Matt Ogilvie started Modulist Creative around a bet that human-led ideas and creative will matter more, not less, in the age of AI. His story, and a Nike spot celebrating the New York Knicks’ champion

When the New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in fifty-three years this June, Nike turned around a commercial within hours. The spot, directed by lifelong Knicks fan Josh Safdie, follows a young fan in a Jalen Brunson jersey sprinting through the streets of Manhattan in the middle of the night, weaving through the city until he reaches a crowd of thousands of people celebrating together. There is no dialogue, no product shot, barely any branding at all. The film closes on two lines against a black screen: Never slept. Always dreamed.

Matt Ogilvie watched it and felt something most advertising never produces.

"Chills," he says.

He does not offer the word as a figure of speech. He means it literally, and he means it as evidence. A chill is the body's involuntary response to something it did not see coming, and for Ogilvie, that response is the entire point of creative work. The idea behind the Nike spot, building an entire emotional narrative around a single fan's run through the city rather than the team or the trophy, required someone to imagine a story that nobody had told quite that way before. "Sure, you could maybe replicate it visually," he says, "but coming up with it needed the human experience."

Ogilvie has spent most of his professional life thinking about what separates that kind of work from everything else competing for our attention. He just did not always have a clean way to describe it. Now, as the founder of his own creative agency, he has built a business around the distinction.

A Life in Creative

He grew up in central Wisconsin hunting, fishing, and riding dirt bikes, which makes the career he eventually built seem like a story about someone else. He studied media arts in college, ran a hip-hop blog on the side, and followed his wife to New York City after graduation, landing his first real job at a digital marketing agency that worked with business authors. For years he absorbed how successful people thought and built things, learning more about storytelling and persuasion than he would fully recognize until later.

He found his footing in paid social media, built six years of genuine expertise in it, and eventually landed what he calls his dream job: in-house media buying at Tidal, the music streaming platform. Jay-Z was technically his boss. Their paths never crossed. He did not care. He was inside the music industry, a world he had been obsessed with since adolescence, and he spent his nights photographing concerts across the city — performers in front of crowds of three and crowds of thirty thousand because that was exactly where he wanted to be.

The pandemic ended that chapter. He moved back to the Midwest, shifted into creative strategy, and spent the next several years working on brands ranging of all sizes and industries  At the beginning of 2026, he launched Modulist Creative, built around one founding conviction: creative work should sit at the center of everything a brand does, and it should be led by people, not generated by machines.

He describes himself as bullish on humans.

What AI Cannot Quite Reach

Ogilvie is still working through what he thinks about all of this, and he will tell you so. He is not someone who has closed the book on AI and creative work. He uses it, watches it, thinks about it daily. What he keeps returning to is a feeling he cannot quite shake when he holds the Nike Knicks spot against what fills his LinkedIn feed on any given morning.

"The beautiful thing about great creative is that it's new," he says. "The reason something is exciting and different is because no one's done it that way before."

In his experience, AI tends to work differently. It learns from what already exists, identifies the patterns, and produces competent variations of what has already resonated. That process has real value, and Ogilvie is not dismissing it. But it is a different thing than the spark behind the Safdie spot, the concept that required someone to imagine a story nobody had told quite that way before. Whether AI will eventually close that gap is a question he holds with genuine openness. For now, what he observes is a meaningful distance between the work that moves him and most of what the technology is actually producing.

What he sees on the ground troubles him in a specific way. He watches LinkedIn and estimates that roughly half the posts in his feed are visibly AI-generated, content that is competent and frictionless and largely indistinguishable from itself. "We're just flooding content that is kind of all the same, that doesn't inherently have any original value to it," he says. Brands have started treating creative as a line item to be minimized rather than a discipline to be developed. The cost per unit keeps falling. The output increasingly looks like everything else.

His instinct is that this dynamic is already producing a counter-pressure in the audience. Research from the Interactive Advertising Bureau published in December 2024, surveying Gen Z and Millennial consumers, found that younger audiences are notably less receptive to AI-generated advertising than the industry executives producing it tend to assume, and that Gen Z consumers in particular report more negative feelings toward brands leaning heavily on AI-generated creative. A separate 2025 survey found that 55 percent of consumers between sixteen and twenty-four preferred human-written content, describing it as more engaging and more authentic.

He does not claim to have this fully sorted. But he is watching carefully, and drawing his own conclusions about where the value is going to flow.

Artificially Intelligent

His own use of the technology looks nothing like what fills his LinkedIn feed. He uses AI regularly, primarily as a research and analytical partner, something to argue with, to stress-test his thinking, to push back on assumptions before he commits to a campaign direction. He points, unprompted, to AI's role in early cancer detection as an example of what the technology can do when it is aimed at the right problem. His concern is not with the tool itself. It is with what happens when people use it as a substitute for thinking rather than a sharpener of it.

He recalled a line from a comedian that stuck with him: AI makes people feel artificially intelligent. The joke lands because it names something real. The experience of generating polished, confident-sounding output can feel like the experience of having thought something through, even when very little actual thinking happened. The quality of what AI returns is shaped almost entirely by the quality of what is put into it. A person with a clear point of view and an original idea can use AI to sharpen and accelerate that thinking. A person without one tends to get back a fluent version of nothing in particular.

"The people who succeed with AI have critical thinking skills," he says, "in the way that you know what to ask for to help you get smarter, versus just opening it up and saying, make me a flyer." The distinction he is drawing is not really about the tool at all. It is about whether a person brings something of their own to the work before the technology ever enters the picture.

The Bet

Modulist Creative is Ogilvie's answer to all of this. He identified a gap in the market for creative work that moves quickly, stays genuinely human, and is led by people who can hold both the data and the craft at once. The creative strategist role, he argues, combining analytical rigor with real creative instinct and the organizational discipline to actually ship work on a deadline, has become one of the more in-demand positions for growing brands precisely because so few people bring all three of those qualities together.

His bet is straightforward: the market is moving toward him, not away from him. As AI-generated content continues to flood every channel, the brands willing to slow down, invest in genuinely original work, and let people lead the process will be the ones that stand out from the noise, while the ones chasing speed and cost savings will increasingly blend into it.

He did not wait to find out if the bet would pay off. He built a company around it.

"Everything that we do is going to be creative," he says, "and it's all going to be led by humans."

That is a business strategy. It is also, for Ogilvie, a statement about what makes anything worth making in the first place.

Matt Ogilvie is a creative strategist and founder of Modulist Creative, based in the Midwest. This conversation is part of the Humans & AI: Everyday Stories series by HumanCulture.