Coca-Cola's Creative Director on Why AI Produces Correct Work, Not Meaningful Ideas
Luke Perkins, Creative Strategy Director at Coca-Cola, said the biggest surprise from his team's daily AI experiments wasn't what the technology could do-it was what it couldn't. AI excels at producing structurally sound briefs that synthesize category data and map competitive landscapes. The most impactful briefs his team has written, though, require something else entirely: a felt truth about cultural tension or a moment in someone's life where a brand can matter.
That gap only became clearer after Perkins' team committed to a Friday discipline: blocking two hours every week to use AI tools. The consistency made the boundary visible. "The best briefs we've ever written have never really been about being correct," Perkins said. "They've been about finding a felt truth."
Lived Experience Drives the Work
Perkins said the material that makes a brief great comes from outside any marketing course. It comes from the music someone grew up on, relationships that failed, neighborhoods they came from-the lived stuff that gets onto the page.
When a creative team sees that human insight, they run toward it. When it's absent, they execute mechanically. "AI can build you a perfectly structured brief all day long. But it hasn't had its heart broken. It hasn't felt out of place in a room," Perkins said.
Rather than weakening the value of human experience, AI has made it more valuable. Creatives who can articulate genuine cultural insight have a clearer competitive advantage.
The 1.7-Second Decision
Perkins operates with a hard constraint: the average person decides whether to keep watching an ad within 1.7 seconds on mobile. That's not a habit. That's a reflex.
The question isn't whether an idea is good. It's whether a good idea announces itself fast enough. Perkins looks for something visually surprising in the opening frame or emotionally familiar that pulls viewers in before they consciously understand why. The work has to feel like something-not like an ad.
When something isn't landing, Perkins doesn't kill the concept. He sharpens it. Usually the idea is sound and the entry point is wrong. "People are giving you their time-the most valuable thing they have. The work has to be worth it from the jump."
Fighting the Middle with a Strong Idea
AI is designed to find answers most people will accept. In creative work, that instinct is dangerous. It pulls everything toward the middle, and the middle becomes wallpaper.
The antidote is a strong idea built on real insight and felt truth. Once that exists, AI becomes a tool to build around it-not a shortcut to skip the idea itself.
Perkins sees real potential in using AI for customization: taking one strong idea and tailoring it by audience, time of day, location, or weather. That level of personalization at scale was previously impossible. "That's not AI replacing the idea. That's AI making it work harder for more people in more moments."
For creatives looking to work more effectively with AI tools, understanding how to extract better outputs while maintaining human judgment is essential. Prompt Engineering Courses can help professionals structure requests that preserve strategic thinking rather than defaulting to algorithmic middle-ground solutions.
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