Fast Five with Chuck McBride

Name

Reuben Halper, Head of YouTube, Google New Zealand

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How do you define creativity?

I'm a bit of a cynic in this space and think the idea of creativity as something truly original is actually overrated, given "humans abhor the new" . With that in mind my definition of creativity tends to be around combinatorial creativity where you combine existing ideas, insights, tech, etc. to develop something novel yet familiar. Or to quote Kirby Ferguson "Everything Is A Remix"

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither, it's a tool. In the same hands a hammer can be both a tool and a weapon. I feel the same way about AI.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

I bet half the respondents will say Cadbury Gorilla and frankly I want to punch them in the face. I honestly don't think there's any idea that an AI could never have come up with as the space is evolving so rapidly and so much of the output comes down to the input and the prompting. I also want to include a non-advertising piece of creativity that an AI expressed in the form of the move that AlphaGo made in the second game vs Lee Sedol.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

A bar in deep Alabama where a hardcore NASCAR fan asked why we couldn't visualise the effects of drafting. That became a massive project involving wind tunnels and patents.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

NotebookLM is the shit for so many things both personal and professional. Probably my favourite general use case for GenAI is using it as a sparring partner and adversary to challenge my thinking.

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Insights From Women Driving AI Startups

Cannes had a ton of AI talk this year. Most were a mix of hype, fear, and lots of buzzwords. Our GM of the Americas, Carolyn Murphy, joined a conversation worth listening to at Salon Culture Conversations: Women Entrepreneurs Driving AI Startups.

It brought together four founders/AI leaders who are doing the thing everyone’s talking about,  but doing it with intention, creativity, and a whole lot of focus on people over product.

And the themes that came through couldn’t align more with how we build: AI isn’t here to replace humans, it’s here to make creative humans even more powerful.

AI isn’t the star. People are.

Everyone on the panel came to AI not because it was trendy, but because it solved a real, human problem, like faster staffing in entertainment, clearer emotional insight from voice, better discovery in ecommerce. For us at Springboards, it’s about helping strategists and creatives get to smarter ideas faster without losing the joy, weirdness, and originality of the work.

As Carolyn put it on stage: “We’re not building to automate execution. We’re building to unlock new creative ways in.”

Being AI-native doesn’t mean flashy. It means useful.

The best products on that stage were showing results. Purva Gupta from Lily AI framed it perfectly: AI isn’t electricity, it’s electricity that proves its value. At Springboards, our value is time saved, thinking unblocked, and pitches won. That’s what being AI-native means to us: delivering something real.

Execution is cheap. Insight isn’t.

This theme ran through the whole session. Everyone agreed that AI should streamline production, not strategy. Carolyn framed it well: “We’re here to support the thinkers, not replace them. The best creative still comes from people who feel, who talk to others, who know what’s happening in culture.”

That’s why we don’t do content automation. We’re not here to make ads faster. We’re here to help you get to better starting points, so you can make something worth watching.

Listen harder. Move faster. Stay weird. 

Every speaker on stage made one thing clear: the best AI products are shaped by their customers, not their founders.

Same goes for us. Some of Springboards’ best features have come directly from strategists telling us where they’re stuck, what’s not working, or what would help them get to a bigger idea, quicker.

The TL;DR:

AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a tool. What matters is what you do with it — and why you’re doing it. The founders on this panel aren’t just using AI. They’re building companies that respect creativity, center human insight, and move fast without losing the plot.

That’s exactly how we build Springboards. Because the future of creative work isn’t automated. It’s amplified.

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Name

James Hurman, Founding Partner, Previously Unavailable

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How do you define creativity?

Original, engaging ideas, beautifully crafted.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

A friend in the right hands (good strategy people using it as a springboard, good creative people with great taste using it as a production tool) and a foe in the wrong hands (poor strategy or creative people, or anyone in marketing, using it to conceive and produce average work).

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

Basically any big Lion-winner. But I'm going to pick on Heinz' 'Ketchup Fraud' as I don't think an LLM would ever be in a position to notice a restaurateur pouring cheap ketchup into a Heinz bottle.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

Around the back of a service station in Pakuranga. It was under a random big sheet of cardboard that someone had spilled quite a lot of JD's and coke on. It was quite cold and the idea looked sad and quite sketchy but I could tell it was a great one. I was nervous about just taking it because there was a security camera there, but I had a hoodie on so I pulled up my hood and put my sunglasses on and turned away from the camera and grabbed it. Then a woman came busting out the back door of the service station and saw me and shouted something about me smelling like JDs, not realising that it was the cardboard and not me. I was going through a period of using quite a lot of Lynx Africa so I was pretty confident I didn't smell of JDs and instead I would most likely have been giving off an aromatic, woody, powdery oriental accord opening with notes of lime, mandarin, lavender, apple and galbanum which lead to a heart of geranium, rose, Jasmin and lily on a base of cedarwood, sandalwood, amber, musks, patchouli, Tonka, vanilla and moss. Anyway, the woman was pretty grunty and came at me hard. I was shitting myself so I dropped the idea and ran really fast down the road and then hid behind one of those old telephone exchange boxes for a while until it was safe to come out. Then I walked home and watched an old episode of M*A*S*H to calm down.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Talking to ChatGPT in audio mode to understand things that I'm thinking about or working on. It's great for constant fact checking or deepening my understanding really quickly without needing to switch tabs or context switch.

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