Hey friends,
Welcome back to Creator Etiquette®.
I recorded this episode at the YouTube Creator Collective at Cannes Lions, and instead of interviewing an executive or a founder, I sat down with someone I hired that week. Samhaoir is a creative director and social creative, and I brought her out to France specifically because I knew there was no way I was going to capture everything I needed from the week without someone whose entire job is to make the output look intentional.
Nobody Invests In The Script
Samhaoir pointed out that brands will put enormous budgets behind production crews, directors, and post-production, and then hand them a script that is not good. The spend goes to everything around the story instead of the story itself. And whether it is a movie theater screen or a phone screen, whoever is consuming that content, story is at its core. Stunning visuals on top of a bad script are still a bad script. Nobody cries at production value.
Her version of creative direction starts with asking what emotion you are trying to create? Not what features does the product have, but what do you want someone to feel? Everything else is built around that answer. “If you are selling a pen, forget everything the brand told you about the pen. Ask yourself how to make someone feel something. They will want the pen when they feel it.”
AI Is a Sounding Board, Not a Generator
Samhaoir’s use of AI is specific and different from how most creators approach it. She is not using it to generate ideas and post them. She is using it to interrogate her own ideas. She speaks into Claude, it asks her four or five questions back, and those questions force her to articulate the thing she was only half-thinking before. The AI does not give her the answer. It gives her better questions, which sharpen her into giving herself the answer.
Even when AI-generated ideas are bad, generic or overdone, they are useful. Because seeing a mediocre version of your concept inspires you to create something better out of defiance. The baseline gives you something to push against.
Her advice for any creator who has not touched generative AI yet is to download the tools and start playing around. Even if you decide not to use them in your work, knowing what they are capable of means you can articulate specifically why you are not using them, which is a far stronger creative position than just saying AI is not for me.
As an Adobe Acrobat Ambassador, I partner with Adobe to share tools I genuinely use in my business workflows.
How I Structure Creative Pitches Before I Present Them
The part of this conversation that resonated most for me was the idea of using a sounding board before walking into a brand conversation — because I have been doing a version of this with Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant and it has genuinely changed how I show up to pitch meetings.
Before any creative pitch, I drop my concept notes, the brand brief, and any reference material into an Adobe Acrobat PDF Space. Then I use Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant to stress-test the pitch — asking it to identify where the logic breaks down, what questions a brand stakeholder might push back on, and whether the emotional throughline I think is there actually reads clearly from the documents in front of it. It reads from my actual uploaded files, not from generic knowledge, which means the feedback is specific to the pitch I am about to give.
It is the same principle Summer described with Claude — except applied directly to the moment before a high-stakes creative conversation. You want to walk in having already heard the hard questions, so that when the brand says I am not sure about this, you already know exactly what you are going to say.
Try it before your next brand pitch: https://creatorlink.shop/4ltg0sM
The Best Advice Samhaoir Ever Got Was Not to Take the Advice
She has been told, more than once, to be less bold. To stop doing quite so much because she might upset people, but she did not take any of it and charged forward anyway. It got her fired from two jobs, and directly hired into both of her current roles, because the same qualities that made her difficult in the wrong environments made her exactly right in the right ones.
When it comes to mentorship, she says that listening to people does not mean you have to act on what they say. You take in the input. You translate it internally. You decide what actually applies to you and what is someone else's fear wearing the costume of advice. The best mentors she has had are the ones who supported what she already knew to be true rather than the ones who tried to redirect her away from it.
Pitch the Weird Idea Anyway
Samhaoir’s instinct as a creative is to go strange. Her aesthetic is absurdist, very unserious, very Gen Z. And her advice for pitching to brands is to lean into that rather than sand it down into something safer. Pitch the weird idea with conviction. Say it clearly and mean it. Because even if the execution does not land, there is often a kernel of something genuinely intelligent inside an off-the-wall concept, and a good brand partner will be able to see it.
One of my favorite quotes from this episode is that “good is the enemy of great.” We are currently drowning in mediocre content because the barrier to creating it has never been lower. The creators who stand out to the right brands are the ones who bring something nobody else would have thought to bring.
Samhaoir, thank you for the whole week and for the episode. Go follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram, and make sure to check out all of the creative things she is a part of!
Welcome to Creator Etiquette®. I am so glad you are here.
Xo, Gigi Robinson
Founder, Hosts of Influence® | Creator, Educator, Speaker, Author, Dog Mom 🐾
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