Out-Human the Algorithm: CMOs Pair AI and Creativity to Win Culture in 2025
AI scales marketing, but taste, empathy and cultural insight set brands apart. CMOs back creators, community and agent-ready content as budgets shift to social and speed.
Agents of Reinvention: What Creatives Need to Know from the 2025 Global CMO Report
Dentsu Creative's 2025 Global CMO Report lands with clarity: AI is everywhere in marketing operations, and it makes human creativity more valuable, not less. The study gathers insights from 1,950 senior marketing leaders across 14 markets and pinpoints 10 themes shaping brand building in the age of algorithms and agentic AI.
For creatives, the message is simple: use AI for scale and speed, but differentiate with taste, empathy, and cultural intelligence. That's where the returns are.
The Core Paradox: Scale with AI, Stand Out with Humanity
Almost all CMOs are using AI to scale content and personalize experiences, with over 30% doing so daily. Yet 87% say creativity and humanity are critical to effective strategy-and 78% believe generative AI will never replace human imagination, up 13 points since 2024.
The takeaway: AI gets you in the game. Craft gets you remembered.
Beat the Algorithm Without Becoming the Same
71% of CMOs agree that "if I don't win with the algorithm, I will be invisible." At the same time, 79% worry that over-optimization creates sameness. 90% want to combine agile production with intelligent data, but 76% still see content speed as a blocker to true personalization.
- Design for pattern breaks: introduce tension, surprise, or novelty in the first 2 seconds.
- Build modular content systems so one idea spawns variations for channels, contexts, and creators.
- Fine-tune models on your brand's tone, taste, and taboos to avoid generic outputs.
- Use human edit rooms to add specificity, cultural nuance, and emotional resonance.
- Prototype weekly: quick AB tests beat big-bang campaigns in an algorithmic feed.
Culture > Pure Reach
84% of CMOs say cultural share matters more than share of voice. Entertainment, community engagement, and creator collaborations are the tools of choice-yet 81% admit there aren't many proven playbooks.
- Co-create with creators instead of renting reach. Give them latitude within clear brand guardrails.
- Build community rituals: recurring formats, episodic content, and participatory prompts.
- Publish through passion hubs where your audience already gathers, then expand.
Where Budgets Are Moving
90% say social and influencer content now drives more engagement than traditional advertising. 91% agree brands are increasingly built through partnerships with creators, platforms, and tastemakers-up 14 points year on year. Still, 82% are concerned about losing control. Over 70% plan to allocate more than 20% of budgets to innovation.
- Set creator governance early: approval paths, usage rights, disclosure, and crisis protocol.
- Measure beyond media: track community growth, creator equity, saves, shares, and repeat exposure.
- Treat innovation as a portfolio: 70% proven, 20% emerging, 10% experimental.
Agentic AI Is Next-Trust and Taste Will Decide Winners
89% of CMOs expect agentic AI to have a major impact on business. As digital agents curate itineraries and shopping baskets, brand preference will be set by trust, utility, and cultural relevance. This is where creative direction meets data design.
- Make your brand machine-readable: clean product data, consistent taxonomy, rich descriptions, and clear benefits.
- Create content for agents and humans: FAQs, comparisons, citations, and how-tos that answer intent with authority.
- Codify brand taste: examples of what's "in" and "out," so AI outputs stay distinct.
What Leaders Are Saying
Abbey Klaassen, Global Brand President, Dentsu Creative: "The future of marketing is about augmenting human ingenuity with AI to enable a level of pace and personalization not previously possible… connecting creativity, media, data and production to meet the right customer with the right message in the right moment."
Yasu Sasaki, Global Chief Creative Officer, dentsu: "AI is exceptionally good at prediction but creativity by its very nature is unpredictable. What is most exciting is when AI and human creativity come together to unlock new possibilities."
Patricia McDonald, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Dentsu Creative: "They must win with the algorithm or be invisible, but optimize too closely and they become indistinguishable… The more we embrace AI, the more human we must become."
Amit Wadhwa, CEO, Dentsu Creative & Media Brands, South Asia, dentsu: "Algorithms may shape what we see, but it is imagination, empathy and culture that shape what we remember."
A Creative Ops Stack That Fits the Moment
- Integrate data, AI-enabled production, and your martech stack for real-time creativity at scale.
- Stand up a modern content supply chain: strategy, creation, versioning, approval, distribution, and measurement.
- Close the loop: feed performance data back into prompts, palettes, and pattern libraries.
Do This in the Next 90 Days
- Audit your content supply chain for speed, volume, and personalization gaps.
- Build a brand taste system: voice rules, visual grammar, negative examples, and cultural do/don'ts.
- Launch a creator pilot with clear objectives and shared ownership of outcomes.
- Prototype agent-ready content: structured product info, trusted comparisons, and citations.
- Create an internal "edit room" of strategists, editors, and cultural researchers to refine AI drafts.
- Set a monthly "originality review" to prevent drift into sameness.
Further Reading and Resources
Explore the report and go deeper on the trends shaping creative work:
