Welcome to the part of the circus where the clowns aren’t funny, the trapeze artists keep falling, and yet somehow the ringmaster insists that everything is going according to plan. That’s modern marketing for you: a relentless obsession with efficiency, as if “more” has ever equaled “better.”

Let’s call it what it is. Marketers worship dashboards like televangelists worship their donation hotlines. They stare at those glowing charts—CTR, CPM, impressions—like neon casino chips blinking at 2 a.m., convinced the next spin of the graph will reveal divine truth. It never does. It’s noise dressed up as insight, junk food parading as nutrition. And the tragedy is that entire budgets, entire teams, entire CMO careers are now shackled to the belief that if you churn out enough stuff, you’ve achieved “impact.”

Spoiler: you haven’t.

Efficiency has become the Prozac of marketing: it dulls the edges, keeps you calm, makes you feel safe. You’re not inspired, but at least the quarterly report looks tidy. “We produced 5,000 assets this quarter!” someone crows in a boardroom. Congratulations—you’ve turned creativity into factory-floor labor. It’s Dickensian content, minus the soot.

Leslie Walsh, Head of Strategy at Episode Four, is far too polite to call it the scam it is, but she didn’t need to—her words in our conversation were surgical. She said, “If that’s what we’re using AI for, it becomes a race to the bottom of who can make a banner ad faster and cheaper. And that’s not a strategy. That is digital busywork.”

Digital busywork. That’s the epitaph for an entire era of “growth hacking.”

While the rest of the industry polishes dashboards like they’re family heirlooms, Leslie and her team built RYA, a creative AI that does the one thing efficiency will never allow: it hallucinates. And not in the “oops, ChatGPT thought Napoleon fought the dinosaurs” way. These are hallucinations with teeth—strange, glorious mashups that make you question why you ever tolerated oatmeal-brained campaigns in the first place.

Leslie told me about one early experiment: “We gave RYA a brief for Charles Schwab, and it came back with this idea that involved punk music. It was all about creating a rock band where the investment vehicles you choose embody the punk ethos and challenge the norms. You’d go into battle against Wall Street giants in a virtual stock market mosh pit.”

Stop. Read that again. A virtual stock market mosh pit.

Tell me that doesn’t deserve its own Super Bowl slot more than yet another ad about how “mobile carriers empower connection.” Picture the Sex Pistols thrashing while you diversify your 401(k). That’s not just a campaign; that’s a cultural middle finger wrapped in an ETF.

Here’s the industry’s dirty secret: committees do not birth boldness. Committees birth oatmeal. You put ten CMOs in a room and beg for “disruption,” you’ll get a deck with rooftop millennials high-fiving under the tagline “Innovation Starts Here.” Nobody will remember it, not even the interns who built the slides.

Leslie sees it too. She said, “It came up with some really unique, interesting, weird combinations, which is what we leaned into because that’s what creativity is all about—finding those unexpected patterns.”

Exactly. Creativity is not tidy. Creativity is not “on brand.” Creativity is LSD for your brain, cut with Red Bull, and set loose in a brainstorming session. It’s the uninvited drunk at the wedding who jumps on stage and suddenly makes the dance floor electric. You don’t control it, you ride it.

The problem is that efficiency doesn’t just fail to encourage creativity—it strangles it. Efficiency has a dashboard. Creativity doesn’t. Efficiency makes you look good in the Monday stand-up. Creativity makes you sweat through your shirt until the client gasps, “Wait… this might actually work.”

When I asked Leslie whether efficiency had murdered creativity outright, she didn’t hesitate: “It can, especially right now where performance marketing is a lot easier to track and validate. Brand building kind of goes to the wayside… Creativity dies on the vine.”

That’s the funeral nobody wants to talk about. Creativity didn’t just fade—it was choked to death by dashboards, sacrificed on the altar of “performance.”

Here’s why I adored this conversation: Leslie treats AI not as the corporate apocalypse, but as the unpredictable co-conspirator. She’s not bowing down to robots; she’s handing them guitars and telling them to thrash.

When I asked her to describe RYA’s superpower, she didn’t waffle: “RYA is LSD for your brain powered by Google on a Red Bull binge.”

Find me one strategist at a holding company who’s brave enough to describe their product like that. You won’t. They’re too busy writing another “AI empowers creativity” press release.

So here’s the thesis: AI isn’t coming to replace you. AI is coming to shove you into weirder neighborhoods, make you mosh with ideas you’d never invite into the pitch room, and leave you wondering why you ever tolerated oatmeal.

Efficiency is the Prozac that keeps you safe. Hallucination is the amphetamine that wakes you up, kicks you in the chest, and reminds you why you got into this absurd industry in the first place.

And if you’re still clutching your dashboard like it’s a lifeboat, I’ll leave you with Leslie’s warning: “If that’s all we use AI for, it’s just a race to the bottom.”

If Part 1 was about kicking the teeth out of efficiency, Part 2 is about the quieter, more delicate knife fight: how to sneak bold ideas past the compliance cops without getting your agency handcuffed at the boardroom door. Because let’s be real—most big enterprises, especially in the financial sector, would rather tattoo their risk disclosures on your forehead than let you run wild with anything resembling fun.

And yet, somehow, Leslie Walsh and RYA are pulling it off.

Enterprises love to talk about innovation until the legal department walks in. Then it’s all: “risk mitigation,” “reputation protection,” and “please don’t let us end up in front of Congress.” AI is no different. Most corporate giants see it less as a shiny new tool and more as a compliance nightmare waiting to detonate.

Leslie spelled it out: “Most of our clients, particularly in the enterprise space, see AI as a compliance risk. They want to get in on it, but they have to take a risk-averse approach and don’t want to be reckless.” Translation: they’re curious, but terrified. So what do they do? They outsource the danger. Agencies like Episode Four become the AI test kitchens, experimenting with the wild ideas, running the stress tests, and surfacing only the ones that won’t get a general counsel pacing the carpet.

This is why RYA works—it isn’t trained on client data. That’s the magic trick. Leslie explained, “It comes with its own proprietary data. It doesn’t depend on the client data at all. So it’s safe for them to use.” In other words, it’s not snooping in your CRM; it’s conjuring insights from a decade of agency-side intelligence. That’s what transforms it from “cute gimmick” to boardroom-defensible asset.

Take Charles Schwab, one of the most buttoned-up brands in finance. Nobody’s expecting Schwab to stage-dive into a mosh pit. But thanks to RYA, they didn’t just dip a toe into the creative pool—they gave away a classic muscle car to the winner of their annual golf tournament. That’s not a “safe” move. That’s a brand stepping out of its khakis and putting on a leather jacket, at least for a moment.

And guess what? It worked. Because RYA’s pitch wasn’t, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” It was, “Here’s what your audience cares about. Here’s the data. Here’s the cultural connection.” Suddenly, what looked like a risky stunt was actually a strategy with receipts.

Then there’s Invesco QQQ—another finance player not exactly known for flamboyant creativity. Yet here they are, serving up a cooking show with celebrity chefs, complete with a second season in production. You read that right: a finance brand running a food show. And again, the DNA traces back to RYA’s data-driven imagination.

Leslie put it plainly: “We’re helping Invesco QQQ deliver the second season of a cooking show with celebrity chefs. And again, all of that was helped come to life by RYA.”

That’s not just bold—it’s borderline absurd in the best way possible. Because compliance doesn’t like absurd. Compliance likes boilerplate. But when absurdity is backed by proprietary data that says, “this is what your audience is actually passionate about,” suddenly it feels less like chaos and more like calculated risk.

Here’s the emerging playbook if you’re trying to smuggle weirdness into the land of compliance paranoia:

This is why Leslie’s work matters. It’s not just about conjuring up funky AI ideas. It’s about creating a safe corridor where even the most conservative brands can take swings without feeling like they’re about to end up in a Senate hearing.

Because here’s the truth: compliance may be allergic to risk, but audiences are allergic to boring. And boring is the one thing no brand can afford.

We’ve covered the hallucinations and punk-rock portfolios. But ADOTAT+ takes you deeper:

Leslie Walsh: “One of the keys of getting a client to accept some weird ideas is to help them feel like they’re a part of it.” In ADOTAT+ you’ll get the full playbook—co-authoring tactics, passion maps, and “defense kits” that make bold ideas boardroom-safe.

Why most agencies fail at productization, and how Episode Four’s decade of proprietary data gave RYA a moat Silicon Valley can’t touch. Plus, the tension: will creatives embrace or resist their new AI pitch partner?

Leslie again: “The average tenure of a CMO is 18 months. You’re under the gun… creativity sometimes just takes a longer stretch to prove, but it can be proven.” We break down Cannes data, S&P outperformance, and why AI’s next frontier is measuring creativity’s ROI.

👉 Upgrade to ADOTAT+ and get the mechanics, not just the metaphors.