Channel Mastery Gives Creative Teams The Edge Generic Output Can't Copy

There was a time when making 100 versions of an ad was a production problem. Now it's a prompt. AI can generate headlines, images, variations, and campaign concepts faster than most creative teams can review them. With production solved, the challenge is looking at a wall of competent work and refusing to ship it.

Carlo Maria Ferrari is Global Head of Earned Content at De'Longhi Group, where he builds content systems designed to travel across social, creators, PR, retail, and out-of-home. He also writes AD BREAK, a weekly newsletter on advertising worth paying attention to, and hosts Uncomfortable Ad Break, a series of candid conversations with people who work in the industry. His argument is simple: put people back at the center, both the people who buy the work and the people who make it.

On the topic of AI, Ferrari says, "AI is a great tool to decide what not to do."

AI sets the floor and the team has to clear it

"The whole point of AI is that it's built on past knowledge, so it doesn't come out with anything new," Ferrari says. That makes it useful for research and documentation, for assembling examples of campaigns that already worked, provided somebody checks the sources. That makes it a weak originator, and Ferrari's answer is to use that limitation as a filter. "You can use AI, give me 10 ideas, and then you can take those ideas off, because everybody is going to be using those ideas," he says.

Used that way, the model marks the baseline everyone else is already working from. The ideas are already sitting within everyone's reach, so whatever survives has to clear a standard beyond the obvious. He compresses the entire method into three sentences. "If you had already this idea, AI had it too. It's not good enough. Raise the bar."

Cheaper production looks like a win at first. Digital tools let a team make hundreds of things it could once make only one of, but making more of them doesn't make any one of them better. Past a certain volume, the work starts to blur together and editorial judgment becomes the thing separating what's worth promoting from everything else.

Cheap production expands what a team can afford to attempt

With all that said, Ferrari actually likes the technology. He just has a clear view of where it works. "There is no real added value when you have to resize the pictures in four different formats," he says of launching a product on Amazon. "It's boring and tiring."

He also offers a case that complicates the usual headcount story. Early on he helped fund an AI content factory inside a large group, hiring creative directors and art directors to produce social, web, and ecommerce work across the company's brands. The team started at 20 people and now runs at 50. "For the budgets that we had, we would not have been able to create all that content for all those brands," he says. Cheaper production raised the number of briefs the group could afford to answer, and the payroll grew to match.

When AI absorbs the rote parts of production, it leaves more room for higher-value creative work. As Ferrari puts it, "AI as a technology that helps us live better, I think that's a great thing."

Mastering one channel beats showing up on all of them

Ferrari traces the slop back to teams that are stretched too thin to think. "A lot of the marketing teams and agencies are required to deal with multiple tasks in campaigns, so everybody's overworked," he says. "Even new brands are trying to be on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Snapchat, at the same time doing out-of-home, at the same time doing TV. It's too much. People are stretched." Overloaded, teams lean on AI to move faster. "So you go to AI for help, and there is no way to validate." Nobody has time to check the output, so work goes out the door that no one in the room would defend.

His preferred correction comes from Rima Suppan, co-founder of the nappy brand Peachies, whose campaigns have built a following on tone that treats parents as adults with a sense of humor. Ferrari repeats her advice with obvious approval. "Go and master one channel, become the maximum expert. Create something that is incredibly recognizable, distinctive, impactful, and effective, and then move to the next channel."

He likes the approach for what it hands back to the team. "You get yourself time to learn on becoming great at something, and you don't overwork teams," he says. "How many useless PowerPoint presentations do we still need to do for a channel that maybe is not going to get launched because we don't have budgets?" The same thinking applies to media planning. Master one channel before the next, and the same discipline shows up in where the money goes. Spread a small out-of-home budget nationally and it disappears everywhere; concentrate it in a market or two and the work actually lands.

Out-of-home puts a whole city in front of the same idea

Ask him which medium rewards that kind of concentration and he goes straight to the street. "Out-of-home can be a real shared experience for people," he says. "It's one of my favorites, and it's very people centric, because it's something that you can touch and feel."

He's seen that effect firsthand. One of his best-performing formats is walking London, photographing the ads he passes and rating them, and it lands because everyone scrolling has already seen the same posters. Brands are buying that same effect. "If you build some really creative out-of-home billboards or posters, people will stop and look at it, and maybe laugh at it," he says. "With social media, if it's really good, people will take a picture of it." That's what makes it one of the last shared channels, where everyone meets the same image in the same place at the same time.

Ferrari gets there from the audience side. "The big data companies sold us the dream that microtargeting would have worked," he says. "It's emotion that drives people, and a shared emotion is going to be as effective as possible." When the eclipse crossed Europe, London's parks filled with people looking up together, and no segment produced that. His instruction is to aim a level above the individual. "You should speak to a level above, to make us think, if only our fathers had this, how would their life be easier? That's much more emotional and much more interesting."

When the machine can supply ten ideas, it's the creative team's job to make sure none of them are good enough.