AI can create an ad in seconds.
So will it replace all creatives? All agencies? Creating every ad ever needed all by itself?
I’ve seen a few experiments over the last year. AI being prompted with the original creative briefs of some of the most famous and successful pieces of work the industry has ever produced. Guinness, Cadbury and Nike.
The results were as you’d expect, not good. Each output the most obvious, cliché, base version of an ad you could create.
The conclusion was it will never be possible to replace great creatives with machines.
I agree, but it’s not the full story.
I’ve sat in enough creative presentations to know that every single one of the AI generated scripts in those experiments could be bought.
Because they were all the expected and ‘safe’ answer. Often the equivalent of listing out the product benefits on the brief with a massive picture of the product.
I could see a lot of brands, not all but a lot, thinking ‘great, this means we don’t have to deal with that annoying creative agency trying to sell us nonsense they just want to win awards with, these scripts just tell the public what we want to tell them’.
And that’s the real threat to creatives.
We all know the best work engages, entertains and causes emotional reactions.
But it’s also riskier. It rocks the boat. It’s harder to sell in. While the standard and obvious maintains the status quo and is easy to go with.
So how do we combat this?
As an industry we need to serious think about the best places and ways to use AI. And where it shouldn’t be used too. Should it be used to create the actual ads? Probably not. To help with research, resizes, rollout and all the backroom stuff like timesheets, absolutely.
But it’s also a much bigger problem than AI, Guinness ads now are nothing of the creative quality or cultural impact that Dancing Man, Surfer or Swimmer reached. That’s not down to AI.
More than ever we need to champion great creativity, educate why it’s needed and why it’s the right thing to do. So it’s not seen as the risky and dangerous route but the right one.
