The AI-saturated media environment is producing an unexpected creative response: brands are now leaning into physical, tangible experiences that machine-generated content can't replicate. Ten years ago, a video of strangers forming a human chain to rescue a dog from a reservoir in Almaty went viral across Kazakhstan, and the moment lived on in cultural memory long after the news cycle moved past it. The creative team behind Forte Bank's latest campaign translated that memory into a permanent interactive bronze sculpture, the Humanity Chain, that people can touch, complete, and share on the street.
The campaign was conceived by Evgeny Kostylev, DASM CCO, and brought to life by the wider DASM Group team, with Yuliya Tushina, Chief Creative Excellence Officer, leading its execution. Formerly the Managing Director of GForce Grey, Tushina is also the first and only creative leader from Kazakhstan to earn a Gold Cannes Lion, and has served on the Cannes Creative Data jury evaluating campaigns across global markets. She believes authentic brand moments come from hyper-local human truths that already exist in the audience's shared experience, and the work is about surfacing them.
"You cannot engineer virality. When you try too hard to make something viral, you usually end up making an advertisement. People carry an idea themselves when they care about what it represents for them," says Tushina. Forte Bank was pivoting from a corporate institution to a mass retail brand, and Tushina's team had to introduce it to consumers without leading with financial products. The Humanity Chain answered that brief by anchoring the introduction in a story of mutual support that Almaty residents already knew, giving audiences a physical way to participate, and carrying a human truth that needed no cultural translation.
The sculpture translates the ten-year-old digital memory into a physical gesture, casting a bronze human chain with a hand extended toward the sidewalk. Each passerby who reaches out and grasps it completes the chain in the same way the original rescuers had. Tushina and her team also read the surrounding cultural moment correctly. Audiences worn down by daily crisis reporting were looking for interactions that added something to their day, and a positive public act of participation delivered exactly that. "The more local and emotional a truth is, the more universal it often becomes," notes Tushina. "Empathy doesn't require any translation. People don't have to understand every detail of your culture to understand the emotion of being human."
Tushina's philosophy of surfacing existing truths carries through to her read on how data and AI are changing creative work. From her seat on the Cannes Creative Data jury, she sees the strongest campaigns treating data as a source of imagination that reveals unexpected connections in human behavior, surfacing audience patterns that the creative team then interprets and turns into an idea. The interpretive step, including cultural translation, emotional connection, and the messy magic of creative synthesis, is what data uncovers but doesn't do on its own. "Because of new technology and new data, we are starting to find new layers," says Tushina. "When we overlap these realities, we can see something truly unique and truly new."
Where data changes the raw material of creative work, AI changes the timeline. Tushina argues that its most useful contribution is capacity, taking on the production-speed and workflow demands that used to consume the hours creative teams had for the interpretive work. The reclaimed time, in her model, raises the creative stakes because the work no longer has a production excuse for a shallow idea. "We have an exoskeleton because we can use AI to make us more powerful, stronger, and faster, but now we can spend more time going deeper," Tushina explains. "We have more time to make our ideas even more valuable."
In Tushina's view, the faster AI develops, the more audiences respond to work that carries an unmistakably human origin. The Humanity Chain succeeds partly because it delivers something AI-generated content structurally cannot: a physical, participatory experience anchored in a specific human memory. The current moment produces new room for ideas that are simple, tangible, and built for participation. "This is the paradox of the current time, because we see that AI is evolving very, very fast, and at the same time we see how we miss humanity," Tushina concludes. "Simple and beautiful ideas still touch people and still make an impact, even though technologies are changing. We are still humans."
