In a world obsessed with dashboards and algorithms, are we at risk of creating work that's efficient but forgettable?

We’ve never had more data about our audiences. We know what people click, watch, share, skip and buy. We can measure engagement, sentiment and performance in real time, optimise creative before it has even finished running, and increasingly use AI to help make the work itself. But has all that information actually made us more creative, or has it simply made us safer?

Culture vs. Code explores the growing tension between data and creativity in PR, social and content. It looks at how optimisation, algorithms, benchmarks and AI can create a gravitational pull towards sameness, where proven formats are repeated and “best practice” slowly becomes average practice. This isn’t an argument against data. It’s an argument for using it differently: data should help us understand people, identify tensions and show us where to look, but creativity, instinct and human imagination still need to decide what we see. Because the ideas that become part of culture are rarely the ones an algorithm could have predicted.

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