As part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands, Jack Stanley argues that the industry is at a moment in history where choice is being forced and that the brands that will define the next century will be those that recognise this and make the deliberate, difficult decision to choose not to know what their category has taught them.
If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.
In 2016, DeepMind created AlphaGo. An AI trained on thousands of human games, which beat one of the best Go players in the world, Lee Sedol, 4-1. It marked the first time an AI had beaten a top level human Go player. (Wired, 2016)
But Deepmind didn't stop there. In 2017, they released AlphaGo Zero. A version given no database of human games, no inherited strategies, no accumulated wisdom from 2,500 years of play. It was given the rules, a blank board, and left to play against itself. (Silver, et al., 2017)
In three days it beat every previous version of AlphaGo. (Sheldon, 2017) In forty days it was the best Go player on earth. It had developed strategies and moves that centuries of human play had never conceived. How? Not because it was more intelligent. Because nobody had told it how the game was supposed to be played.
It started from a blank board. And that turned out to be the advantage.
The reason this matters for brands is the blank board. AlphaGo Zero had no choice but to start from first principles. It didn’t have any legacy to protect, sunk investment to justify, or stakeholders invested in the existing way of doing things. It was structurally forced to discover what actually worked.
Brands and agencies have the same opportunity available to them.
I believe the brands that will define the next century will be those who deliberately choose not to know what their category has taught them. I am calling this the Blank Board Choice.
This is not an argument about whether AI will replace human creativity. That framing is too narrow and familiar. Every major technological revolution has clarified what makes humans irreplaceable and this is no different. Instead I’m arguing this is a moment in history where choice is being forced, but the brand industry is facing this technological turning point in a desperately limited way. Organisations that make the wrong one or none at all will pay a price no technology could impose on its own.
Where AlphaGo Zero had no option but to start from a blank board, human organisations do. The central argument of this essay is that the ones who’ll thrive for the next century will be those who recognise this and make the deliberate, difficult decision to choose not to know.
To understand why the choice is so difficult, and what it costs when it isn't made, I will first look at a pattern that has repeated at every major technological turning point in history. Then in my Therefore, I will argue there are three mindset moves required to make it.
And before we get into it, it’s worth saying the Blank Board Choice doesn’t produce the same answer for everyone, it produces your answer. For me, it revealed something I hadn't expected: 99.5% of UK businesses are small, and have never had access to world-class creative agency thinking because the economics never worked. Until now. That has become my blank board (and we’ll get onto that later on). The question is universal but the answer will always be yours.
1.1. I believe… The board always resets
When electricity arrived in the late nineteenth century, manufacturers did not redesign their factories around it. They retrofitted electric dynamos into their existing steam-powered pipework. Existing workflows and factory logic remained unchanged. It took thirty years and a new generation of engineers with no prior investment in the old system before factories were redesigned around what electricity actually made possible. (David, 1990) Without that abandoning of assumptions, we might not be driving cars today.
Carlota Perez identified this as a civilisational pattern. (Perez, 2010) Each major technological revolution follow the same structure: an installation period where the technology arrives and money floods in. A crash. And then deployment where the organisations who asked the right question embed in the fabric of society, and reap the economic and social rewards.
Today we are at the turning point of the AI revolution. The infrastructure is being built, the capital is flooding in. Now comes the harder question. Not whether AI is powerful, but what we choose to do with it.
At every turning point in history, the organisations that flourished in the deployment period were the ones that asked the right question about what the technology was for.
The wrong question was always the same: how do we use this to do what we already do, faster, cheaper or better?
The right question is always harder: what does this make possible that wasn't possible before?
Almost universally, the brand industry is answering that question the way the early factories answered electricity. Retrofitting new technology into the existing system. Using AI to do the same things faster, cheaper, and more confidently. Installing the dynamo into the steam engine.
And it is about to spend years wondering why the productivity gains were modest and the genuinely new outcomes never arrived.
1.2. I believe… The wrong game is an efficiency trap
The efficiency trap is not a new idea. But this is new context.
Efficiency thinking is a value capture strategy. It takes what has already been created - brand equity, customer trust, emotional resonance, category leadership - and extracts the maximum return from it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Every business needs to capture the value it creates. The trap is when capture becomes the strategy, and creation is sidelined, the brand ceases to be a source of future demand and instead becomes a machine for extracting the residue of past demand.
James McNicholas, a senior leader at Virgin Media O2 put this plainly: "The conversation I have frequently is: where are we creating value versus capturing value? The more you only capture value, the more you destroy trust in your business." That framing of creation versus capture is such a useful diagnostic for any brand leader shaping Blank Board thinking.
Efficiency-only thinking hollows brands. They get tidier but less distinctive, and more dependent on the existing: distribution, discounting, habit and inertia. You’ve still got recognition but the meaning fades as new entrants take distinctive positions to meet new consumer behaviour in ways legacy players can’t adapt to. Binet and Field, and 45 years of IPA effectiveness data shows why this matters: the accumulated emotional resonance of a brand built over time is how brands command premium prices, survive category disruption, and compound returns. (Binet & Field, 2013).
Take Kraft Heinz. In 2019, it wrote down $15.4 billion in part to the declining value of its core brands. Years of rigorous cost-cutting had damaged brand value and innovation capacity. Management described the turnaround as requiring "necessary investments" in brands. They had overspent the asset and had to rebuild it.
Wells Fargo's target was "eight is great". Eight products per customer household. A number chosen because it rhymed. Over two million accounts were opened without customers' knowledge. Eight years later, YouGov's brand tracking still showed Wells Fargo's health below pre-scandal levels. (YouGov, 2024) That is what happens when a business stops asking what customers need and starts asking what the metric requires.
Now, AI is being used to accelerate that logic as brands target outputs, not outcomes. When asked how they feel about AI in brand communications. 61% were neutral. 7% trusted the brand more. 31% less. A 4:1 trust destruction ratio. (EMARKETER, 2026). The New York Times found that half of Gen Z now uses AI regularly but their feelings about it are souring. They know when something is generated rather than created with feeling. But the industry is investing heavily in more and cheaper, without looking to new, previously unattainable frontiers. It’s making the wrong choice.
1.3. I believe… There is power in the choice that AlphaGo Zero never had
Here is the paradox at the heart of this essay. AlphaGo Zero’s advantage - the blank board - wasn’t a choice. It was its whole existence. It didn’t have existing systems to optimise, accumulated assumptions to overcome, or quarterly pressure to hit a number using the approach that hit the number last time. It was architecturally free.
Brands and agencies aren’t. They operate inside systems efficiently designed to produce the same output, in the same way, faster and cheaper than last time. Governance structures favour what is predictable. Agencies are paid to deliver what came before. The system isn’t broken, it’s actually the opposite. It’s working exactly as designed. The problem is that it was designed for a different game and the board has been reset.
The Blank Board Choice is the decision to override that system permanently, and make asking “what could this become?” as habitual and non-negotiable as asking “what does this cost?”. A mindset of constant reinvention, and marketplace mentality that runs underneath everything else the organisation does. It’s building the institutional willingness to choose to not-know. To deliberately suspend what your category, organisation, and professional experience tell you is true, in order to see what the new board actually makes possible. AlphaGo Zero didn’t choose ignorance, it was structurally incapable of knowing. The human version is having access to everything that has been done before and choosing to set it aside anyway.
This is why challenger brands and new market entrants so frequently redefine categories that established players have optimised for decades. They’re not smarter and certainly not better resourced. It’s because they’re structurally AlphaGo Zero and that is a superpower. They have no choice but to ask the real question. Oatly didn’t optimise dairy, it asked what a food brand could be for a generation leaving dairy behind. Monzo didn’t optimise retail banking, it asked what banking should feel like for people who grew up with iPhone. Both times the established players had access to the same market signals. But they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) choose to let those signals rewrite their assumptions.
The question this essay poses is this: can an established brand or agency create the conditions of the blank board deliberately? Is it possible? Can you build an institution capable of making the Blank Board Choice, against the pull of every system that rewards the existing answer?
I believe the answer is yes. But it requires three mindset moves.
Therefore...
2.1. Therefore… Choose a behavioural mindset
The Blank Board Choice is not the same as starting with nothing. AlphaGo Zero understood the rules of Go completely. Its advantage was the absence of inherited interpretations of those rules. The equivalent for brands isn’t abandoning what is known about human behaviour, but understanding it at sufficient depth that the right questions become visible.
Two ideas are really powerful here. Kahneman’s System 1 remains one of the most important yet underacted insights in modern brand work. (Kahneman, 2011) And Rory Sutherland’s argument that value is perceived rather than intrinsic, that the most valuable things brands do are the ones which look irrational on a spreadsheet (Sutherland, 2019), are great companions. Together they make the case that what a brand means to a person is what drives behaviour, commands a premium, and survives competition. The campaigns, content and activations are just pipes. What flows through them is what matters
Sofia Pires, in her IPA Excellence Diploma President’s Prize essay, proposed a compelling extension that connects them to this AI moment: System 3. As AI handles more of the rational processing done by System 2, System 1 reliance gets stronger. The emotional, sensory and instinctive dimension of human response becomes more prominent as we move about the world. She points out that the paradox of AI is it enables us to be more human rather than more machine. (Pires, 2023) Part of the Blank Board Choice therefore also becomes the need to respond to a changing human reality. As AI handles the functional layer, the brands that win will be the ones that understand and serve the experiential layer, at a level that data cannot yet capture.
James McNicholas put it this way: “Continue going deep on human behaviour - it is changing quicker than ever. Understand how AI will change that human behaviour, and leverage it to redesign what you are for people’s needs and wants. It goes back to value capture versus value creation.”
Value creation. That is what the Blank Board Choice produces. And value creation begins with human understanding deep enough to see what isn’t there yet.
2.2. Therefore… Choose a multiplication mindset
Byron Sharp established that brands grow through mental availability. Being thought of by more people in more buying situations. Romaniuk demonstrated that linking distinctive assets to category entry points is what makes that availability last. (Sharp, 2010); (Sharp & Romaniuk, 2022) The laws haven't changed. As Jeremy Bullmore said: people build brands as birds build nests, from scraps and straws they chance upon. But AI changes the economics of it.
Until now, the economics were a ceiling. Expressing your brand authentically to a 23-year-old in Lagos, a 45-year-old in Manchester, and a 67-year-old in rural Japan required three teams, three budgets, three campaigns. The economics made it impossible, so brands built generic workarounds, and mental availability suffered for it.
The Blank Board Choice, applied to scale, asks a different question to the one most organisations are currently asking. Not: how do we produce more content faster? But: how do we help more people, in more situations, chance upon our scraps and straws? The first is an efficiency question. The second is a question of mental availability, being distinct, and building memory. And it has only ever had one answer: genuine human insight, expressed with enough specificity to capture the imagination.
AI removes the economic ceiling by multiplying the reach of meaning that humans find. James Webb Young, writing in 1942, identified that an idea is simply a new combination of old elements, and that the capacity to combine depends on the ability to see relationships. (Young, 1942) That ranging outward, noticing unexpected connections, bringing back something strange, is human. AI can amplify it but can't originate it. Not really.
So the brand manager and creative director’s jobs don’t disappear in this world. They become more consequential, because the quality of the original insight determines the quality of everything that follows. The organisations that understand this won’t be reducing their investment in strategic and creative thinking. They will be concentrating it. AI multiplies it.
2.3. Therefore… Choose a mindset of structural freedom
The final mindset move is the hardest. It’s building organisations that are structurally capable of making the Blank Board Choice. Not once but repeatedly, as a sustained competitive advantage.
What does a blank-board structure actually look like? Three consistent moves. First, the language around a unit of value shifts from units sold to outcomes delivered. Second, data and AI move from back-office efficiency tools into the heart of the brand, product and service experience itself. Third, the brand stops being a communications layer and becomes a coordinating layer. (Imagine a platform, a service ecosystem, a membership logic, or an organising presence in the customer’s life).
John Deere made tractors. Now it’s a farm operating system, organising decisions around data, connectivity and lifetime value.
Airbnb proclaims “Homes were just the start” repositioning as a layer that organises parts of living, travelling, and local participation.
For both, the Blank Board Choice was a strategic decision to stop optimising the existing system and ask what the new board actually makes possible.
Block is the fork in the road made visible. Jack Dorsey’s vision is explicit: not a payments company, but a programmable economic infrastructure for its users. AI handles coordination. Freeing humans to operate at ‘the edge’.
“The edge is where the intelligence makes contact with reality. People reach into places the model can't go yet and can't perceive: intuition, opinionated direction, cultural context, trust dynamics, the feeling in a room. They make the calls the model shouldn't make on its own.” (Dorsey, 2026)
But the same restructuring also involved drastic headcount reduction. Block is simultaneously the Blank Board Choice and the efficiency trap - the same technology intentionally serving two different strategic instincts. Most brands are making that choice without realising it is a choice at all.
“We believe every company will eventually need to confront the same question we did: what does your company understand that is genuinely hard to understand, and is that understanding getting deeper every day? If the answer is nothing, AI is just a cost optimisation story. You cut headcount, improve margins for a few quarters, and eventually get absorbed by something smarter. If the answer is deep, AI doesn't augment your company. It reveals what your company actually is.” (Dorsey, 2026)
Amazon is perhaps the most instructive institutional example of the Blank Board Choice and returning to first principles built into an operating model. A leader at Amazon describes the company as “a load of experiments always running from a million businesses.” Better to think of it as an internal market for new ideas that attack the core problem they see in new ways, even when it is a threat to the core business. The conditions that make this possible are deliberate: a written culture that forces coherent arguments over polished presentations. Permission to pursue ideas before they have commercial proof; and a structure where a new venture is protected from the economics of the existing business until it can stand on its own.
The result? Kindle, Fire TV, Alexa. None of which came from optimising the existing retail business (and in the case of Kindle posed the threat of cannibalizing the book buying market!). They came from people who were structurally free to ask what was possible. It’s not creativity, it’s institutional architecture. The Blank Board Choice systematised for that company.
The contrast with incumbent categories is telling. Consider telecoms. Data, texts, and minutes have been commoditised. The phone itself is an OS platform owned by Apple and Google. The blank board question: ‘what job are we actually hired to do now?’ is one that most incumbents in that space can’t bring themselves to ask. Not for lack of intelligence, but because the systems, incentives and metrics of the existing business make it structurally almost impossible.
But the most exciting implication of the Blank Board Choice isn’t about defending existing markets more imaginatively. It is about the new markets that become visible only when you make it. Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Oceans describe uncontested market space where the rules haven’t yet been written. (Kim & Mauborgne, 2004)
Three types open up: markets emerging from shifts in human behaviour as System 1 strengthens; existing markets shifting in ways incumbents can’t adapt to; and markets previously unattainable due to the economics of the old model.
That third category is where I found my own blank board moment. 99.5% of businesses in the UK are SMEs. 95% are micro, never been served by agencies like mine because the economics didn’t work. But now? AI changes that equation entirely. New products can be built on decades of creative excellence, accessible at a fraction of the previous cost, A market that didn’t previously exist. That is a blank board story.
AI can make very large organisations structurally less efficient, not just leaner. The Dorsey point suggests it’ll become impossible to sustain organisations of tens of thousands of people in their current form. But that’s not doom, it’s a precondition for something more interesting: a new marketplace of smaller, more entrepreneurial organisations competing in spaces that didn’t previously exist. Value moving away from scale and toward specificity, expertise, and the kind of genuine human insight that no production line can manufacture. Jim Clifton at Gallup identifies the three leading indicators of the coming $100 trillion in economic energy as ambition, employment quality, and thriving. Not efficiency. Not AI adoption rates. Ambition. (Gallup, 2026)
I got my first computer when I was seven (an Amstrad CPC-464 in case you’re wondering) and have loved games ever since. Not because I’m necessarily the best at them, but because of the feeling you get when you stop playing the game as it appears and start playing it as it actually is. Something just clicks and suddenly you understand what the game has been asking of you all along. LLMs are trained on the past. Amazing for remixing what’s already known, but by definition unable to originate what isn’t. The genuinely new remains a human job. And where AI can handle everything else it’s the most valuable capability going.
AI is forcing that moment on us all. And I believe we’re seeing in agencies and brand teams, in strategy decks and budget conversations is the industry picking up the new technology and using it to play the old game better. More content. Faster. Cheaper. The dynamo, bolted into the steam engine.
The factories that thrived in the electrical age were not the ones that retrofitted the fastest. They were the ones that eventually asked the question the early adopters couldn’t bring themselves to ask: what if we didn’t start from here at all?
The Blank Board Choice is that question.
It’s up to all of us how we choose to answer it.
Jack Stanley is Senior Strategy Director at Golin Ketchum London. This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.
Last updated 22 September 2026