C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Jeff Charney Of MKHSTRY On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans
An Interview With Kieran Powell
You Won’t Lose Your Job to AI, but You Will Lose Your Job to Someone Who Knows How to Harness the Technology. We know there are issues around the technology. With anything this new, there always will be, but embrace it or be replaced. Understand how it can make you better vs. how it can make you worse. It is survival of the fittest, and this technology can truly make you better. Consider our technology, which helps ignite the light bulb moment in us all. You’re all “one idea away” from greatness for yourself, your company, your brand, and your family. Why wouldn’t you welcome a tool that will help you get there faster?
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance and integrate into various aspects of business, decision-makers at the highest levels face the complex task of determining where AI can be most effectively utilized and where the human touch remains irreplaceable. This series seeks to explore the nuanced decisions made by C-Suite executives regarding the implementation of AI in their operations. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Charney.
The CMO mind behind MKHSTRY AI is former Brand CMO of the Year, Jeff Charney, now CEO and founder of MKHSTRY. In launching the new AI ideation engine on Feb. 27th, Charney draws upon his experience creating and/or leading established campaigns and characters like Progressive’s ‘Flo’ (16 years in market) and ‘Dr. Rick’ (8 years in market), and the ‘Aflac duck’ (24 years in market) — as well as many other iconic national launches. Charney stepped away from his decades-long run as a Fortune 500 CMO in 2022 to focus on solving challenges he observed in the industry, dedicating himself to building disruptive marketing creativity and technology solutions for the world’s bravest leaders and brands. In announcing MKHSTRY AI (https://mkhstry.ai), Charney and his team are the first to dispel the long-held myth that you “can’t teach a machine to be creative.” This new, patent-pending ideation engine will disrupt the $350 billion marketing industry, by igniting and driving large-scale “light bulb moments” for not only broad national brand campaigns like those seen in the Super Bowl but also will ultimately drive that creative spark for ALL creatives in general. He calls for creatives to Rise Up! and realize that the right combination of Human Intelligence (H.I.) along with AI can make the best creatives…even better.
Charney is one of the nation’s most accomplished marketers, having been CMO for brands including Progressive, Aflac, QVC, and Move.com (formally Homestore.com). He was also one of the only CMOs to champion internal creative agencies and media teams (at high-spending velocity) before it was trendy to do so. He also has been a speaker and thought leader on disruptive technology. He and his teams have received over 100 national and international marketing and creative awards. Charney was named “Brand Genius: Top Marketer of the Year” by Adweek Magazine in 2011 and Ad Age’s “Brand CMO of the Year” a decade later in 2021. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Investor’s Exchange (IEX), Unify Work, Cann-Ade, and the Mobile Marketing Association. He also received Alumni of the Year awards from Ohio State University in 2022 and the University of South Carolina in 2023. For more, go to www.jeffcharney.com.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I’ve been really fortunate because I’ve known exactly what I wanted to do since I was 17 years old.
I was in high school and had a crush on a girl in my class, so I asked her out. What happened? She turned me down flat! In an attempt to either connect with her or exact some kind of childish vengeance, I ran against her for student council. And I won!
But I didn’t win because I was the better candidate or more popular. I won because I ran a more creative campaign filled with cool posters, a well-written, heartfelt speech, and shaking hands with every student in the school. It was my first ever successful marketing campaign. And I decided that rather than become a marketer out of vengeance. I could apply marketing principles for the greater good. And from 17 on, I never looked back. I put my head down and became a marketer.
After that, I was fortunate to have many mentors, some great teams, and my fair share of luck. But one thing has always been true: my ability to “outcreate,” in almost any circumstance, has been core to my success.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I was a severe overachiever back when I was in college and already had two job offers before graduation — one in New York and one in Columbus, Ohio — both from advertising agencies. Even so, I accepted a call from Raytheon Company in Boston for me to come out and interview. I had NO intention of taking a job on the dreaded “client side,” but I was a small-town kid who had never been to Boston, so I said what the hell, might as well go and give it a try. Because I really didn’t want or need the job, I was relaxed and confident.
Lo and behold, because I really didn’t want it, I got the job offer and ended up taking it. Being on the client side was not only the right move, but it also made me realize that the scarcity model is much better than trying to be over-eager just to “please” or get people to “like me.” Decades later, I apply that scarcity model with my “invite only” businesses. If you have the best product or the best concept, people will find you. You don’t have to carry a megaphone with you all the time for them to notice. Don’t change who you are. Just be who you are.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
MKHSTRY AI, the company I recently founded, is the most exciting, impactful, and rewarding project I’ve worked on in my career.
Many sources cite the Torrance Test as the measure of creativity. Within its results, there is a finding many believe to be surprising. High creativity is more indicative of real-world success than a high IQ. Yet, Torrance test results have been declining since the 50s, and scientists generally agree on the cause: our minds are now too overstimulated; we’re constantly distracted or entertained by devices and overscheduled lives.
These results are sad. Our creative potential as humans is going unfulfilled.
We see creativity in the crosshairs within the $350B marketing industry. The intense pressure on marketing teams to draw straight, bold lines to revenue means the industry spends more time in technology, looking at data and “slide-rule analytics,” than it does freeing up the mental space needed to generate the creative campaigns that can connect brands to a generation of customers.
I chose to leave my position as CMO of Progressive at the top of my game in 2022 because I saw this problem looming and wanted to work on solving it. I now believe AI is the missing piece that will help drive the industry to the place it should be.
At MKHSTRY AI, we’re the first to teach a machine to be creative on the national stage. Our AI, combined with H.I. (Human Intelligence), can help make any human the most “creative person in the room.” Users become more creative, faster, and at a fraction of the cost. Today, the tool is built for marketers. It is trained on everything I know from my 25+ years sitting in the top creative CMO seat. Looking to the future and beyond the marketing industry, the possibilities are endless. We all have brains. Are we using the right side of that brain to its fullest?
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. In your experience, what have been the most challenging aspects of integrating AI into your business operations, and how have you balanced these with the need to preserve human-centric roles?
If you watched the recent David Beckham documentary, there’s a scene at the end where he expresses his love of the game. He says he thinks he may love it more than anyone ever has. I’ll never be as cool as David Beckham, but that’s how I feel about marketing. I love this industry, perhaps more than anyone. It hurts how much I love it, and I am thankful for this profession.
So what I say next comes from this place of love. The genie is already out of the bottle! AI is here, and there is no going back. Today’s marketers need to know that the immediate risk is not losing their jobs to a machine but to another human worker who learns how to harness that machine. To use my company name, it’s a make history or be history moment.
Even that is understating it. You must embrace vs. be so worried about being replaced. AI will help the best be better.
All that said, the best AI engines consider their human users during the design stage. For us, humans are core to MKHSTRY AI. The product must have human intelligence drive the artificial intelligence.
We all know that moment when everything clicks into place — that “lightbulb” or “eureka” moment when you know you have a great idea. MKHSTRY AI sparks those lightbulb moments in us all. While we are initially coming to market to serve the marketing vertical, our same ideation engine that sparks new creative marketing ideas can be used to spark any type of new idea.
Now, STOP.
Think about what that means.
We’re talking about human ingenuity itself becoming better, stronger, faster. Ideas for the next generation of inventions, business models, global solutions….even ideas for future AI. Creativity exists within us all. We just need to unleash it. Unlock it. The scale is quite literally limitless.
Can you share a specific instance where AI initially seemed like the optimal solution but ultimately proved less effective than human intervention? What did this experience teach you about the limitations of AI in your field?
AI is in its infancy, and it will only get better from here.
2023 into 2024 has been all about large language models (LLMs). While these initially wowed users with what they could do, we’re quickly seeing that they are riddled with problems — from serious ones to hallucinatory issues.
The marketing industry is already flooded with these — all powering a dangerous sea of creative sameness. But the best CMOs are not going to adopt off-the-shelf, self-serve AI tools built by developers. The best tools that change our industry will be small language, and vertical models built by marketers for marketers.
LLMs are trained on thousands of things and have the generalized results to prove it. Ours is trained on one thing and one thing only — to outcreate. If you trained a human on one thing, 24/7, for over a year, that person would probably be an oddity. If you train a machine on ONE thing (outcreate), it will truly make history.
How do you navigate the ethical implications of implementing AI in your company, especially concerning potential job displacement and ensuring ethical AI usage?
AI will change marketing as we know it. Top-tier marketing leaders and agency executives already know this, and our goal is to lead this change alongside them to make the industry better. A significant part is ensuring ethics are central to everything we do. This means embedding ethics around proprietary ideas and copyright into the design phase of our development and then continuously and rigorously testing our patent-pending model to ensure it adheres to those standards. This commitment is one of the main reasons we have taken so long to come to market and why we will continue to evaluate speed to market from this point forward.
We are only committed to our mission if it can be done ethically and if it leads to the industry thriving. Those are the guiding principles we work to uphold each day.
Could you describe a successful instance in your company where AI and human skills were synergistically combined to achieve a result that neither could have accomplished alone?
We have many real-world examples, but because MKHSTRY has confidentiality agreements with our disruptive clients, we’re reluctant to speak on their behalf for competitive reasons. But thinking much broader, reflect back to a month or so ago when the Super Bowl occurred, and 60 marketers paid an average of $7–10 million for their campaigns to be on this national stage.
Consider the scale of each of those 60 campaigns.
How many people do you think were pulled in to work on it? How many hours were dedicated to brainstorming everything from initial concepts to how to execute them? How many creative teams? And lastly, how much money was spent from concept to launch? And now, consider the creative result. Especially this year — it was critically disappointing, and I would speculate that the ROI wasn’t there either.
Now, let me walk you through how MKHSTRY AI could be paired with a single, human marketing decision-maker to do these same large-scale campaigns better — in a small fraction of the time and for a small fraction of the cost.
Using MKHSTRY AI, a marketer enters a few prompts that have been created, patent-pending and trained based on my decades of experience as a Fortune 500 creative CMO. Because it’s been trained for thousands of hours to know the difference between good creative ideas and bad ones, in mere seconds it generates breakthrough, full creative concepts. Users then choose one of these options and can use the AI to keep workshopping it — doing things like coming up with large-scale television scripts, ad copy, viral ideas, finding influencers, production partners, and in the future, integrating with other AI tools — to be able to bring that full campaign to life.
It turns days, weeks, and sometimes even months of work into seconds, minutes, and hours. I REPEAT — days, weeks, and sometimes even months into seconds, minutes and hours. And, of course, the cost savings are nearly incalculable.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on Humans, and Why?” How have these 5 things impacted your work or your career?
I’d like to put this question into the context of our business and our industry. In our business, we specifically look at how AI can be used to unlock the creativity of humans. We see our tool as foundational — it sparks initial “lightbulb moments” capable of generating large-scale, national marketing campaigns. Down the line, we see MKHSTRY AI integrating with other tools; tools such as Sora that stack on top of MKHSTRY AI to form building blocks capable of bringing full campaigns to life. When we put this question in this context, I think marketers looking at any AI solution need to consider the following:
- AI is a once-in-a-generation technology that has THE worst-in-a-generation perception issue. From its initial name, Artificial Intelligence, you lose people at hello. The first word throws people off. Activate, Accelerate, or Augment Intelligence would be much better — because that’s what it does. I’m a realist and know we can’t change it now, but the marketing around it from the big tech companies isn’t helping in the way it’s intended. We’re in such a technology rush that we are just throwing creative against the wall to see if it will stick. This “Ready, Fire, Aim” mentality must change if you want consumers to rally behind this historic tech. We have to slow down and look at the amazing product we’re creating and match that product with equally amazing branding. There’s too much happening at once, and while it may work in targeting investors and VCs, it’s not working with consumers.
- Don’t Always Believe the AI Myths. Bust Them. Forget the “everybody says’’ scenario. If we had listened to everybody who says you can’t teach AI to be creative, we wouldn’t have spent a year successfully training this AI to truly outcreate. It was long, brutal work that wasn’t easy; but we did it instead of believing we couldn’t. It’s a new technology that comes with new opportunities to create and make history. Always realize that haters gonna hate, and as the ancient proverb says, “the tallest nail will always get hammered.” Understand that and just tune out the noise.
- 2024 Will be the Year of the Vertical SLM. Just like 2023 was the year that billions were spent developing the jaw-dropping Large Language Models that know a lot about everything, 2024 will be laser-focused on developing the Small Language Models and vertical applications that know a lot about one thing. To do that you need to train the AI with the best Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in Marketing, like MKHSTRY AI as well as legal, architecture, art, medicine, sports, finance, etc. LLMs will go wide, SLMs will go deep, and will change industries — one at a time.
- You Won’t Lose Your Job to AI, but You Will Lose Your Job to Someone Who Knows How to Harness the Technology. We know there are issues around the technology. With anything this new, there always will be, but embrace it or be replaced. Understand how it can make you better vs. how it can make you worse. It is survival of the fittest, and this technology can truly make you better. Consider our technology, which helps ignite the light bulb moment in us all. You’re all “one idea away” from greatness for yourself, your company, your brand, and your family. Why wouldn’t you welcome a tool that will help you get there faster?
- The Best Tech Three-Legged Race Will be a H.I./ A.I. Combo. It must be a chicken-AND-egg philosophy. Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence will always coexist. In our case, there will always be creative friction between the two, but a delicate degree of difficulty exists in how you manage that creative friction. Again, in our case, you not only need bravery, but immense talent to identify and maximize that light bulb moment. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you want to do something to make history, you better be better than any CMO around you. Period.
Looking towards the future, in which areas of your business do you foresee AI making the most significant impact, and conversely, in which areas do you believe a human touch will remain indispensable?
The future of marketing is about how humans and machines will come together. Any other view is looking into the past.
In building MKHSTRY AI, I drew upon my experience creating and/or leading established campaigns and characters like Progressive’s ‘Flo’ (16 years in market), ‘Dr. Rick’ (8 years in market), and the ‘Aflac duck’ (24 years in market) — as well as many other iconic national launches.
The campaigns were a part of my decades-long runs as a Fortune 500 CMO. Everything I did in my successful career in my past is passed. It’s history. What I create today is what’s relevant NOW. AI is already the most important innovation of our present time. That only becomes more true when you look into the future; the world’s bravest marketing leaders and brands know it’s coming faster than we can imagine.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
C-R-E-A-T-I-V-I-T-Y! That 10-letter word has powered my career in the past, and with this new technology, we’re putting the ability to O-U-T-C-R-E-A-T-E in everyone’s hands for them to trigger lightbulb moments for all. It’s for everyone. It requires no hardware. You just need a brain and to open your mind to the possibilities.
It starts with a simple product today but will unlock and unleash the creativity in us all tomorrow.
AI is giving us our moment. And not just for us — for all of humankind. It’s a br(ai)ve new world. Creatives…rise up.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
C-Suite Perspectives On AI: Jeff Charney Of MKHSTRY On Where to Use AI and Where to Rely Only on… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.