Fast Five is our rapid-fire interview series, capturing quick takes from the industry on creativity and AI. 5 questions, 5 minutes, unfiltered.
Who are you?
Chuck McBride, CCO & Founder, Cutwater Agency
How do you define creativity?
It’s the act, the will, and the want to make something absolutely wonderful for everybody to enjoy. It’s about showing that you really care about the process, the work, and the people you’re giving it to. And wanting to make a difference in people’s lives.
Is AI a friend or a foe?
AI is a friend, at the beginning.
Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with?
Any John Coltrane song.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?
In an argument.
Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?
Right now it is better to search with AI and not google. Simple way to up your game.
If you thought you knew everything about Pip and Amy's origin story, think again. We learned a ton from Vidit’s “meticulously researched biography” episode of High Flyers Podcast, featuring Springboards co-founders Pip and Amy.
In episode #218 of Vidit’s High Flyers Podcast, Pip and Amy got into some early details of their careers from meeting at a media agency (where Pip literally interviewed Amy for her first job) to building a global AI startup with two small kids, a dark sense of humor, and a shared belief that work should feel like play.
So what do you get when you mix: two agency vets with a ton of experience in creative and media shops, a redundancy or two, two small kids, and a belief that creativity is going to win out no matter how fast AI moves? You get Springboards.
This episode dives into the full journey of agency life, the chaos and challenge of startup building and lots of insights they’ve learned along the way.
Pip is a big fan of being really good at what you’re doing right now and continuing to say yes to get doors to open for you. You’ve gotta keep evolving and learning and being open because you never know where that could lead you.
Amy’s thought is that people often try to specialize too early. You don’t need to have one job for the rest of your life. And as Vidit added, he’s discovered his passion through trying different things. You can’t sit around waiting for your passion to find you.
Listen in for some laughs, some insights on just taking the leap when building your product, and proof that creativity isn’t dying, the value is only going up. It’s on humans to evaluate what great creativity looks like and weed through the average content that so much of AI spits out.
Our friends over at Jellyfish built a brand from the ground up in only 24 hours. This was the challenge they took on during SXSW London in June as part of British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) House. With a combination of AI tools, they built a brief, worked on the strategy, came up with concepts and created a full campaign for the new brand in less than a day.
Jellyfish strategists used Springboards and Pencil to come up with the name, proposition and core concept for the fictional brand. Then the creative team picked up the baton, using Pencil and Veo3 to spin up the visuals, OOH campaigns, and a super fun 30 second ad.
What resulted was Moodlings, “a premium, mood boosting gummy brand”, and you’ve gotta admit - it’s adorable. We got the warm fuzzies when we first saw the brand. The team developed four different brand avatars, each with its own unique taste and fun packaging.
The human team included: Tom Roach, Emily Collins, Lucas Stanley, Gemma Cotterell, Sam Yates, Margaux Dalgleish and Sahar Amer, who worked together to build everything from brand strategy to execution using a combination of AI-powered creative tools.
Moodlings is a masterclass in AI-powered creativity. It’s the perfect example of how AI allowed a team of strategists and creatives to get weird and push them to places they wouldn’t have been able to get alone in such a short period of time.
New York, NY — June 10, 2025 — Today, Springboards, an AI platform accelerating creativity in advertising, and a collective of global advertising and marketing associations, creative leaders, and AI experts – including 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies), ACA (Advertising Council Australia), APG, D&AD, IAA (International Advertising Association), IPA, and The One Club for Creativity – announced an initiative to establish the first comprehensive Creativity Benchmark designed to evaluate the creative instincts of large language models (LLMs) in the context of advertising and creativity.
The initiative seeks to answer a critical question: Which LLMs are most useful for creative inspiration, variation, and problem-solving across the advertising process? At a time when AI tools are increasingly embedded in the workflows of strategists and creatives, this benchmark fills a crucial gap in industry knowledge.
“Existing AI benchmarks test logic, accuracy, and comprehension,” said Pip Bingemann, CEO/Cofounder at Springboards. “But advertising isn’t about right answers, it’s about originality, insight, and impact. This will be the first benchmark designed around the real creative instincts we value in agencies and brands so that people in creative industries can understand what models are good for the work they do.”
An Industry-Wide Effort to Set New Standards
The initiative is supported by a technical and research team that includes PhDs in machine learning, AI engineers, and former researchers from Google. Together, they’ve designed a system that blends data analysis with human taste to reveal which models excel across various types of creative thinking.
The evaluation departs from traditional AI testing methods by focusing on creative instincts, not coached outputs. Key criteria include:
Human judgment of insight, idea, and “wild” idea quality
Creative variance (how different or repetitive model responses are)
AI versus human judging comparisons to assess alignment with human taste
Creative problem-solving tests to measure the ability to think outside the box
Participants globally will judge outputs in a "Tinder for Ideas" style experience, receiving personal insights about their creative preferences and the LLMs that best match them.
Fueling Creativity and Bridging the Knowledge Gap
"The 4As is excited to help support this important research initiative,“ said Jeremy Lockhorn, SVP, Creative Technologies & Innovation at 4As. “Our members are rapidly adopting generative AI across many aspects of their business, and actively seeking guidance on which platforms can help achieve the most innovative and impactful work for their clients."
“There's a ton of stuff about how good different LLMs are at solving maths problems, coding and logic-based tasks and tests—but that's not much use for the creative industries,” said Tom Roach, VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish/Brandtech, on behalf of the APG. “We need to know which models are best at generating new and original creative ideas, but at the moment we're all flying blind on that. It's exciting to be involved in a project that can help us be more creative with this incredible new technology and help the industry as a whole make better informed decisions on the AI tech we use to drive better results for our clients.”
“We’re at a crossroads in the creative industries,” said Zoe Scaman, Founder of Bodacious. “AI is already embedded in our workflows, shaping ideas and generating outputs, but we’ve had no meaningful way to assess its contribution to creativity itself. This benchmark changes that. It’s not about pitting machines against humans, but about understanding which tools can genuinely elevate our thinking, unlock new directions, and push creative boundaries. If we want to harness AI not just for efficiency but for originality, we need standards rooted in real creative instincts, not just logic and grammar. That’s what this initiative delivers. And that’s why it’s vital, especially now.”
“The future of creativity is human – but AI’s ability to stimulate human creativity is exciting. Especially when we can learn which models produce the kind of interesting, divergent, and sometimes bonkers provocations that trigger our own individual creative brains in just the right way.” said James Hurman, Founding Partner of Previously Unavailable.
The study is currently accepting participants. Interested individuals can vote on LLM outputs atCreativityBenchmark.ai.
