By Joost Narraina, Strategic Creative Director
I've spent €5,847 testing AI tools over two years. Most were deleted within a week.
Here's what actually works for strategic creative work and what's just expensive marketing hype.
Jasper AI: €109/month for 3 weeks. Generic output that screamed "AI wrote this." Cancelled.
Copy.ai: €49/month for 2 weeks. Templates that created template-sounding content. Deleted.
Writesonic: €79/month for a month. Promised strategy, delivered buzzwords. Gone.
Synthesia: €90/month for video avatars. Clients could tell it was fake immediately. Waste.
Total wasted: €980 in the first three months.
Tools that promise to "think strategically" for you are lying. Strategy requires understanding business context, stakeholder dynamics, and market positioning. No AI tool knows your client better than you do.
Tools that try to do everything usually suck at everything. Specialized tools that solve specific problems work better.
Expensive doesn't mean effective. Some of my most useful tools cost €20/month.
ChatGPT-4: €20/month My strategic thinking partner. I give it business context and ask for execution options. This morning I used it to generate 15 headline variations for a recruitment campaign. Took 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.
Never ask it to think strategically. Always give it strategic parameters.
Claude: €20/month
Better for long-form content that needs to maintain voice consistency. When I write case studies or detailed strategic documents, Claude keeps the human tone throughout.
Midjourney: €10/month Visual concept development. Not for final designs, but for generating 20 visual directions in an hour. Helps clients see possibilities they couldn't imagine from text alone.
Notion AI: €16/month Project management and client communication. Handles routine emails and project updates so I can focus on strategic work.
Canva AI: €55/month for team features Brand-consistent design at scale. After I establish creative direction, my team can create materials without constant oversight.
Eleven Labs: €22/month Voiceover and audio content. Perfect for camera-shy executives who want to create content but hate being on video.
Perplexity: €20/month Market research and competitive analysis. Before starting any strategic creative project, I research current industry trends and competitor approaches.
Surfer SEO: €89/month Ensures my strategic content actually gets found by the right people. Great content that nobody sees is useless.
Zapier: €49/month Workflow automation. Handles client onboarding, content distribution, and performance reporting automatically.
Tools for specific situations
RunwayML: €95/month Video concept development. When I need to show clients what the strategic creative direction will look like in motion before expensive production.
Hotjar: €39/month Understanding how audiences actually interact with content. Shows me which strategic messages work and which don't.
Grammarly: €12/month Copy polish and tone consistency. Simple but effective for maintaining professional quality.
Test 1: Does it make my client work better? Cool features don't matter if they don't improve deliverables.
Test 2: Can I maintain creative control? If I can't direct the output strategically, it's not strategic. It's just automation.
Test 3: Does it save time for strategic thinking? The goal is more time for strategy, not just faster execution.
Test 4: Can I explain the output to clients? If I can't defend why we chose this direction, the tool isn't helping.
Total monthly cost: €467
Compare that to the €300+ "all-in-one" platforms that deliver mediocrity across everything.
For regulated industries (pharma, finance): Focus on tools with clear audit trails. ChatGPT-4 for content generation, Grammarly for compliance checking.
For B2B services: Perplexity for market research, Surfer for content optimization, Claude for thought leadership.
For consumer brands: Midjourney for visual concepts, RunwayML for video development, Canva for social content.
"AI strategy tools" that claim to do strategic thinking for you. Strategy requires understanding business context that no AI tool has.
Save your money. Use AI for execution, keep strategy human.
Start with ChatGPT-4. €20/month. Learn to give it strategic direction and evaluate output for authenticity.
That's 80% of the productivity gains for 4% of what I spent testing everything.
Add other tools only when you have specific problems the core tools can't solve.
Don't choose tools based on features. Choose them based on whether they make your actual work better.
Test everything with real client projects before committing to subscriptions.
Focus on tools that amplify your strategic thinking, not ones that try to replace it.
The competitive advantage isn't having the most AI tools. It's using the right tools strategically while maintaining authentic human direction.
Most people either avoid AI completely or expect it to do everything. Both approaches lose to strategic humans directing AI execution.
Stay great,
Joost
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