Your AI just wrote the best tagline ever. Now what?

Close your eyes for five seconds and think about history’s greatest taglines. 

What comes to mind?

“Just Do It,” the anthem that inspired millions of athletes around the globe to grit their teeth and lace up their sneakers? “Think Different,” the contrarian ad campaign that embodied Apple’s turn-of-the-century comeback story? “It’s Finger-lickin’ Good?” “A Diamond Is Forever?” “I’m Lovin’ It” (and that despicably catchy ba-da-ba-ba-baaa jingle)? 

Now ask yourself, what if AI had generated those now-iconic nuggets of copy? Would they have had the power and momentum to take root in the marketplace and spread like wildfire?

The short answer: not unless they had a champion. Someone to take ownership of the concept, wrestle with it, pour life into it, and infuse it with the human spark. Someone to believe in it and — through their unshakeable belief — earn the buy-in of others.

That’s pretty obvious. Great ideas go nowhere without an advocate, right? What’s less obvious — and what many business leaders may be overlooking as they scramble to keep pace with competitors in the AI arms race — is this: the role of the champion is in danger.

As more companies outsource creative and critical thinking to AI, they risk losing their champions by gutting the very things that forge them — time, space, and freedom to engage with concepts on a deep (even personal!) level.

Of course, we at Stoke use AI daily to stir our creativity, reveal blind spots, and tighten workflows (and we’ll cover some AI best practices in this piece). But our team also sees the tremendous value in protecting the human elements — the soul, struggle, and sunlight — that create a culture of champions.

If that’s something you agree is worth preserving, read on.

The perils of the mad dash toward AI adoption

Before we continue, a quick qualifier. 

The capabilities of AI are not inherently at odds with the role of the champion. They should coexist, and even build on each other. Since we’ll spend the next couple of sections cautioning leaders on how they adopt AI, we had to get that out in the open. AI is an amazing technology, truly. The most impressive thing since the Uncrustable. An inexhaustible box of wonders.

Now, here’s why you should take a measured approach amid the fever pitch of integrate-AI-everywhere-by-YESTERDAY messaging in marketing (and darn near everywhere) today. 

Yee-haw! We’re in the Wild West of AI adoption

As CXOs grapple with AI’s impact on their companies and industries, many are desperate to keep up.

A 2025 McKinsey report found that 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments over the next three years, but only 1% of leaders consider their companies “mature” on the AI deployment spectrum. The Marketing AI Institute’s 2025 State of Marketing Report tells a similar story: 74% of marketing leaders say that AI is either “critically important” or “very important” to their marketing in the next year, but fewer than half have a roadmap for how their teams should actually use it in the coming years. 

In other words, everyone thinks AI is vital, and most leaders are chomping at the bit to unbridle it, but few execs really know how. And when leaders do have caution (rather than urgency) on their minds, they don’t seem too worried about disempowering their champions. McKinsey identified leaders’ top three concerns around AI adoption as:

• • Cybersecurity (51% of respondents)

• • Inaccuracy (50%)

• • Personal privacy (43%)

This isn’t surprising. Leaders are focused on practical concerns, on issues they can sink their teeth into — not something abstract like “protecting our idea champions.” As expected, concerns that are even tangentially related to company culture or creativity are much lower on the list. Workforce displacement (35%) finds itself in fifth place, and organizational reputation (16%) lands all the way in 10th.

It’s still the Wild West of AI. And during Wild West phases, leaders are prone to putting the (AI) cart before the (human) horse. But remember, in many cases, your horse is the champion of ideas who brings in new business or the strategist, creative, or builder behind your next jaw-dropping marketing campaign. 

Reckless efficiency (or the race to the bottom)

Productivity is essential, but a strong strategy must come first.

In 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported on a new survey from Penn’s Wharton School. The survey examined how business leaders are thinking about and implementing generative AI. (The gist: They’re using it a lot, and they’re optimistic about its impact.)

For commentary, the WSJ looked to Professor Stefano Puntoni, co-Director of Wharton’s Human-AI Research initiative:

“One issue that I have with a lot of the conversations in business about generative AI is that we’ve been focusing so much on productivity. And when you talk about productivity, it’s almost like a code word for cost-cutting.

Companies ought to be as efficient as possible. But…this technology is only going to give results where we are imagining new things to do. I’m a marketing professor, and I get excited about productivity, but I get more excited about what kind of new customer experiences we can create. What kind of new products and services can we generate? What kind of better, stronger customer relationships can we forge using this technology? To me, that is the kind of thing that…is going to lead to sustained growth, rather than simply throwing money at AI because everyone else is doing it and they don’t want to get left behind.”

Hasn’t marketing always been about creating better customer relationships and experiences? As we adopt AI, shouldn’t we protect that vital and vivifying part of marketing where we imagine new horizons — instead of speeding toward the same ones ever faster?

Indeed, when you encounter AI in today’s marketing contexts, it’s almost always bundled up with everyone’s favorite productivity buzzwords: “streamline,” “optimize,” “accelerate,” and so on. Even the authors of McKinsey’s study ratchet up the pressure, saying, “It’s critical that leaders meet this moment. It’s the only way to accelerate the probability that their companies will reach AI maturity. But they must move with alacrity, or they will fall behind.”

Efficiency is good. But not if it’s detached from strategy or comes at the expense of impact. Real, innovative, champion-led impact.

What makes a champion?

When you think about a champion, you might imagine Steve Jobs swaggering across the stage, brimming with charisma, unveiling the iPhone to thunderous applause. 

But champions are defined more by what gets done behind the scenes (picture Steve Wozniak designing Apple’s first PC in a cramped garage) and less by who gets credit on stage. More Woz, less Jobs. And that’s why AI can’t be a champion. The things going on behind its interface are rigid, rule-bound, and number-crunchy; the things that make a champion are experience-based, emotional, and squishy. You know, human things. 

After decades of living and breathing marketing across a vast range of industries, the Stoke team has identified three key ingredients that form a champion (which also happen to be areas where advanced AI tools struggle or have no capability whatsoever):

• • Emotion: What drives ideas deep into the mind and moves audiences to action

• • Empathy: The bridge between a marketer and their audience, the “glue” that allows you to meet them where they are and offer what they need — not what you want them to need

• • Deep understanding: A strong grasp of complex ideas, earned by tilling the soil around them (and often involving periods of boredom, self-doubt, and elation)

Emotion as the activator

Last year, we wrote about emotional ROI in marketing, characterizing emotion as “the neural superhighway for brands that want to be unforgettable.”

Recent LinkedIn research on B2B advertising backs it up — bold ads that earn a laugh, break (or mend) a heart, or offer a surprising twist are more likely to be remembered and lead to a significant boost in sales. Notably, the LinkedIn report found that when executives saw ads as “creative,” they were 23% more likely to prefer the advertised brand over its competitors, 34% more likely to research it, and 40% (!) more likely to consider purchasing from it.

The emotion that binds marketers to their work is the same that inspires, delights, and activates audiences. Because people care about what people care about — not what AI has produced in a split second. 

Champions know how to make ideas move people. 

Empathy as the binding agent

All too often, business leaders do everything right — dream up an in-demand product or service, engineer the apparatus to deliver it, develop a beautiful brand — and then blast it out to the masses without ever taking a moment to stop and listen.

Empathy is the antidote to this hyper-brand-centrism. 

As the market shifts, companies must shift with it. A champion takes time to dialogue with their audience, whether via face-to-face conversation, methodologically sound quant/qual research, diligent secondary research, or (and this is about as human as it gets) by putting themselves in their audience’s shoes and feeling what they feel. 

AI can mimic empathy, but it can’t experience or be motivated by it. Champions, on the other hand, obsessively empathize with customers, prospects, and key stakeholders to deliver a solution that hits the mark for everyone.

Understanding as the fount of confidence

Leaning too heavily on AI can cause, as Velocity puts it, a “critical thinking hangover.” Although generative AI is an emerging technology and peer-reviewed studies on the impacts of AI are just beginning to appear, compelling research substantiates that conclusion.

As an example, a 2025 paper from the SBS Swiss Business School found that “cognitive offloading” — leveraging AI to do mentally taxing work for you — can free up cognitive resources, but it “may also lead to a decline in cognitive engagement and skill development.”

This decline in cognitive engagement doesn’t disappear. It lurks as “cognitive debt,” which can levy a significant toll when it comes time to, say, pitch an idea to a client. Who can explain the rationale behind a decision or convey the passion with which an idea was conceived if no one actually understands it? If the lion’s share of the legwork were delegated to an LLM?

Yes, you can safeguard against this by requiring human oversight for important, AI-influenced deliverables. But oversight often isn’t enough. Sometimes your team needs to get its proverbial nails in the dirt to truly own an idea — and to win over the decision-makers who are looking for a team of champions, not just a promising idea, to believe in.

Balancing AI efficiency and human ingenuity

If you’re like us, you’re committed to implementing AI thoughtfully, ensuring efficiency, equity, and safety while preserving breathing room for humanity. So, how can you find that perfect balance of human and AI as the tech’s sophistication skyrockets? 

“North Star” principles for AI usage

Drawing from Harvard’s direction for using AI responsibly and Washington State University’s guidelines for AI/Marketing Communication, we’ve compiled several ready-for-action best practices.

1. 1. Humanity at the heart. It’s crucial to elevate the ingenuity of humans. Equally important, though, is the reality that AI cannot watch over itself. None of the following principles is possible without human oversight, which is why this is commitment number one.

2. 2. Crystal-clear accountability. AI is known to hallucinate, and because its main goal is to give you an answer that makes you happy, it likely won’t stop any time soon. A human must always understand what’s in a deliverable and triple-check that it’s accurate, cogent, and unbiased.

3. 3. Credit where it’s due. LLMs have a hard time sifting through their near-infinite inputs to properly cite sources. When your teams use AI, encourage them to generously give credit to whoever inspired their ideas. It’s a great way to build collective expertise and keep your AI honest.

4. 4. Secure as Fort Knox. Personally identifiable information, proprietary client data, and other sensitive details are worth their weight in gold. At Stoke, we take a privacy-first approach to AI, using dedicated enterprise plans to prevent AI from training on client data and following strict protocols for inputting, sharing, and retrieving information.

5. 5. Efficiency with integrity. We’re always striving to get the most out of our clients’ investment. Depending on your appetite for AI use, we flex how we embed it into our processes to streamline work while maintaining excellence.

A closing note: Champions are good — really good — for business

Remember those taglines we mentioned?

“Just Do It” does nothing if Dan Wieden hadn’t insisted on adding an “umbrella” message to bring cohesion to a bunch of Nike campaigns (inspired, if you’re curious, by convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s last words to the firing squad: “Let’s do it!”). “Think Different” goes nowhere if the creative team at TBWA\Chiat\Day didn’t pour their hearts and souls into brainstorming and then corral the chaos into a bold, beautifully simple campaign.

The outcomes in both of those stories speak for themselves. Worldwide brand recognition, an unforgettable product, sustained sales growth, and so on. Google your favorite tagline, and you’ll probably find a similar story — smart folks got in a room together, conducted research, ideated, iterated, and struggled through the creative process to accomplish something incredible. (We’ve done the same, and it’s produced the work we’re most proud of.)

At this point, you might be thinking, “So, the earth-shaking insight here is that iconic taglines created before Generative AI existed were created by people — not GenAI?”

Exactly! That doesn’t mean people can’t use AI to produce the next crop of legendary taglines. But it does mean we should scrutinize what is lost if the balance tips too heavily toward AI. And today, the research shows that many leaders are keen to implement AI in the name of increasing efficiency without fully considering the creative and cultural consequences.

So, yes, AI absolutely has a place in the creative process. And, certainly, AI can elevate creative work while improving productivity.

But before your company blindly opens the floodgates to the new wave of AI tools, we encourage you to ask this: how can we adopt this tech in a way that complements, rather than disempowers, our champions? How can we ensure that human excellence and AI-driven efficiency hum along in oh-so-strategic harmony?

Most crucially, how can we make our next campaign move people — not by battering them with a barrage of perfectly benign taglines, but by wrapping a gorgeous, human story around the one tagline that deserves it?

After all, 1,000 tech-savvy marketers are using AI this very second to produce 10,000 headlines. Most of them are forgettable; a few of them are really good.

But unless there’s a fueled-by-feelings, deeply empathetic, weirdly-obsessed-with-their-craft marketer with the taste and drive to recognize, refine, and render greatness from AI’s raw material, those taglines won’t go anywhere. And the next “Just Do It” will be buried by a follow-up prompt, lost to the scroll, left to collect dust on the digital cutting-room floor.