This post was created in partnership with Empathy Lab 

The campaign had a good run. One big idea launched everywhere, studied, repeated. Now? Not so much. 

During an ADWEEK House Cannes Lions panel co-hosted with Empathy Lab, industry leaders explored what replaces it: a connected creative infrastructure where engineers, creative talent, data, and AI production work together. 

The infrastructure shift 

When AI production tools reach everyone, the real competitive question comes into focus. What keeps one brand from sounding exactly like the next? 

The answer is not necessarily more tech. 

“I think the creative teams are the ones that now matter more than anything,” said Roland Butler, head of product, content solutions at Zalando. 

“What we are now building is a whole creative system around those teams, maintaining their agency and their creative freedom, and allowing them to respond faster and better,” he added. Designers and engineers now work alongside one another on prompts, quality controls, editorial guidelines, and cultural trend signals.

Ben Hall, VP at Empathy Lab, sees this moment as a clarifying one. “The fundamentals are more important than ever,” he noted. “The idea, the insight, the cultural relevance has become massively important. Teams are now surrounding themselves around this again.” 

None of that completely went away. What shifted is the strategic foundation. “You’ve got to have systems thinking, you’ve got to have people who really understand how this idea can translate to composable systems across and outside of the Internet,” Hall continued. 

Keeping speed from turning generic 

During the Met Gala this past spring, the Zalando team used tooling to link trend signals, product relevance, visuals, and an editorial review, then published a campaign within 24 hours. 

“The speed to react, I think, is something that you should track, and then the speed to insight,” Butler said. “If you’re just counting the volume of AI output, you’re adding to the problem of a world of blandness.”

Hall added that speed “can actually be an antidote to blandness, because you can read signals from culture and speed that roll in. You can create content really quickly, but it actually has meaning.”

The upstream role 

Hall’s framework for where people fit is clear: “You need the empathy upstream, and the machines power the creative downstream.”

Hall and Butler agreed that strategic thinking has to be baked into the infrastructure, not applied at the end. Brands need the people responsible for taste, emotion, and cultural judgment to be involved in designing the operating models. AI can help teams move at the speed of culture, but creatives bring the empathy and storytelling instinct that make a brand memorable. 

“Keep your teams curious, and focus on systems rather than projects,” Butler concluded.