As we head into awards season, a familiar pattern tends to start appearing across every category. Words like ‘innovative’ or ‘first-of-its-kind’ suddenly show up everywhere. Film. Brand Experience. Commerce. Effectiveness…
And with them come a familiar cast of characters: the first‑use‑of‑AI thingy. The data‑driven widget or the beautifully demonstrated demo. Slick, smart, and convincingly narrated as the future. The case film lands, headlines follow, then the launch ends, the budget moves on, and the work quietly disappears.
That tension between what looks innovative at launch and what survives contact with the real world has become harder to ignore in an era of ‘vibe coding’ – using AI tools to write software. In a world where it’s easy to build something that works on day one, being good enough to launch is no longer the creative touchstone it once was.
Part of the problem is that we’ve trained ourselves to talk about the launch of an idea, not the life of it. Case studies, press coverage and awards narratives are overwhelmingly launch‑centric. We obsess over the moment something appears – the reveal, the announcement, the first activation – and spend far less time interrogating what happens next. Does it evolve? Does it scale? Does it still matter when the novelty fades?
This isn’t a rejection of creative technological firsts or move‑fast‑and‑break‑things experimentation. Far from it: it’s an incredibly exciting time to be involved in creativity and technology. I’m champing at the bit to see the work that will emerge this season, certain it will be courageously conceived, technically impressive, thoughtfully designed and genuinely imaginative. Data and AI will continue to open up extraordinary creative possibilities.
But as conversations deepen across juries, agencies and brands, a different set of questions keeps surfacing. What actually changed? Who is still using this six months later? Would this exist if the case film stopped playing?
If you’ve worked in data and technology long enough, you’ve seen this cycle before. In the early 2000s, the industry enthusiastically rewarded flashy websites that stretched what the web could do. Many won awards. Few delivered lasting commercial or cultural value. Today, we risk repeating that pattern with data and AI. Not because the tools lack power, but because we’re still wired to reward the beginning of an idea rather than its lifespan.
We are being seduced by what might be called impactful fantasy: work that looks extraordinary in a case film but lacks the structural scar tissue required to survive contact with the real world.
This awards season, it’s worth pausing on how we’re using the word ‘innovation’, and whether it still means what we think it does. Existing technologies should not be penalised for familiarity if they are embedded into new systems, made to be newly interoperable to support new solutions, reshape supply chains, create economic loops, or change behaviour in ways that endure beyond launch week.
This is where the friction test matters and how the creative idea helps overcome the friction. Did the idea survive the messy, unpromptable reality of legacy systems? Did it collide with real organisational constraints and still stand up? Does it plug into a human need so deeply that it becomes infrastructure?
Being innovative in 2026 isn’t about being the first to use a new model. It’s about delivering the model that’s the hardest to turn off.
If awards are meant to point the industry forward, then our role is to recognise the ideas built to sustain lifecycles and build the organisation’s purpose, mission or bottom line. Because what’s the point of celebrating something innovative that flames out four weeks after launch? So, I say, not just first. Forever.
Maurice Riley is the chief data officer at Publicis Groupe ANZ.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
