insight into their world. Even after the ad shipped (better because of their input), this experience made us all tenfold more curious.
Why Customer Curiosity Still Shapes Better Marketing
We weren’t parents yet, but we were surrounded by our customers in our daily lives. We started paying attention. Getting invited to a baby shower was like being out in the field. Babysitting for a friend’s twins was essentially an invitation to run a focus group. We started asking questions at family birthday parties.
We started learning things, like how kids start losing teeth in kindergarten. What an amazing hint for our next photo lineup. Today, we would probably just ask Claude, which would get us the right answer in less than a minute. And the question I think we all have to ask ourselves is… what do we lose in the time that we saved?
How AI Efficiency Can Weaken Creative and Customer Insight Skills
If Leo was right and curiosity about life is the secret of great creative people, marketing leaders should all be listing curiosity as hiring criteria No. 1. But our recent State of Curiosity report showed that although 95% of people report they are curious, only 30% of workplaces strongly reward curiosity.
Yes, AI slop is a problem. The technology narrows the range of ideas we generate and reduces our willingness to engage deeply with its output. But I’m more worried that our skills—the ability to take notice, get curious, connect previously unconnected dots, and create something new and exciting out of it all—are going to get rusty when we’re outsourcing the hardest, best part of our work. The muscle that matters most in marketing is the one connecting deep customer understanding to a creative leap. That’s the whole job, and it’s exactly the part teams are handing away.
The promise of AI is real, and I use it every day. I’m also paying attention to where I feel loss amid all of this acceleration. In the last few years, the FAA issued a safety briefing warning that when pilots lean on autopilot and stop hand-flying, their manual skills decay. This decay was cited as a factor in a crash where automation failed, and pilots couldn’t recover. Our work in Marketing is lower stakes, of course—but I think we’d be wise to heed the warning here. If human skills are use-it-or-lose-it assets, we need to choose carefully what we outsource and what we keep.
A Practical Framework For Balancing Human Thinking And AI Execution
There is certainly a place for AI and automation in our world. I’m inspired by Wharton’s Kartik Hosanagar and his research showing that we can preserve diversity of thought when humans generate the initial ideas, but bring in AI for evaluation or refinement. For marketers, that means we have to keep doing the hardest part: connecting deep empathy for our customers to a creative leap. And as marketing leaders, we have to expect this phase of the process to take some time.
In the end, that time spent on curiosity and creativity will accelerate our teams. Our State of Curiosity report found that workers in environments that encourage questions report fewer mistakes, less wasted time, and fewer missed opportunities. Those workers also feel significantly more comfortable speaking up and exploring new ideas. They are more than twice as likely to feel safe asking questions and more than three times as likely to explore new ideas in meetings.
Here’s our step-by-step protocol for balancing artificial and human intelligence in our work:
- Understand the customer. Who are they, and what job are they trying to do? How can you help them?
- Understand what you’re selling. How does it help that person, and how does it work?
- Get curious and get creative. I encourage my team to collect a notebook (digital or physical) full of ideas they encounter in the world. Art, music, ads, shows, poetry, tabloids, relationships, great moments in sports… whatever it is that inspires them, so they have a wealth of experience to draw on when it’s time to generate ideas. No prompt can produce that connection.
- Now bring in AI. Here, it is genuinely useful for sharpening, pressure-testing, and scaling after the hard thinking is done.
This is also how we make sure what we hand off is real, not slop. This is how we make a campaign sing.
Katie Miserany, Chief Communications Officer and Global Head of Marketing at SurveyMonkey, joined the company in 2019 and oversees both communications and marketing, driving the company’s global strategy and brand storytelling. Previously, Miserany held key marketing and communications roles at Worthwhile Digital, the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and Tiny Prints (acquired by Shutterfly). She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she began her career as a reporter and copy editor for her beloved college newspaper, The Daily Nexus.
