What a guy who sold beer in 1989 learned about AI in 2026

By Steve Fairhurst - a man who now talks to computers for a living.

I have a confession to make.

Last Tuesday, I spent forty-five minutes having a conversation with an AI about the emotional resonance of lager. And somewhere around minute thirty-two, when the machine told me that consumers in the 35–54 demographic associate the smell of beer with "freedom," I realized two things simultaneously: 

First, that it was right, and second, that I needed a drink.

My name is Steve. I started in the advertising business in 1989. Ronald Reagan had just left the White House. The Berlin Wall came down. The internet hadn’t been invented, and we were still awaiting the arrival of our first Mac SE.

Our office had one Motorola mobile phone that even then cost over £8 a minute to use and had to be booked out and its usage signed off by both Directors. 

My first campaign was for a regional brewery in Manchester somehow — somehow — it worked. The client called us, very happy. I thought this is the job.

This is the  job for me.

Thirty-five years later, I'm learning how to write prompts.

The old world

Let me tell you what advertising used to feel like, because I think it matters in order tounderstand what's happening now.

Back then, the creative process had a particular texture. You'd sit in a room with bad lighting and a whiteboard. The smell of dry-wipe marker filled the air.

You'd argue about the headline. You'd argue about everything. It was slow and inefficient. It was deeply human.

Research meant focus groups: 

Twelve randomly selected strangers representing the ‘target audience’ sitting around a table in a rented conference room, eating buffet and telling you, with total sincerity, that they loved your ad.

While simultaneously planning to buy the competitor's product the following morning. You'd read the transcripts. Then you'd go back to the office and make an educated guess about what you had learned.

Educated guesses, good instincts, and a willingness to defend your ideas.

The moment everything changed

I saw AI coming. I watched ‘Terminator’. A Silicon Valley parlour trick. Listening at scale. I called it cheating. Quietly. To myself. But I kept thinking about it.

Like a Mac Monkey, but an algorithm…

AI, in marketing, is not a replacement for instinct. It is a replacement for the time you used to spend before you could use your instinct. Let me explain...

When I started out, getting to the creative insight meant wading through weeks of research. The insight, the human truth that makes a campaign work was buried in there somewhere. 

It was very much like panning for gold. And by the time you found it, you were exhausted and behind schedule and the client had already moved the goalposts twice.

Now? I can feed a language model six months of customer support emails, a competitor analysis, and a brand positioning document, and in about four minutes, it surfaces patterns I'd have taken three weeks to find. 

Themes. Language. The specific way people describe their frustration or their joy. It doesn't give me the idea. But it gives me the ground under my feet so I can stand somewhere solid and look for the idea.

That's the part that surprised me. The AI didn't want to replace my creativity. It wanted to do the homework.

What AI can't do

The truth is messy, yet interesting. AI is extraordinarily good at finding patterns in existing data. It is, therefore, excellent at telling you what has resonated with people before.

The problem is that the best advertising is rarely built on what has worked before. It's built on a new angle. A tonal shift. A decision to ‘zig’ when everything says ‘zag’.

I've been testing this. I'll brief an AI on a product and a target audience and ask it for campaign concepts. It gives me good concepts.

Competent concepts. Concepts that would pass muster in a mid-level client presentation without embarrassing anyone.

Then I ‘try to beat the AI’. 

That's what I didn't understand at first. AI wasn't replacing the creative flight. It was just shortening the runway.

Here's what I've been telling people lately about AI:

Learn to use it before you think you need to. The temptation is to wait until there's no other option. Don't do that.

The people who will be best at this in five years are the ones who have been fumbling for years right now, when the stakes were low and the learning curve didn’t matter.

Tools give you options. It will give you more options than you can use. Your job is still the same as it's always been - figure out which option is right.

Which one will make a person react. That's not a machine's job. That's ours.

Stay weird

AI-assisted creativity is trained on what already exists. Stand out or step aside if you want to be noticed in a way that will make people part with their hard-earned money.

Great advertising has always been about talking to people, so it feels like you already know them. We've changed the tools a dozen times in my career: From print to radio to television to digital to social to whatever's happening now on platforms I can just about navigate.

The tools change. Human nature doesn't change

AI is the ‘latest thing’. I'm glad I stopped fighting it and started learning it, because it turns out the thing is useful, which is more than I can say for a lot of the technology I've been handed over the years. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a prompt to write.

Steve Fairhurst has been working in advertising since 1989. And is, against his better judgment, on LinkedIn. If you want to know what AI could do for your business, get in touch: steve@bemorecheetah.com