Marketers are always marketing more, never less. The bottleneck was never media, it was content. AI is the catalyst, but quality and brand still win.

The Creative Engineers is a new consultancy McKinney founded with three other advertising and marketing veterans, launched only last week. The problem it targets is that marketers have to produce ever more content: as the CMO of Vanguard told him, you are always marketing more, never marketing less. The challenge is reaching the right people at the right time with the right personalisation while budgets stay flat.

His answer is a better content model that connects the people, the processes and the tools to produce more, with AI as a massive catalyst to lift both volume and quality.

The work runs in three phases. First an audit and scoping of use cases, workflows, outputs, volume, formats and the tools and people already in place. Then a future state: which workflows sit in-house, which sit with an agency, the right tools and the skillsets to run them. The hard part is the journey between them. Rather than handing over slides and saying goodbye, the firm sits in the client's office, writes job descriptions, trains teams, puts guardrails on AI use cases and makes sure everything works, over three, six or 12 months, without breaking business as usual.

McKinney started in marketing at P&G, Time Warner and Travelocity, then ran a digital transformation agency, The Knowledge Engineers, which he sold in 2017. He then worked in AI before it was cool at an e-commerce startup, Black Crow, which raised money in 2021 and again in 2022 to capture intent using machine learning. Across all of it, the media could target granularly but the content could never keep up. When generative AI arrived, he saw the solution to a problem he had chased for 10 or 15 years, and with partners Helen, Chris and Morgan combined classical production methods with his AI understanding.

He is emphatic that this is not mass production at the expense of quality, and that staying on brand matters even as output grows. Having always been a proud brand marketer, B2C and B2B, he calls that the tricky bit.

McKinney has trained marketers since ChatGPT arrived, and describes the last four months as unbelievably accelerated. Where good use cases once needed real prompting expertise, platforms like Claude, Claude CoWork and Writer.com now let marketers build agentic workflows out of the box.

The nature has changed too. Digital and machine learning mostly touched the media side and barely touched creative. Now the impact on creative is very big and growing across modalities, from text to images to, he expects this year, high-quality AI-generated video.

One area is automating thankless tasks. Brand guardianship is his example: in a big organisation everyone's content passes a brand team, and many inputs are simple, the wrong font, colour, logo or spacing. Automating 50 to 70 per cent and giving immediate feedback frees that team to do the great brand marketing they actually want to do.

The other is volume and velocity. Working with a startup called Leapfrog, clients including well-known fashion brands use synthetic talent to version far faster. A brand entering Thailand without time for a shoot can version thousands of product pages that look locally made, entering markets faster and creating engagement it wouldn't otherwise get, always with brand and creative guardrails in place.

Tools can be leapfrogged fast, so McKinney says be sensible rather than crazy. If you once signed three-year vendor deals, you shouldn't now: one-year rolling contracts should be the maximum, giving you room to switch when something better appears. Corporate adoption also lags because tools must be compliant with IT policy and robust on legal and copyright.

His firmest advice is that you have to personally engage with the tools and use them, with a team who are inspired to experiment, or you get left behind and misjudge where to invest.

In The Creative Engineers, McKinney targets human capability on specific workflows, not big groups, and often finds clients own expensive tools they simply need to use better. The exception is leadership, who must know enough about AI to support strategy. Through Edify, the AI education company he chairs, the most interesting focus is managers, who understand the workflows and tools, and who can catalyse the opportunity once given competence.

Below that, he argues coding is no longer a discipline you must master; his family built an app without knowing how to code or design. What lasts is critical thinking, iteration and persistence. The forward-deployed AI engineers he works with have no computer science background but are among the best users of ChatGPT and Claude Code because they worked hard. It may be more of a mindset than a skill set.

Asked about a CMO whose agency shortlist all mirrored the same AI output, McKinney laughs because it is obvious enough to get caught, like pasting ChatGPT text with the em dashes still in. He once saw a listed company paste a hallucinated environmental policy into an annual report draft. That, he says, is a primitive approach.

In creativity, AI should help you explore the problem and approaches, not solve it. A blunt request for five ideas produces weak ones. Break it down: a planning agent to understand the consumer, a methodology you trust to accelerate insight, then AI as a creative partner. You still impose judgement and taste. It gives a starting point, not a finished answer. His verdict on the lazy version is unsparing.

The one piece of AI he couldn't live without right now is Claude CoWork, running 24/7. Having hated Macs since the 1990s and sworn never to return, he admits his PC can't keep up with Claude, so next week he is buying one.

To keep abreast, he rates X, where frontier labs and serious data scientists like Andrej Karpathy now post openly, plus strong communities on Reddit and private Slack and Teams groups run by vendors and industry bodies.