Better Curiosity: Noble’s AI Marketing Philosophy Revisited

For months, we’ve been talking about writing another piece about our perspective on AI in marketing, as a follow-up to our initial agency perspective on AI and marketing, which we wrote at the beginning of 2023 when we were all trying to wrap our heads around what AI would mean to our industry and the world overall. 

To be honest, it holds up pretty damn well. 

It’s just the right amount of noncommittal ambiguity with a few dashes of “who the f*ck knows” and “who the f*ck are we to say” fortunetelling. We’re definitely patting our back-then-selves on the back for that wishy-washy feat.

All jokes aside, though, this knees-bent, leading-with-curiosity approach feels like the best way (the only way) to approach the future of AI. Because literally, every day is the future of AI these days. 

That’s not to say we’re waiting to see what happens. Quite the opposite. 

With a human-first approach, we’re playing and poking, tinkering and testing, experimenting and brazenly trying to break things at breakneck speed. We have our hypotheses, and we have our predictions, but they all have the caveats and asterisks that we “probably know” and “probably don’t know” all at once.

The speed of change in this space is like lightspeed in a vacuum (apparently, that’s faster than just regular lightspeed, according to ChatGPT). Point is, it’s fast–even for a group of “Change Huggers” like us. So every time we’ve started to write this piece, something happens in the world of AI for us to think about, discuss, hypothesize about, research further … it’s completely “crAI-crAI.” 

So what are some of those things? 

Heading into the holidays, we were fortunate enough to see the Head of Product at OpenAI speak, and he said by the end of 2025, we’d all have AI agents doing 3 to 4 hours of work for us a day while we go about more important things. That sounded like sci-fi hyperbole at the time, but “Hey,” we thought, “He sets the product roadmap, so he must be serious.” 

Then they released Operator a month into 2025, and it’s not perfect yet, but it will improve quickly, so it’s easy to see that he wasn’t full of hyperbolic sci-fi poop emojis.

Then, over the holidays, Coke was taking it right in the label from the advertising and marketing industry for their “Holidays Are Coming” all-AI created campaign. Creatives everywhere were up in tattoo-covered arms. But guess what? One of our creatives watched those spots on Christmas Eve with normal people who don’t listen to AI podcasts and read AI articles all the time, and the quote they heard was, “Coke always has the best holiday commercials.” These normal people didn’t give two shits that the wheels of the Coke trucks were actually going backwards and that the AI was imperfect. 

While the industry was rebuking the spots for being hacky AI and taking jobs away, the real world didn’t care. And Coke got a lot of attention for it. The truth is, technology has always shifted and changed jobs. The same people complaining about those spots have probably enjoyed advances in cameras and phones and software over the years that have altered the course of someone’s job. 

This is all part of democratized creativity, which is what technology tends to do. 

Those Coke spots still employed plenty of creative people, just in a different, AI-driven capacity. We actually saw the CMO of Autodesk, Dara Treseder, speak at the Cannes Festival of Creativity last year, and she said, “AI isn’t going to take your jobs. People who know AI are going to take your jobs.”

Around that same time, Nike released a video for the Air Jordan 1 Low Level “Velvet Brown” featuring Travis Scott, which didn’t feature AI in the final product, but AI was heavily and inventively involved in the creative storyboarding process, which is described in this post by Eddie Yoon. No AI was used in the final product to avoid judgement from the creative community. Yet it still received judgement, as you can see in the comments on the post. 

Yes, the creative director could have used a storyboard artist, but instead he used Midjourney to create 5,000+ storyboard images and probably got closer to what was in his head than he ever had before. Isn’t that just a new way to unlock someone’s creativity? Isn’t that just a different kind of art? Isn’t that progress?

The next thing up? People were slamming the Pentagram CEO for unapologetically doubling down on their use of AI with this really inventive use of AI for this design work. We just thought it was an incredible case of starting with human craft, creativity and ingenuity and iterating with technology. 

This is a perfect case study in our estimation. And frankly, we think anyone in our industry who doesn’t think this is smart, creative, human and the future of marketing is probably not going to be doing marketing in five years. We have to embrace AI as marketers, creatives, technologists and strategists. We have to use it, learn it, master it, be better than it and let it make us better.

Then, the United States announced that it would become the U.S. of AI with the massive “Stargate” investment, attempting to ensure national dominance in the AI race (smart move, dumb name). That news was big but lasted all of 10 seconds. 

Then DeepSeek, a Chinese company, sent a heat-seeking missile into the stock market (leading to NVIDIA’s nearly $600b loss in value alone and more than $1tn overall) by releasing their LLM and claiming they achieved the same levels of innovation as American companies like OpenAI with an open-source project done faster, for pennies on the dollar, without top-of-the-line chips, while using less energy. 

Then we witnessed one of our industry friends finally discover AI (you know who you are (googly eyes emoji)) and like a lunatic, post a series of AI-generated images on Facebook while tagging some of our team, who he travels with, as if they were on a big trip together.

These were not even good AI-generated images, and yet hoards of people oohed and aahed and congratulated him on the stunning feat and beautiful photos. WTF people, these are clearly not real. Well, they thought they were. And guess what? That didn’t make us think, “AI is dangerous because people can so clearly be manipulated.” 

No, unfortunately we already knew that about people. What it made us realize is that people need to become more familiar with AI, think critically about it, understand how it’s used, use it in their everyday lives and realize it’s coming. 

A very small percentage of the planet uses these tools, which means the world is about to get a rude AF awakening. The genie is way out of the bottle. 

So those of us at the forefront of technology and creativity shouldn’t be shunning or pooh poohing uses of it. We should be leading the way, in a way that is inventive and human and creative and responsible. It’s happening with or without us, so why not make it interesting and imaginative the way we have all approached everything in marketing?

As artist Matthew Niederhauser, co-creator of “The Golden Key,” an AI art installation that was part of the Techne exhibit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, said in the New York Times, “This is not a time for artists to retreat from technology. It’s a super important time to engage and try to make you think critically about how it works.”

Noble’s theme for the year is “Better Curiosity,” and that’s exactly what we’re applying to the world of AI. The other day we were discussing the environmental impact of AI and the computing energy it requires (a whole other topic we’ll all continue to dig into) and how we feel about that, so one of us asked ChatGPT if it could use less energy for us while still maintaining its quality. It was a tongue-in-cheek ask, but guess what? It responded, “Yes, I can use less energy by operating more efficiently while maintaining high-quality responses. Let me know if you’d like me to adjust further ⚡😊.” That led us to ask how much it was saving and it explained that queries are where it uses most of its energy, so it gave us advice on consolidating those, which was actually really helpful. 

That’s just a small example, in regards to a very big question, that shows how a little human curiosity powered by AI can lead to a cool solution. Isn’t creating cool solutions that help our clients why we all do this?

Things are moving fast. Every day gives us something new to think about, ponder, criticize, be curious about, test, have our minds blown by. It’s a lot. 

So the way we approach it is by knowing we can’t know everything, but we can keep learning, keeping our eyes open, minds open and knees bent. If you get creative with AI, like with any other tool (or medium), it will allow us as humans to create some seriously cool shit (cool shit = solutions, pieces of creative, tools, insights). 

We’re all in on humans. 

And we’re all in on AI. 

Both things can and should be true. 

That balance is what can help us create super valuable personalized experiences (emphasis on valuable), which is what our vision is as an agency. We’ve always been all about humanity, creativity, strategy and technology making meaningful connections, and this is just the next chapter of that book that won’t stop being written by us and others. That’s part of having “Let’s Be Better Every Day” as our rallying cry and core belief as a company and individuals.

Shit, something new just happened. Hold please …