Casting call: none of my versions got the part

João Unzer, CCO, on wearing several hats and staying one person.

The problem with working with AI is the day it starts living a far more interesting life than yours, and you are still the one paying the bills.

I have always thought painting is one of the most honest ways to tell a story. Better than words, most days. And since I have been a little too excited about AI lately, I decided to use it to talk about the painters I love. Starting with Hopper.

So I started making versions of myself. The first one came out strange. The second one too. The third managed to be worse. When I looked up, I had a full cast. I did what any creative director does with a full cast. I held a casting. Nobody got the part. For now.

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Version four sits in the diner. Hat, glasses, tattoos on hands that never held a brush. He has the face of a man who was promised a meeting at nine and it is now eleven. I know that face. I have made that face at three agencies and one wedding.

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Version seven is my favourite. He smiles like me, waves like me, and has six fingers. He is the most honest of them all. Everything the machine makes has a sixth finger somewhere. The job is to find it before the client does. Ours, on a deck, was found by a client. That is a story for another day, and there is a whole vertical on this site built on it.

There is precedent. In 1964, Life magazine looked at Roy Lichtenstein’s enlarged comic panels and asked if he was the worst artist in America. He had copied another man’s drawing, dots and all, and the copy went to the museum. Sixty years later the same question lives in my laptop. A copy becomes an original the moment somebody chooses it on purpose. Nobody has chosen my versions yet. That is the difference between a Lichtenstein and a jpeg.

The mischief school would have shipped the cast already. Limited drop, gone by Friday, essay included. I respect the move. My cast is still in rehearsal.

Bernbach said the memorable never emerged from a formula. He said it about ads made by hand in 1960. It holds better now: the machine is a formula that has eaten every other formula. It hands you the average of everything it has seen. The job is the part that was never in the training set. Choosing.

And then there is the one that exists. Suit, cigarette, number one, on a bike built for a nine-year-old. He is not more dignified than the others. He is just the one who has to answer the emails.

Being a creative is changing personality and still being you.

This is the part I actually wanted to say. The versions were a joke, and then they weren’t. A creative director wears a lot of hats. In the same week you are the one who dreams the film, the one who cuts the film in half because the budget said so, the one who sells the half with a straight face, and the one who calls the director afterwards to say it was still good. Four hats. Same head.

You learn which hat by wearing the wrong one in public. Here is mine.

When I started leading people, I said yes too often. Rarely because I believed in the thing. Saying no felt uncomfortable, so I wore the nice hat. A few years ago I was presenting a campaign in New York. The idea was soft. The team had worked hard on it. I said it was good. We presented it. The client killed it in the first five minutes. That silence in the room was on me.

Each yes had felt harmless. Together they put my team inside a fog I had made. Nice says yes to keep the peace. Kind says no to keep the standard. Kind comes from kin. It was never about manners. The best thing I ever did for my team was learn to say no. Being nice is easy. Being kind takes something.

So the versions stay in the drawer, and the casting stays open, and I keep making them, because creativity has to flow somewhere when the brief is quiet, and it should be fun while it does. Then one day a hard task lands on the table, and you know how to do it, and you know which hat. You have tried them all in private.

If you want to meet the rest of the cast, they are on my Instagram. Bring popcorn.