To AI or Not to AI? That is the creative question.
Welcome to spring, the equanimity of light and dark; the mid-way point of winter and summer; the season for all things new and emerging.
Kind of like advertising creative at the moment.
OK, a bit of an analogy stretch there. Our media services agency embraces AI – its benefits and limitations. I’ve been thinking a lot about AI’s creative use. Mediastruction doesn’t execute creative, but we are big fans of our talented partners who bring brands to life. And – pardon the uber wonky here – our measurement practice has seen the power of strong creative.
Walk with me through some recent examples of creative both AI generated and creative human-generated.
My colleague Andrew Tindall at System 1 said about the above ad, “The job of a marketer has become infinitely more challenging in the past 20 years. There used to be a handful of channels. You made your ad, made edits for other channels, and then called your shopper team and took it through the line. Now, we must know the job hundreds of channels and formats can do for our customers while juggling cost per reach and attention. It isn’t easy…this is a great example.”
So while AI can iterate the hundreds of customized executions faster and probably cheaper – can it do something like this? Would it have picked up on the orientation? The pop-culture reference? The visual surprise ending? Probably not.
Have you ever heard a song in the aisles of a grocery store, and the urge to dance overshadowed the effort in which you were currently engaged, perhaps wrangling toddlers and carts and seat belts and shopping lists?
That’s the experience this ad conveys, and I can’t help but wonder if the emotion of it all – the affinity for Pedro Pascal; his look of longing for something “other”; the color and seasonal contrasts – would have been picked up by AI.
Puma and Monks created the above ad unit with minimal human involvement. The agency used hundreds of autonomous AI agents for concept design, scriptwriting and video production. Humans intervened for addressing unrealistic depictions. Humans also curated material. The ad is good. But is it compelling? Do you experience it with humanity or as AI might imagine a range of human emotions? We won’t know since, thus far, it’s not for public use.