Essay · Founding Perspective

Why Creative Commerce

When people hear “Creative Commerce,” I think most assume one of two things. Either it’s a creative agency that happens to work with commerce brands, or it’s just two words that sounded good together.

It’s neither, honestly — and the gap between what the name sounds like and what I actually mean by it is kind of the whole point of this piece.

Commerce is the subject. “Creative” is not a department.

When I say “creative,” I don’t mean the ad, the campaign, the asset — the thing one team makes and another team places. I mean it more the way you’d describe a person who’s good at connecting things other people miss. Someone who can hold a bunch of seemingly unrelated pieces in their head and notice the shape they make together. Someone who looks at a system and sees not just how it works, but how it could work differently.

That’s synthesis, pattern recognition, connecting things that don’t obviously belong together — designing a system instead of just optimizing one piece of it.

That’s what I mean by creative. And commerce — not marketing, not “the creative side of the business,” commerce itself — is where I think that kind of thinking is suddenly, urgently needed.

Here’s the part I think is actually new.

For the last twenty years or so, commerce has mostly run on one kind of thinking: analytical thinking. You break the business into parts, measure each part, and improve each part — conversion rate, engagement rate, data accuracy, campaign performance — usually with a different team owning each metric, and each team genuinely good at the thing they’re measured on.

And honestly, that wasn’t a bad way to do it. For a long time it was exactly the right way to run a large organization, because the work really was divisible. The website was one thing. The store was another. The email campaign was a third. You could improve each one on its own terms, and the improvements mostly stacked up.

AI is changing this in two ways, I think — and only one of them is getting much attention.

The first, the one everyone’s talking about, is that AI is starting to do a lot of that analytical work itself. Optimization, personalization, attribution, even a good chunk of content production — the stuff commerce teams spent twenty years building processes around is, more and more, just something software does now.

The second — and this is the one I find more interesting — is what’s left over once that happens.

What’s left is the work AI doesn’t really do, at least not yet: deciding what the system should even be in the first place. Noticing that what your content team is producing, what your commerce platform is showing, and what your data is saying about the customer don’t actually agree with each other — and that nobody’s job is to notice that, because everybody’s job is to optimize their own piece.

That’s not really an analytical problem. You can’t A/B test your way into noticing it. It’s a synthetic one — a creative one, in the sense I mean.

This is also why the org chart hasn’t changed.

I don’t think it’s because organizations are slow, or stubborn, or bad at change. I think it’s that the org chart was built — quite sensibly, at the time — around the analytical mode: work that could be divided up, measured, and owned by someone. There was never a box on the chart for “notices when the parts stop adding up to a whole,” because for a long time, that wasn’t really anyone’s job. The parts mostly did add up.

They don’t anymore. Or, more accurately, the customer doesn’t experience them as parts anymore. A single AI-driven interaction touches commerce, content, data, and whatever your AI strategy is — all at once — whether your org chart is ready for that or not.

So, that’s the name: Creative Commerce.

Not “commerce, plus some creative services.” Commerce, approached with the kind of thinking that’s historically been pretty scarce inside commerce organizations — synthetic, connective, big-picture thinking — because that thinking isn’t optional anymore. It’s becoming the actual job.

If I’m honest, that’s the bet I’m making with this whole site: that over the next several years, the valuable thing won’t be better optimization — AI’s going to mostly take care of that — it’ll be better synthesis. People, and organizations, who can look across commerce, content, data, and AI and see one system instead of four.

This isn’t a framework I’m trying to sell anyone. It’s just the thing I keep finding myself doing — moving between rooms that don’t usually talk to each other, and noticing what each one is missing from the others. I’ll keep writing about what that looks like as I go.