Making A.I
marketing’s M.O
“Rob was a true creative partner to Barclays on our GenAI journey. He inspired belief in what GenAI could unlock, then brought the energy to transform it into a trusted, scalable marketing capability. Hands-on with the tools, ruthless on creative standards, and smart on governance.”
Barclays’ GenAI Creative Transformation.
From 0 to 1 in under 6 months
No playbook. No precedent. No heavily-regulated brand had shipped GenAI integrated advertising with results worth talking about. Barclays wanted to be that first financial services brand – with the governance to match.
So, we set about with healthy caution in compliance, legal, and risk – and plenty of big disruption energy in our client and in-house team.
Of all the brands and client teams I’ve been on the GenAI creative journey with, this was one of the most gratifying. Pioneers expect to get mud in their eyes and arrows in their backs. Instead, we received an award short-listing.
Orchestrating Art + Science
Our Pencil Pro–powered AI tech stack was bleeding edge, but the creative and craft expertise I brought was 25 years in the making. I relished the chance to both do and direct right at the coal face.
Our obsession was inputs. Because outputs are only ever as good as what you feed the machine – insight, proof points, judgement, and creative taste.
The tech is just the accelerant. Taste is always the true multiplier for a brand.
The Barclays and Barclaycard AI transformation would bring:
new levels of ROI for brand response campaigns,
innovations in self-serve creative tools,
fresh ways to orchestrate creatives and their work,
and novel ways to engage customers with the brands via vibe coding, pretotypes and the like.