Every Monday morning we hold our company kick off meeting at Backlash. For the past ten years I've sat in this meeting listening to our teams talk through new business opportunities, live projects and the challenges that come with delivering experiential campaigns. It's one of my favourite meetings of the week because you can feel the energy when a new brief lands or a new brand reaches out to us.
Recently though, there's been a change. Almost every week, a project now starts with the same sentence "The client has created an AI visual." The reaction around the room is always the same. You can feel the excitement fade and the creative energy disappear before the brief has even been discussed. It's not because we're anti AI, like most modern creative businesses we use AI tools that help us work smarter and improve the way we deliver work.
Over the last year we've seen a growing number of both new and existing clients arrive with AI generated designs for their pop-ups already in hand. Sometimes they apologise before showing them but they're presented as the pop-up they'd like us to create.
What's mind blowing is that these images often look convincing. They look hyper real and sit in the right location with stunning architecture and perfect finishes. But these designs rarely answer the brief and as marketers we can see they're simply answers to a prompt and that's an important distinction.
An AI generated design is the conclusion of a process it never actually went through
The AI design hasn't considered the audience or got into the exploration of consumer behaviour. There has been no challenging or questioning the brief or exploration of multiple ideas that approach the brand challenge at different angles that could change consumer behaviour, create conversation or drive sales. Agencies could start to feel like it looks like the end of creative thinking. However, when we really get into it none of the creative thinking has actually happened.
A few months back a global luxury beauty brand approached us with an AI generated design for an outdoor shopping centre pop-up. Visually, it was stunning and made from towering make-up compacts stacked about seven metres high to create a structure that customers could walk through and around.
The problem was that it simply couldn't exist in the real world. Under UK health and safety regulations, and the requirements of shopping centres and public venues, the concept would never receive approval. Even if it could be engineered safely, it bore no resemblance to the client's budget or production timelines we were given to work on.
The AI hadn't solved the brief, It had ignored the constraints entirely and that's where agencies find themselves in an increasingly difficult position.
Our role now becomes explaining why the ‘wow’ exciting idea isn't possible. We're then faced with a decision if we want to redesign a concept that was never viable in the first place or lose the business entirely. If we do proceed, inevitably, we're seen as the people taking the magic away, when in reality we're the ones responsible for ensuring an activation is safe, achievable, commercially realistic and capable of delivering against the brief.
At Backlash we've always believed the physical pop-up is only half the outcome. The real value isn't the structure, the fabrication or even the beautiful designs. It's concept development. Our job is to understand the commercial objective before we ever start designing the experience. We ask the questions, Who are we trying to reach? What do we want people to feel? What behaviour are we trying to change? How does this activation get attention on social media?
Concept development can take time, typically over a few days where ideas are challenged, often getting six ideas down to two ideas that tick all the brief objectives and that's the creative process clients invest in. We are increasingly seeing brands unintentionally remove that process altogether so instead of bringing agencies a problem to solve, they're arriving with what they believe is the solution.
I don't think this is because they don't value creativity, but because AI has convinced clients that creativity can be compressed into a prompt. The worrying aspect isn't that clients are using AI but that clients are beginning to trust AI's first answer more than the expertise they're paying agencies to provide.
The biggest risk isn't to creative agencies but to brands themselves
Realistically AI isn't designed to create originality, it's designed to predict the most likely answer based on everything that already exists. If you're looking for efficiency this is a great tool to use but it doesn't work if you're trying to create something unique or different. If every brand begins its creative process with the same moodboards or trained on the same imagery, influenced by the same trends and prompted in broadly the same way, then the inevitable will start to happen as the work brands produce begin to look like variations of one another.
The brands that stand out and gain attention over the next decade won't necessarily be the ones using AI the most. They'll be the ones who know when to stop listening to AI and go back to authenticity, cultural insights and creative instinct which is something an algorithm can’t replicate.
The best pop-ups disrupt the market through authenticity and emotional connection with consumers that ultimately influence behaviour. These pop-ups generate sales because consumers experienced something that felt considered and made them feel important to the brand, not because the design looked impressive.
A beautiful design has never guaranteed an effective activation in the experiential industry. Experiential marketing has always been about creating something people haven't seen before. It's about tapping into emotions, cultural relevance and creating an experience that consumers choose to share because they feel authentic. AI has made creativity appear instant but the best experiential campaigns have never been about the fastest idea, it's always been about creating the right one.
Katie Peake is a judge for the Brand Impact Awards 2026. If you have a standout branding project from the last year that you think deserves recognition, you need to enter the BIAs. You have until July 9 to enter and you can do so on the Brand Impact Awards website.
