Hilary Badger.
Hilary Badger, ECD, Leo Australia & AWARD Council member
Creativity is mostly failure.
That’s uncomfortable to say, yet every creative knows it’s true.
Developing and crafting ideas is a process of endless experiments, dead ends, and outright failures. And then, very occasionally, a dizzying success.
AI is the shiny new kid on the block when it comes to creative work. And creative people need to be around it a lot before we truly understand what it is and how to work with it. But AI has landed at such pace that there hasn’t been a lot of time or space for failure.
When you’re working with expensive tech, failure costs money. You must get to the best use case straight away, not waste time dabbling. It all ladders up to a very modern yet entirely universal form of status anxiety: you’re not keeping up with technology.
When AWARD launched its GenAI Sprint in May, we thought it was all about education. We gathered creatives, leaders, production companies, and tech experts, many of whom were from AWARD’s broader ecosystem.
Our original mission? To upskill those who’d previously done AWARD’s training for mid-career creatives, AWARD Crash or AWARD Uni. To offer them expertise, live coaching and feedback on the conceptual use of AI within the Leonardo platform.
This seemed the right role for AWARD. We’d just kicked off our AWARD Lab initiative, which aimed to explore the future of the industry. And we’re also the Australian industry’s premier body for creative excellence and education. AWARD School has been part of Australian advertising for more than 40 years, the launchpad of top creatives including David Droga.
And while we did upskill our participants, it turned out that the sprint did something bigger. It created a space where participants, advisors and even judges could experiment and safely fail.
The sprint made AI experimentation feel less loaded. Psychologically safe, even, which we all know is an essential precondition of creativity. By design, it was a celebration of noodling about and feeling your way.
In the most literal sense, the sprint gave creatives the chance to muck around with tools, get expert training on a live brief, win cash and create a nice piece for their book.
But the bigger point was stepping beyond agency life, with all its expectations of efficiency and success. The sprint was a place where creatives could try things without having to record them on their timesheets or present the results at a 9am internal review.
Okay, admittedly we did impose a gnarly deadline, and that is painfully true to life.
And we did have to deliver for our client and partner, AUSVEG and the OMA. There were real outdoor sites to fill. But we had a lot of firepower in the competition, so we were confident a great idea would surface.
So, risk remained the order of the day. We had creatives who didn’t typically work together teaming up. And many who were totally new to the Leonardo platform.
And of course, given our AUSVEG partnership, we introduced a brief about vegetables into the creative equation.
Am I implying that there were phallic symbols in some of the work we got back? I can neither confirm nor deny, but I will say that experimentation seemed to lead the creatives down the occasional NSFW avenue. And that was all part of the process.
The jury room was one of the more experimental ones I’ve been in, because there was a real sense of being at the frontier of a whole new way of being creative.
We were deciding what good would look like in AI creativity, and there were lots of different points of view on that within the jury. Some jurors were technical, some were high-craft visual people, and others were pure agency creatives. Together, we had to blend all those points of view to decide on our criteria for what counts as good.
We expected wildly unpredictable work, and we got it. So we put specific processes in place to assess it.
In formulating the judging criteria and competition format, the AWARD team looked to overseas shows to compare how they assessed AI Craft.
After Cannes’ 2025 AI "scamdals" and the changes they made in 2026, we knew that integrity was critical. AWARD wanted to grant permission to fail, not permission to fake. That’s why we introduced a mandatory process log.
As a judge, these ‘making-of’ prompts and images were at least as interesting to me as the work itself. AI is evolving fast, and we are all still learning, even whilst we’re judging.
After shortlisting and eventually finding our winner, the atypical process of experimentation and risk-taking continued.
We began further crafting the winning work with the team and encouraged them to try to reject more visuals before settling on the final iteration.
For the judges and team, this conversation was not about winning or losing, but about trying. Everything felt less pressured and more like a regular discussion about ideas and art direction, just with cooler tools at our disposal.
In these moments, when permission to fail was completely granted, creativity flourished and advertising felt like advertising again. There was no discussion of AI tools delivering efficiencies or of the tech required to make the magic happen. It was just typography, writing, colours and concepts. The basics.
I hadn’t realised how much I missed them.
It’s hard to know exactly what AI will bring to our industry. Will taste really be the main differentiator, as every second think piece claims? Will we be writing ads for LLMs instead of people? And will all content just be spin-offs of Fruit Love Island?
Getting our industry future-fit is the whole point of AWARD Lab and initiatives like the GenAI sprint. And while no one knows what the future will look like, there’s one thing I am sure of after judging the competition.
Creativity is, and has always been, a process of failing forward. AI hasn’t changed that. And the more automated our processes, the more vital it is to hang on to that unique yet most underrated of human creative experiences: failure.
Process workflow via Leonardo.Ai. Created by Laura Murphy & Amy Morrison