The Thinker
On AI, Jingles, and Why Craft Still Matters
When Sumaira wrote about AI and advertising in Aurora Magazine in 2023, she wasn't running away from the technology or breathlessly embracing it. She was doing what good creative directors do: sizing it up.
Her argument - made before most of her peers were having the conversation in public - was that AI was now collaborating with human creatives, not merely supporting data teams. Coca-Cola, Nike, Cadbury, Heinz were already running AI-assisted campaigns. The question wasn't whether to use it. It was whether the human doing the directing still had something worth directing.
For Sumaira, that human something is craft. In a 2024 piece titled "The Enduring Magic of the Jingle," she mourned the loss of a specific Pakistani advertising tradition: the jingle that became cultural wallpaper, that people hummed three decades after the brand stopped paying for airtime. She worried, publicly, that modern Pakistani ads had traded that durability for speed. Short-form video over singable hooks. Reach over resonance.
The columns read as a creative director working through the central tension of her career in real time. How do you make work that is immediate enough to compete and durable enough to matter? She doesn't always answer the question. Sometimes she just makes you feel the weight of it.
That reflective habit is perhaps why she was chosen for Ogilvy's APAC 30 for 30 Leadership Program - thirty creative and strategic leaders from across Asia-Pacific, convening in Bangkok to think about where the industry is going next. One of thirty from an entire continent. She doesn't make a big deal of it. That's its own kind of confidence.