SomeOne founding partner Simon Manchipp asks creatives to reject the status quo, the vanilla and look to a moustachioed surrealist who tried to boil time in a spoon…
I’ve just come back from Figueres in Spain.
There’s really only one reason to visit: Salvador Dalí. He lived there — and man alive, you know it. His museum(s), his art, his influence are everywhere, 36 years after his death. You’ll find his drawings in restaurants, his sculptures in the streets.
And it made me think — why is all this stuff still around?
Why not move on?
The town has a lovely main square, the weather’s great, there’s a bit of bustle… but the grip of Dalí remains immovable.
It’s because people loved the guy. Hotel managers still regale you with stories.
The legends keep brewing. People just love people who make things.
Or do they?
We care who wrote the novel. We care who sang the chorus that became the summer earworm. We care who painted the portrait, who filmed the scene, who choreographed the chaos. These creators make things that connect with us on a human level. We follow them, quote them, even tattoo their words onto our skin.
Why?
Because they’ve made something that matters — something that moves us emotionally, aesthetically, spiritually.
Now ask yourself: who packed your Amazon delivery?
Who assembled the washing machine humming quietly in the background? Who helped manufacture the barbed wire currently circling some distant border we read about but never visit? Most of us couldn’t care less.
Not because these people lack skill or value, but because their labour isn’t designed to connect — it’s designed to function. There’s no aura, no authorship, no emotional imprint.
This is the quiet death facing commercial creativity. It lives in that uneasy middle ground between artistry and utility. A TV commercial can be gorgeously shot, but it’s still an interruption. A jingle might be catchy, a strapline clever, but you know it’s trying to sell you something.
The tools are artistic — typography, photography, editing, sound design, conceptual storytelling — but the intent is transactional. And people can feel that. They sense the agenda before they see the craft. So, unlike the novel or the song, the ad doesn’t get cherished. It gets tolerated.
People don’t care who made the billboard or the banner ad or the YouTube pre-roll. No one (outside of the ad agency) asks who art directed the out-of-home campaign.
That apathy is the open door through which AI walks in.
And why wouldn’t it? When the output is anonymous, interchangeable, and engineered to be overlooked, the machines aren’t threatening — they’re simply cheaper.
This isn’t a problem of technology; it’s a failure of meaning. The commercial creativity industry has spent decades training itself to be invisible, frictionless, ignorable. It chased efficiency over emotion, reach over resonance, performance over presence.
The more clever we became, the less connected we were. And so the entire sector now stares down the barrel of automation, not because the machines are more inspired, but because they’re more obedient. More cost-effective. Easier to control.
AI doesn’t need to be original to be useful. It doesn’t need to feel. It just needs to be good enough to keep things moving — and in most commercial creativity contexts, that bar is tragically low. If the audience doesn’t care, and the client doesn’t care, then eventually, no one does.
When work lacks authorship, it invites replacement. If you remove the maker and no one notices, you were never making much in the first place.
The path forward isn’t to double down on nostalgia or retreat into sentimentalism. It’s to radically reassert the value of creativity — not just as a tool for selling, but as a tool for meaning. We need to make work that earns attention rather than steals it. To move beyond communication that exists solely to convert, and instead create something that contributes. To stop making noise, and start making culture.
People protect what they value. They fight for what they love. If no one’s fighting for us, it’s because we’ve stopped giving them a reason. The antidote to automation is not more creativity — it’s more ownership. The work has to mean something. To someone. If it doesn’t, then it’s just another thing the machines can do — faster, cheaper, and with zero need for purpose.
Think of people who are willing to make something people care about, stand behind it, and say: I did this. And it matters. Ridley Scott. Charles & Ray Eames. Mr Saul Bass. Even Salvador Dalí.
Dalí was no stranger to commerce — he designed the logo for Chupa Chups in 1969 — the daisy-shaped frame containing the Chupa Chups wordmark that still adorns balls of flavoured sugar half a century later.
He sketched it on a piece of newspaper during a meeting with Chupa Chups founder Enric Bernat, even insisting the logo should always sit on top of the lolly, never the side. It wasn’t just design — it was authorship. A piece of commercial creativity, yes, but with the soul of a signature.
So maybe the future isn’t filled with more commercial ‘creatives’.
Maybe it needs more commercial artists.
People who bring ideas with presence, not just polish.
People whose fingerprints stay on the work.
People who aren’t afraid to let their name sit beside the thing they’ve made — and who make things worth that level of ownership.