Human + AI Creative Studio — Ship the Aurore Relaunch

A four-round, intermediate creative-technology simulation set inside Lumen & Co., the in-house studio of French cosmetics group Florette Beauté (Paris, 9th arrondissement; €620M revenue, 13% margin; a 62-person studio on an €11M budget). As Creative Director you must ship the make-or-break relaunch of the €88M Aurore skincare line — defending against a D2C insurgent that has taken 6 share points in 18 months — across six channels, in a 5-week deadline that is 40% shorter than normal, on a fixed €1.8M production budget, with the board watching how the studio uses AI after last spring's over-automated launch tested 18% below the brand's distinctiveness baseline. Grounded in Margherita Pagani's work on human-centered AI and marketing creativity, the simulation operationalises the core argument that AI amplifies creativity when humans and machines are orchestrated complementarily — AI for divergence, scale and analysis; humans for judgement, meaning and brand sense — and flattens it when machines displace the human creative core. Round 1 diagnoses the brief and rates creative tasks for AI-suitability (the creative core versus scalable production). Round 2 is the core decision: deploy generative versus non-generative AI per task, costing it within €1.8M and defending each placement against distinctiveness risk. Round 3 orchestrates the 5-week human-AI workflow, places review gates for distinctiveness and rights/likeness/disclosure, and locks the six-channel delivery plan. Round 4 reveals launch telemetry — distinctiveness versus baseline, time-to-delivery, engagement, the realised human-AI cost split and any legal flags — and recalibrates the operating model. The math rewards genuine human-AI complementarity and punishes the five classic errors: automating the creative core, all-human refusal (over budget, misses the date), confusing generative with non-generative AI, one fixed human-AI ratio across all tasks, and skipping the rights/legal review gate. Final KPIs track Distinctiveness vs baseline, Delivery (weeks to ship against the 5-week date), Engagement, and Budget committed against the €1.8M cap, with a live Legal-risk flag.