Advertising

We never planned to launch a tech startup. But when my partner Pip and I were laid off within three weeks of each other, we needed to back ourselves. It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned more in the last three years than in the first decade of my career.

Up until that point, my career had been pretty well mapped out. I started in Sydney media agencies learning the industry and then landed a job at a creative agency in San Francisco, which almost inevitably led to jobs in the tech sector at Twitter and then Shopify. Pip’s journey was very similar, but substitute tech for creative agency land and a Web3 company (remember those?).

COVID hit and we decided to move back to Australia - Noosa in fact - and we were able to work our roles remotely from there for a while. Then, in mid-2022, the music stopped very suddenly for us both and we had some choices to make.

We began consulting remotely from Noosa and started using in earnest some of the new AI tools which were emerging on the market at the time. It all felt like a kind of magic, but too often we were finding that the end result was generic and disappointing and we knew there had to be more they could do for us.

So we taught ourselves to code so we could engineer them to be fit for the work we were doing and give us the output we were looking for. We presented the first MVP version at a conference in Sydney just to demonstrate the potential - what we didn’t expect was people’s immediate reaction in asking how they could buy it, invest in the company or partner with us there and then.

We left that room with 50 people willing to pay to beta test a product that didn't yet exist but the knowledge we were really onto something. We brought in Kieran, our technical co-founder, and gave him four weeks to build it properly. No pressure!

That's how Springboards started. Not with a vision statement or a pitch deck, but with redundancy, curiosity and a deadline we'd created for ourselves before we were ready for one.

I tell that story because everything I've learned about collaboration, ambition and what it actually takes to build something came from the particular kind feeling that we were really onto something and the energy that is generated when you’re feeling inspired.

Taking off the mask

Corporate America is fairly performative. It can be fast paced and invigorating, but there’s always a lot of internal politics to navigate and egos to stroke. I learned quite quickly I needed a work version of myself to help navigate that environment.  

But when your co-founder is also your life partner, there's no work version of you to present. No polished front, no selective disclosure. Pip has seen every version of my thinking including the terrible ideas, the half-formed ones and the ones I was confident about at 11pm that I quietly abandoned by morning.

That's confronting at first because there’s nothing to hide behind - you’re totally exposed. It's the things that make you more creative. You can diverge and converge in a really natural and safe way that feels intuitive to the vision.

We can challenge each other without ego in the way. We can say "that's not working" without it requiring a meeting. And when the great ideas do spring forth it also means there is no friction or ego to manage, we trust each other wholeheartedly to just run hard at it.

We can also, genuinely, call it when one of us is being the problem rather than solving it.

External perspective

That last one is harder than it sounds, both professionally and personally. Knowing when to step back, when your idea isn't the right one, when you're blocking rather than building and being able to do that without taking it personally is probably the most important skill we've developed.

What makes it work is having a third co-founder who has nothing to do with our relationship. Kieran is the person we can go to when Pip and I have genuinely opposing views. He's measured, external to our dynamic, and willing to pressure-test the thinking without the noise of two people who also happen to share a mortgage and daycare pickups.

Every partnership needs a version of that: someone who sits outside the gravity of the relationship and can give trusted guidance or bring the temperature down.

Balance is about being realistic

The other thing I've stopped pretending about is boundaries.

Our worlds are completely intertwined - an early-stage startup, two young kids, constant decision-making - some weeks "switching off" is a fiction. What we've found works better than strict separation is integration: being genuinely aligned on what matters, having honest conversations about what needs doing and who's best placed to do it and recognising when the conversation needs to stop because it's not useful anymore.

Our potential is far greater than we typically give ourselves credit for and you can’t have everything at once. Both of those things are true at the same time and sitting with that tension honestly is part of what building something real requires.

We invested everything into this. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, there was no big  upfront conversation about what happens if this fails or if we’re willing to back each other - that was something we both knew coming into this, and still do.

It’s important to have that psychological safety to know this one, very important, part of your lives won’t bring down the other more important part - that creates the freedom to make bold decisions day to day.

Taking your place at the table and building better

Building in AI has meant spending time in a lot of rooms where I'm the only woman at the table. What's shifted for me isn't volume or presence in any performed sense, it's conviction. When you believe in what you're building and you know it matters, you stop needing permission to be in the conversation.

We've also been deliberate about the company we're creating: around 70% of our leadership team are women and most senior roles are held by women. In a space where AI tools are being built to influence how people think and create, who's in the room when those decisions get made is not a secondary consideration - it's the work.

International Women's Day tends to celebrate the moment of stepping forward. What gets less attention is the architecture underneath - the trust, the honesty, the people who will still be there if it goes sideways.

That trust removes more friction than any strategy document I've ever written - although to be clear, we do now have a very robust plan and roadmap as well as a fantastic team driving things forward with us.

The village matters, the honest conversations matter and the willingness to be genuinely okay with all versions of the outcome is what makes the bravery possible in the first place.

What I have very much realised is startups are like children - you can read all the books and guides on what to do and what to expect, but the only way to actually make them thrive is to be guided by what’s in front of you, trust your gut instinct and your own expertise in what you’re building.

Ultimately, you’ve got to run your own race the best way you see fit and lean into the support around you.

How do you define creativity?

It sounds overly simple, but expression at its purest. The way only you see the world and the weird way in which you decide to express that. That can be in music or art or math or a silly little pitch deck or in the song you make up to sing to your dog.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither - that gives it way too much power. Practically speaking, at a systems level, AI is going to raise the floor, but it's also going to lower the ceiling. I saw Chris Anderson from Wired do a talk in the early days of Maker culture mania. He likened the era to early internetting and Geocities. There's going to be a lot of shit until it gets really good. And then it's going to get intrusively spectacular. And then it's going to be frictionlessly and technically excellent that we don't notice it. When AI is no longer THE thing, I look forward to what things we can actually do with AI.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with?

Anything Hunter S. Thompson. That level of chaos and "wrongness" is impossible to be predictable.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

I don't know the weirdest place I've ever gotten an idea, but I'm keeping my weirdest billion-dollar idea a secret for now!

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Mine's incredibly practical right now. I think it's valuable for pressure testing brand frameworks, especially for quite specialty audiences in complex fields. It's never the answer, but it's enough of a starting point, I can fumble my way through it.

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Super Bowl. The greatest day in the calendar for Advertising. It's an embarrassment of riches, promotional excess and big bets. It’s glorious.

My second favourite thing after the great Football Advertising Party is reading and writing all about it. The hot takes. The bold claims. The annual flurry of loosely qualified assertions about how the landscape has forever changed. We in advertising never waste a good opportunity to declare a turning point. Naturally, we gorged ourselves. And although I might just be getting a bit older, both Caro and I couldn’t help but notice this one felt a little less sparkly.

Back on home soil, Caro was watching with equal parts ad-nerd enthusiasm and Patriots-induced heartbreak. Her read was immediate: the game felt a bit flat. And so did some of the ads. The sparkle was missing.

Not all of it, of course. There were proper bright spots.

Liquid IV leaning into a hydration truth most of us have quietly validated with a sideways glance. I suspect very few AI tools would confidently surface that particular insight if prompted. Kellogg’s William Shat Raisin Bran fibre reveal. Annoying, until it clicked. Then genuinely smart. Novartis weaving tight ends into preventative screening with surprising elegance.

Bathroom humour. Fibre jokes. Locker room puns. Juvenile? Slightly. Human? Completely. And maybe that is the point. Because the human bits cut through.

But let's talk about the very well-paid elephant in the room. Celebrities.

This reached a fever pitch last year and although their inclusion is down from 68% of all ads to 62%, it’s clear brands are still hedging risk and distinctive efforts with these folk. There’s nuance here. We can probably expect the number to keep falling. Others have addressed the issue more comprehensively. But the rule I was taught (and still try to stick to) is simple: fame is a byproduct, not a strategy.

Caro put it more bluntly: “if the idea only works because the celebrity is famous, it’s not an idea. It’s insurance.”

Insurance isn’t inherently bad. Insurance can feel safe. But safe rarely makes history.

And speaking of safe… Let’s talk about the other buzzword of the night, besides “field goal.” AI.

Interestingly, there may not have been a huge amount of AI used in the ads themselves (beyond Svedka, who at least admitted it). But there were certainly a lot of ads for AI. If Caro’s tracking is correct, we saw:

Anthropic: their first ever Super Bowl spot, clearly differentiating itself in the LLM race.
OpenAI: a 60 national Codex spot, plus regional ads showcasing small businesses leveraging ChatGPT.
Google Gemini.
Microsoft Copilot.
Amazon (Ring and Alexa. Framed as helpful, but among Caro’s watch party crowd, more than a few felt “creepy”).
Genspark, which sparked a different kind of room reaction: “Is this taking my job?”
Salesforce promoting Slack AI.
ai.com, which left many wondering what, exactly, it does.

From our vantage point at a scrappy AI company from Down Under, it was fascinating to watch the category openly confront itself on the biggest stage in culture. It is a competition, after all. And although many in our space are still learning how to “Super Bowl” (present company included), the open confrontation across tech and beyond was refreshing.

At the risk of alienating the EBI crowd, acknowledging your competition doesn’t simply donate attention to the category leader. Positioning still matters.

While I admired the spirit of Anthropic’s work, it reminded us of something Reed Hastings once said about Netflix: “No advertising coming to Netflix. Period.” Less than two years later, that position shifted. As the major players in AI fight to become the homepage of the internet, there are probably lessons to be learned from the streaming wars.

So yes. A few observations. A few trends. A few stats. But so what? Risk is so what.

Risk underpins every great Super Bowl ad in history. Every great campaign. The work we still talk about didn’t come from playing it safe. It came from someone taking a calculated leap. This year, outside of a few friendly swipes, felt more than a bit cautious. One of the more frustrating paradigms in Advertising is the idea of maths versus magic (as though we have to choose between data and creativity). Realistically, you need both. It’s a false dichotomy.

Magic i.e. creativity is, fortunately, much more difficult to train a language model on. It’s an innately human pursuit that the machines we’re currently enamoured by aren’t very good at on their own. They recognise patterns and desperately avoid risk. There is an answer to this, or at the very least, a wealth of inspiration.

If you want to see something risky, have a look at our Super Bowl spot. Apologies, experiment (for many reasons, most of which are legal). And if you have an appetite for risky work, please reach out - so do we.

We’ve built something that inspires you to find the risks worth taking.

The kind we both kept wishing we’d seen more of this year.

How do you define creativity?

The act of noticing what others have learned not to see. It’s pattern recognition mixed with emotional intelligence and just enough mischief to rearrange the world. It’s not the spark, so much as it's the reframing. The ability to pick something up - an object, a memory, a myth, a moment in culture - turn it in your hand and say: What if this means something else?

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

AI is a mirror - and we don’t always like what we see. If you treat AI as a shortcut to “content,” you’ll get the flavourless soup you deserve. Rooms full of brand decks that sound like they were all written by the same middle manager in Slough. The cultural beige-ification of everything. But if you treat AI as a thinking partner - a provocation engine - you get something very different: velocity. Expansion. A chance to stretch beyond the first, obvious idea and get to the uncomfortable, interesting ones faster. AI doesn’t threaten originality. AI threatens laziness. And perhaps that’s overdue.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with?

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. A model could replicate the sentences. It could summarise the thesis. It could imitate the rhythm, even. But it could never arrive at the idea. Because that essay wasn’t produced through analysis, it was produced through perception. Through noticing. Le Guin takes the oldest story humans tell - the hero, the weapon, the conquest - and quietly dismantles it with a single reframing move: The first human tool was not a spear. It was a carrier bag. A container. A holder. A vessel for sustaining life rather than taking it. From that one shift, the entire architecture of storytelling tilts. Narrative becomes collective, not competitive. Power becomes relational, not dominant. Survival becomes shared, not won. No machine does that. No dataset teaches you to subvert the underlying myth of civilisation itself.

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Ursula K. Le Guin - The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

Cleaning out cupboards is a favourite pastime. When the brain is bored and the hands are busy, the doors between the conscious and the sub-basement swing open. The good ideas live in the plumbing. They surface when the performative, clever, “I am ideating now” brain shuts up.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

I use AI like a conceptual centrifuge. I throw in: a paragraph, a suspicion, the outline of a thought.I ask it to reshape it - longer, shorter, slower, mythic, corporate, angrier, whispering, bored. Not to pick one, but to see the shape of what it could be. Draft zero, rather than draft one. It keeps me from falling in love too early with my own cleverness.

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Who are you?

Matt Herrmann

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How do you define creativity?

Creativity is the alchemic act of seeing what has always been there and articulating it in a way that feels both new and inevitable.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither and both? It's a phenomenal thought partner and conceptual tennis wall - a very helpful and tireless intern with perfect memory and no gut. It will become a foe if we forget about the importance of emotional experience when trying to connect a human with a brand.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with?

One of my favourite lines of copy ever written is for Malort, a famously foul tasting booze popular in Chicago. The line is "Malort: Tonight's the night you fight your Dad." It's the kind of absurd yet truthful and insanely specific idea that requires instinct, cultural understanding that a machine built to be very good at predicting the next word would never come up with.

It's my favourite T-shirt - here's a link to where you can't buy it anymore because it's that good.

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Postmark - Malort, Tonight's the night you fight your Dad t-shirt.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

I don't know if this is weird, but I used Emile Durkheim's theory of the separation of the sacred from the profane to suggest that trash bags can become elevated to a type of religion. Still one of my favourite briefs.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

I love to have an agent debate itself. It's great for following a line of logic down a rabbit hole or up into the stratosphere. I love that it has no shame or self-consciousness about taking the most ridiculous ideas far beyond their logical conclusion.

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Unleashing Human Creativity in an AI-Driven World

AI is moving at warp speed. ChatGPT hit 100 million users faster than TikTok, and now every second LinkedIn post is someone breathlessly declaring “the future of work.” But speed doesn’t equal creativity. In fact, if we’re not careful, AI could speed us straight into a world of beige.

Demystifying the magic trick

When we kicked off our Springboards + Ladies Who Strategize (LWS) AI Summer webinar series, our co-founder Amy Tucker shared her take with the group: most AI outputs aren’t bad, they’re just boring. LLMs like ChatGPT are built to give the “most likely” answer. LLMs don’t “understand” your words; they break everything down into tokens and then spit back the most likely sequence. In other words, they’re probability machines, not possibility machines.

That’s why they’re fast and impressive, but also trained to follow a pattern. Amy demoed it live: ask an LLM any number 1 to 10 and you’ll get the same “random” outputs. Another example: Two different marathon runners received identical training plans from an LLM. Even creative asks like ideas for “band names” collapse into predictable, low-entropy answers.

Machines don’t dream. They echo.

Breaking the gray with Springboards

Springboards was built to be the antithesis of LLMs. We don’t hand you the most probable answer. We hand you sparks, weird prompts, thought-starters, and curveballs, designed to push your brain somewhere it wouldn’t go alone.

Our platform has modes literally called LSD and Asylum for a reason. They’re not about being safe or efficient; they’re about messing with the machine until something interesting, unexpected, and fun falls out.

Because we believe the real power of AI isn’t about removing humans from the process. It’s about supercharging them.

What AI is good for (and not)

Amy also talked about where AI does shine:

• Getting you up to speed fast on new topics
• Spotting patterns in mountains of data
• Helping you flip perspectives or reframe a problem
• Generating starter ideas you can riff off

But let’s not kid ourselves. AI isn’t good at originality. It isn’t good at taste. And it definitely isn’t good at giving you the kind of hard feedback that makes an idea go from okay to killer.

That’s still the human superpower.

Humans + AI > boring

So where does that leave us? Pretty optimistic, actually. New tools always bring new possibilities. Just like the camera didn’t kill painting, AI won’t kill creativity. It just changes the canvas.

The challenge — and the fun — is learning how to break these tools in ways that make space for more imagination, not less. That’s exactly what Springboards is here for: keeping creativity human, playful, and just the right amount of weird.

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It’s official: Springboards is heading to SXSW Sydney. We’re pitching, we’re presenting, and we’re bringing our take on AI + creativity. 

Out of hundreds of startups across APAC, we’ve been chosen as one of just 23 finalists for the SXSW Sydney Pitch 2025, competing in the Enterprise, Big Data & AI category.

We’re proud to be repping creative humans in a sea of tech startups.

Check out the rest of the finalists here.

And we’ll be on stage to present findings from the Creativity Benchmark

Our co-founders, Pip Bingemann (CEO) and Kieran Browne (CTO) will also take the stage to present: AI on Acid: Breaking the Machines to Break the Mold.

This session will unveil results from Creativity Benchmark, the world’s first industry research testing AI’s creative potential, not just its logic.

Launched with partners the APG, IAA, 4A’s, One Club, D&AD, ACA and IPA, the benchmark looks at: Which models are the best at inspiring creativity? And what does that mean for the work we make?

We’ll share the findings and what this means for the industry. 

Read more about the other sessions in the Tech and Innovation track at SXSW Sydney here.

See you at SXSW Sydney.

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Name

Eleanor Rogers, former Sales Director at Snap

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How do you define creativity?

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.” —Albert Einstein

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

It depends who is in the driving seat and who is the back seat. If it helps you detect early disease and shares a personalised treatment plan to help heal you then it’s a saviour. If you just lost your job as AI has taken over then it’s the devil.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

John Lewis Christmas Advert 2011 - The Long Wait

One of my all time English favourites that soothes the soul for all parents who worry about their kids and the damage of consumerism. Honestly though there isn’t a creative in history that AI couldn’t have a helping hand in to make the process shorter & smoother.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

Pain. Pain is the place where you meet a new version of yourself and is a catalyst for thinking and seeing the world in a different way.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Uploading medical reports on a damaged knee to find out absolutely everything I can do to get back on the black runs one day.

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Who are you?

Gabrielle Tenaglia, Head of Marketing, Lettuce

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How do you define creativity?

When solving problems, its common for people and businesses to ask the same questions and use similar processes...which leads them to similar answers. In marketing its a key reason why so much of the communications in each category look and sound the same. Creativity is about asking different questions and using a different process to open up new options--not just ones that are different from what your competitors are saying, but ones that your competitors could not say. In marketing, creativity is taking your strategy, your messaging and your communications assets to a place where your competitors can't follow you.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

It can be either. Like any other technology tool, It depends 100% how you use it.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

This was produced with AI, but developed and written by humans. AI is so much about pattern recognition and doing things that are similar to what you've done before. This is so different than what exists out there in the tax and accounting space that no AI could have come up with it.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

All my great ideas happen when I'm not working. Lately some of my ideas have come from thinking about my grandmother. When she died and we cleaned out her house, we found all of these bundles of money hidden away in different places tied up with ribbons. I'm working on a financial services product. We think about money as a very rational thing but there is SO much emotion wrapped up in it. Like the little bundles my grandmother left us.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

I'm not sure that I have a brilliant answer here--I use it as a partner in lots of thinking and work. It helps you get the obvious ideas out of the way quickly. I am able to be SO fast in doing background research, developing target insights, and understanding the competitive landscape that I can spend my HUMAN time working on the creative pieces that push the thinking to new and more interesting places.

My mother has been sick with a complex medical condition and I've been using it a ton to understand what to expect and figure out questions to ask the doctors. But I haven't been telling the doctors that I'm doing that because I think they'll be annoyed. I had someone tell me recently that they had AI write recommendations or questions in a format that looks like a referral letter from another doctor. They then hand that to their new doctor and it gets more attention. I thought that was super interesting...how AI is giving such good information but we need to "fake" the source so people will accept it.

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Name

Faris Yakob, Co-founder Genius Steals

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How do you define creativity?

ideas are new combinations, creativity is a recombinant act of combining inputs into novel solutions

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

tool

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

Hamlet

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

Hamlet

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Research mostly

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Name

Reuben Halper, Head of YouTube, Google New Zealand

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How do you define creativity?

I'm a bit of a cynic in this space and think the idea of creativity as something truly original is actually overrated, given "humans abhor the new" . With that in mind my definition of creativity tends to be around combinatorial creativity where you combine existing ideas, insights, tech, etc. to develop something novel yet familiar. Or to quote Kirby Ferguson "Everything Is A Remix"

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither, it's a tool. In the same hands a hammer can be both a tool and a weapon. I feel the same way about AI.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

I bet half the respondents will say Cadbury Gorilla and frankly I want to punch them in the face. I honestly don't think there's any idea that an AI could never have come up with as the space is evolving so rapidly and so much of the output comes down to the input and the prompting. I also want to include a non-advertising piece of creativity that an AI expressed in the form of the move that AlphaGo made in the second game vs Lee Sedol.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

A bar in deep Alabama where a hardcore NASCAR fan asked why we couldn't visualise the effects of drafting. That became a massive project involving wind tunnels and patents.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

NotebookLM is the shit for so many things both personal and professional. Probably my favourite general use case for GenAI is using it as a sparring partner and adversary to challenge my thinking.

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Name

James Hurman, Founding Partner, Previously Unavailable

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How do you define creativity?

Original, engaging ideas, beautifully crafted.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

A friend in the right hands (good strategy people using it as a springboard, good creative people with great taste using it as a production tool) and a foe in the wrong hands (poor strategy or creative people, or anyone in marketing, using it to conceive and produce average work).

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

Basically any big Lion-winner. But I'm going to pick on Heinz' 'Ketchup Fraud' as I don't think an LLM would ever be in a position to notice a restaurateur pouring cheap ketchup into a Heinz bottle.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

Around the back of a service station in Pakuranga. It was under a random big sheet of cardboard that someone had spilled quite a lot of JD's and coke on. It was quite cold and the idea looked sad and quite sketchy but I could tell it was a great one. I was nervous about just taking it because there was a security camera there, but I had a hoodie on so I pulled up my hood and put my sunglasses on and turned away from the camera and grabbed it. Then a woman came busting out the back door of the service station and saw me and shouted something about me smelling like JDs, not realising that it was the cardboard and not me. I was going through a period of using quite a lot of Lynx Africa so I was pretty confident I didn't smell of JDs and instead I would most likely have been giving off an aromatic, woody, powdery oriental accord opening with notes of lime, mandarin, lavender, apple and galbanum which lead to a heart of geranium, rose, Jasmin and lily on a base of cedarwood, sandalwood, amber, musks, patchouli, Tonka, vanilla and moss. Anyway, the woman was pretty grunty and came at me hard. I was shitting myself so I dropped the idea and ran really fast down the road and then hid behind one of those old telephone exchange boxes for a while until it was safe to come out. Then I walked home and watched an old episode of M*A*S*H to calm down.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Talking to ChatGPT in audio mode to understand things that I'm thinking about or working on. It's great for constant fact checking or deepening my understanding really quickly without needing to switch tabs or context switch.

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Name

Colts (Chris Colter), Managing Director, Media Strategy, Accenture Song A/NZ Australia

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How do you define creativity?

Originality

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Copilot

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

I honestly don’t think there is an idea AI could never arrive at without the right prompts from a human working in tandem.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

In a nightmare.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Deep research to help me answer a Springboards “fast five” survey without sounding like a novice.

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Who are you?

Chuck McBride, CCO & Founder, Cutwater Agency

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How do you define creativity?

It’s the act, the will, and the want to make something absolutely wonderful for everybody to enjoy. It’s about showing that you really care about the process, the work, and the people you’re giving it to. And wanting to make a difference in people’s lives.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

AI is a friend, at the beginning.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

Any John Coltrane song.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

In an argument.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Right now it is better to search with AI and not google. Simple way to up your game.

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Our friends over at Jellyfish built a brand from the ground up in only 24 hours. This was the challenge they took on during SXSW London in June as part of British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) House. With a combination of AI tools, they built a brief, worked on the strategy, came up with concepts and created a full campaign for the new brand in less than a day. 

Jellyfish strategists used Springboards and Pencil to come up with the name, proposition and core concept for the fictional brand. Then the creative team picked up the baton, using Pencil and Veo3 to spin up the visuals, OOH campaigns, and a super fun 30 second ad. 

What resulted was Moodlings, “a premium, mood boosting gummy brand”, and you’ve gotta admit - it’s adorable. We got the warm fuzzies when we first saw the brand. The team developed four different brand avatars, each with its own unique taste and fun packaging. 

The human team included: Tom Roach, Emily Collins, Lucas Stanley, Gemma Cotterell, Sam Yates, Margaux Dalgleish and Sahar Amer, who worked together to build everything from brand strategy to execution using a combination of AI-powered creative tools. 

Not only were the Moodlings cute, the ad also performed well when tested in potential real world scenarios. Jellyfish ran it through their own Share of Model™ platform, System1, and DAIVID, resulting in high scores across the board.

Moodlings is a masterclass in AI-powered creativity. It’s the perfect example of how AI allowed a team of strategists and creatives to get weird and push them to places they wouldn’t have been able to get alone in such a short period of time.

Let’s do more of this together.

Check out Tom Roach's post on Jellyfish here and Pencil's case study on the Moodlings that was featured in Google Cloud's latest blog.

Springboards co-founders Pip and Amy had a chance to sit down with Peregian Digital Hub Director, Chris Boden, to talk about how they went from freshly laid-off tech workers with a toddler to founders of an AI startup, changing the game for advertising agencies. Peregian Digital Hub is a self-proclaimed “gathering place for AI nerds” in Noosa, Australia, where the co-founders reside, and was a huge influence on kickstarting Springboards.

The conversation ranged from playing and tinkering with AI tools during covid times to building an MVP and learning what VC was, to today with over 100 agencies onboarded and using Springboards to supercharge their creative process. Read on for highlights from the conversation between Chris, Pip, and Amy.

What Business Need Does Springboards Solve?

If you haven’t heard, the ad industry’s got a problem. Margins are shrinking, and a big part of it is what we lovingly call the "pitching problem." Agencies are hustling harder than ever, sinking time and money into speculative work—creating entire campaigns for free just to win a client. It’s exhausting, expensive, and honestly, kinda soul-crushing.

That was the impetus for Springboards, the platform that puts creativity back in the driver’s seat without losing the human spark. Built by ad-world veterans, Springboards is an idea accelerator designed to speed up the creative process without watering down the magic. Think of it as your new brainstorming buddy, helping with everything from strategy to killer concepts.

Here’s what makes us tick:

1. We Want to Fit Into Agency Workflows: Clients don’t just hire you for the work; they want ideas, innovation, and yep, even "someone to blame” if something goes wrong (no judgment!) Springboards isn’t supposed to replace your process—it powers it, giving you more firepower to deliver fresh, unexpected ideas.
2. Not Designed to Give You Answers but an Inspiration Overload: Springboards isn’t about spitting out the answer. It’s about throwing a hundred weird, wild, and wonderful ideas your way so you can pick the best and make them better. It’s like a workshop in your pocket, minus the bad coffee and awkward icebreakers.
3. Humans Always Come First: This isn’t some “robots-take-your-job” story. Pip and Amy built Springboards to keep people in the creative equation. The platform is there to amplify your genius, not replace it. We like to think of it as the Terminator story - we’re using humans partnered up with AI to fight the evil AI.
4. Say Goodbye to Meh Ideas: AI often has this nasty habit of playing it safe and turning out stuff that’s painfully average. We hate that. So we’re constantly tweaking Springboards to make sure it doesn’t fall into that trap. The goal? Help you hit the jackpot without settling for "fine."

Springboards isn’t just helping agencies work smarter—it’s flipping the script for teams and entire agencies:

• One user told us, “With Springboards, I feel like I can take on any agency out there.” That’s the energy we live for.
• Pitches are turning into wins: Agencies using Springboards have more wins under their belts. One client even joked, “The only problem is, I don’t have enough briefs to answer anymore.”

What’s Next?

We’re not stopping here. With plans to continue growing globally and a laser focus on fighting creative entropy (aka the soul-sucking sameness that kills good ideas), Springboards is on a mission to keep creativity alive and well.

Our promise? To keep pushing boundaries and helping the world’s creatives do what they do best: make weird, wild, wonderful things happen. Check out the full interview here for more insights.

Ready to rethink how you work? Join the Springboards revolution, and let’s keep creativity where it belongs—in human hands. Request a demo today at https://springboards.ai/#demo. 

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When creative industry visionary Zoe Scaman drops a post about a game-changing new tool, the creative world perks up. Known for her unfiltered insights and knack for spotting what’s next, Zoe’s Tweet and LinkedIn post about our product—Springboards—was nothing short of electric. 

Here’s how she thrust Springboards into the spotlight:

Credit: https://x.com/zoescaman/status/1725089109436199152

The Cat Was Out of the Bag

Replies started stacking up almost immediately. Agency folks and strategists jumped into the conversation, buzzing with questions and speculation and it was clear that Springboards could no longer operate in the shadows of beta testing agencies. 

After taking a second to shake himself and realize he wasn’t dreaming, our co-founder Pip Bingemann chimed in to share his excitement.

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So What is Springboards, Anyway?

Springboards is a suite of AI tools that loosely mirrors a traditional creative process. Spoiler alert: we won’t give you the answer, but we’ll give you sparks to help you get there. Little thought starters to get your head thinking and give you the ability to EXPLORE more ideas than you ever could before. It’s the act of exploring and playing that leads to great creativity and we are built to do just that. We want to accelerate human creativity and help you have some fun along the way.

What Makes Us Different

Springboards isn’t built like your typical LLM that just wants to pump out answers; we’re built for creative sparks. We’ve reprogrammed them to keep giving you fresh answers, instead of the same cookie-cutter answers that you see after you keep prompting with your standard LLM. We’re not here to give you the answer and we want you to jump into the sandbox with us and get messy and come up with ideas together. We want this process to be fun for you and we’re hoping to help spark those ideas to get you places you wouldn’t alone.

How Did We Get Here 

We started experimenting with AI because we thought the technology was good, but the product (ChatGPT and others) were shit. It was too generic and took too much hand holding to get anything decent. We built something for ourselves to bring the thrill back to the creative process. We were tired of the same-old, same-old, using tools that promised creativity but delivered dull, predictable content. So, we set out to build something different. Something that makes creative work feel as inspired as it should. Springboards isn’t your average AI tool. It’s a creative tool to help you spark creativity, NOT give you the answers. It’s designed specifically to give agency creatives superpowers, built by agency people who truly understand the needs of this industry. 

The early response from our beta was beyond what we’d hoped. When creatives like Zoe started sharing their excitement, we knew we’d struck a chord. People are seeing that Springboards isn’t just another tool—it’s a partner, designed to challenge you, expand your ideas, and bring real, unexpected fun back into the mix.

A Glimpse at What’s Next

Zoe’s post was only the beginning. In minutes, it sparked a wave of curiosity, and soon our inbox was overflowing with demo requests. So yeah, we had to create a waitlist, thrilled that so many people want to be part of this journey with us. But we’re just getting warmed up.

The waitlist wasn’t just a buzz-builder. With Springboards, we’re bringing a fresh approach to how agency creatives work, so we want to make sure each demo is personal, interactive, and tailored to show what Springboards can really do. Yes, it means we are a bit slower to get through everyone, BUT it also means people understand not just WHAT Springboards can do, but WHY it was created and HOW to get the most out of it.

We’re planning an official launch to share with everyone what we’ve been working on and we’re gearing up to make an even bigger impact. We’re bringing more features, more fun, and even more ways for you to push creative boundaries. 

If this has you curious and you want to break out of the boring, request a demo today and get ready for what’s next.

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