Agility is a readiness problem, not a speed one
Everyone is talking about the World Cup, but marketers know Christmas is not far behind, and both rely on the same product being ready to work in a different context. For years, agility has been framed as a speed problem: how quickly can the team respond when a brief lands? Carly’s point is that the brands that look genuinely agile are rarely the ones moving fastest in the moment. They are the ones that have already done the work, rather than reshooting or making do with whatever happens to exist each time.
The scramble is usually with yesterday’s assets
Product imagery has always been reused, but it was rarely created with future use in mind, so a new brief meant working around what already existed. Now the same product has to work far harder, across more moments, channels and regions, with less patience for starting again. Production gets stuck when working out which image is correct, whether the packaging is current, what needs changing, and who approves it, often having to start from scratch because a new supplier cannot open last year’s file.
Carly sees this across categories, from personal care packaging that changes with sponsorships to beauty trends that shift overnight to new-market launches where only the language or regulatory details shift. For drinks brands, it goes further still, with signature pours, condensation and liquid behaviour becoming reusable brand IP in their own right.
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I think less about speed and more about readiness.Carly Hackett
Managing Partner, Collective
Why digital twins change the game
The value is not only efficiency, but also trust. When content starts with the same approved foundation, the product stays accurate, and the brand remains consistent as the world around it changes. This is also where AI adds value: not as a replacement for brand assets, but as a way to extend the ones a brand has already invested in. It still needs an accurate starting point, because if that is wrong, AI simply amplifies the inaccuracy. A digital twin, at its best, is a pixel-perfect digital version of a product a brand can trust and reuse, so the campaign can change without rebuilding the product content every time. The brands that move fastest will not be the ones sprinting; they will be the ones that did the groundwork long before the brief arrived.
Read the full article
Read Carly Hackett’s full piece on Creativebrief.
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