A creative tool to inspire,
not give you the answers.

New York, NY – October 21, 2025 – A comprehensive new study by Springboards, an AI platform inspiring creativity in advertising, found that popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others perform much more similarly on creative tasks than many people think. Creativity Benchmark, conducted in collaboration with the 4As, ACA, APG, D&AD, IAA, IPA, and The One Club for Creativity, challenges the idea that there's a single "best" AI tool for creative work and shows agencies need more efficient ways to test AI tools for their specific needs.

Sixteen different AI systems – from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, Alibaba and others – were tested on real marketing challenges across 100 notable brands. Over 600 creative professionals from ad agencies, marketing teams, and strategy firms made over 11,000 comparisons to see which ones worked best. The biggest surprise? There was no clear winner. The differences between the "best" and "worst" AI tools were much smaller than expected.

"Everyone assumes some AI tools are way better than others for creative work," said Pip Bingemann, CEO and co-founder of Springboards. "But our tests showed the results were pretty close. Why? Because these models are machines designed to recognize patterns and give you the most probable answer—and 'probable' has never been called 'creative.' Keeping humans in the loop and optimizing for a wider range of varied ideas is crucial.”

The study looked at three types of creative challenges: finding surprising insights about consumers, creating big campaign ideas, and coming up with bold, attention-grabbing concepts.

Key Findings:

• Different AI Tools Win at Different Tasks: No single AI system was best at everything. Some were better at strategic thinking, others at wild, creative ideas. This means agencies might want to use different tools for different jobs.
• Variety of Ideas Matters Most: Some AI tools generated lots of different creative options for the same brief. Others kept suggesting similar ideas over and over. For real creative work, having many different options is just as important as having good ones.
• AI Can't Judge Creative Work Well: When researchers had AI systems evaluate creative ideas, they gave very different scores than human experts. This means agencies can't rely on AI to pick the best creative concepts – they still need human judgment.
• Standard Creativity Tests Don't Work for Marketing: Traditional creativity tests used in psychology don't predict which AI will be better at marketing-specific creative tasks. Brand work requires its own way of measuring creativity.
• Creative Preferences Vary by Location: Interestingly, creative professionals in different countries preferred different AI tools, suggesting that cultural differences affect what people consider good creative work.

“LLMs aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution—they're general purpose tools that require human creativity to unlock breakthrough outcomes," said Jeremy Lockhorn, SVP, Creative Technologies & Innovation, 4As. "These findings suggest agencies and brands should continue to evaluate which models are best suited for creative work - and that a multi-model approach may well be the best path forward."

“This study highlights that creativity isn’t about which AI you use, it’s about how you use it,” remarked Tony Hale, CEO, Advertising Council Australia. “The results reinforce what we see across the industry: the human spark remains essential to transforming good ideas into great ones. For agencies, the real opportunity is learning how to collaborate with these systems to expand, not replace, creative thinking.”

Methodology

The study involved 678 advertising professionals of diverse backgrounds, who participated in blind A/B idea judgments, likened to a "Tinder for Ideas." The data, collected over four weeks starting June 10, 2025, comprised 11,012 human comparisons across various brands, prompts, and models. This was analyzed using Bradley-Terry modeling and cosine distance for diversity scoring.

The research used four different ways to test AI creativity:

• Real Creative Professionals Made the Calls: Nearly 700 people working in advertising, marketing, and strategy compared AI-generated ideas side-by-side. They didn't know which AI created which idea, so they couldn't play favorites. The study covered ideas for 100 major brands across 12 different business categories.
• Tested How Many Different Ideas AI Can Create: Researchers asked each AI system to create 10 different responses to the same creative brief, then measured how different those responses were from each other. Some AI tools generated very similar ideas every time, while others came up with lots of variety.
• Checked If AI Can Judge Its Own Work: The team had three leading AI systems evaluate the same creative ideas that humans had already scored, to see if AI judges agreed with human experts. They didn't.
• Tried Standard Creativity Tests: The AI systems took adapted versions of creativity tests that psychologists use on humans, measuring things like how many ideas they generate and how original those ideas are.

All tests used the same settings and compared current AI systems from companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta.

To access the full research white paper, visit https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09702. 

If you'd like to learn more about the results, visit this page. To access the original research, visit creativitybenchmark.ai

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About Springboards

Springboards is an AI-powered platform built to inspire creativity in advertising. The platform empowers teams to explore more ideas, without sacrificing the craft of great work. Founded by industry veterans Pip Bingemann, Amy Tucker, and Kieran Browne, Springboards has already partnered with 150+ agencies globally and secured $3 million USD in seed funding from Blackbird Ventures. For more information, visit Springboards or contact hello@springboards.ai.

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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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