Adland Meets Westworld - Embrace the Chaos

Computational creative is here. Design by AI is real. Artificial intelligence is not a dystopian future, it is the present and resistance is... embarrassing. Advertising is facing an existential crisis fuelled by denial and fear, traditional agency leaders regard the machinery around them as alien technology capable of an extinction event. 

Like many business sectors, advertising has been haunted by the spectre of robots rampaging through agencies destroying minds, careers and ultimately the life blood of the industry - creativity. There is a degree of truth within the hysteria, campaigns by once revered pioneers of our business are being outperformed by machines. But until agency leaders fully appreciate the new landscape, and resist manipulating it into their image, more agency brands will be consigned to fond memory. 

There are four stages of making peace with AI a creative must work through to achieve liberation. 

Stage One: Acceptance. They already walk among us.

Flick your eyes across your desk. Discreetly look around. How many on your floor have already been assimilated? The harsh reality is, everyone. Computational creative - that is creative outputs made by AI - already plays a key role in the daily riot of communications. AI will have produced and influenced the copy, images, film and sound of billions of personalised direct response ads, concepts so familiar that people would have no idea AI played a part. Even Elon Musk recently replied to a tweet from The New Scientist, not realising it was programmatically generated by Echobox - an AI powered social media content creator. At present, AI is merely assisting brands and agencies to be more efficient, a menial application of a technology with such enormous potential. There are numerous start-ups embedding ‘weak AI’ into creativity. Services from companies like Picasso Labs, Firedrop, Zo, Spirable and Jukedeck are the pioneers. Look them up.

Stage Two. Liberation. AI will set you free. 

AI and automation is a creative enabler, unshackling creatives and clients from the drudge of multi-platform marketing. Clients can be freed to spend more time on ideas and innovation that will grow their brand, alongside their agencies. However, AI will have a big impact on the agency business model, evolving it into leaner clusters of talent working alongside suites of automated applications. But, machines will scale human thinking, they won’t do the ideas and original thinking for us. Networked agencies often dismiss AI as a mere cost saving device to tackle declining margins and consolidation. They will be the first to fail. As the combined human and AI processes become more established, agencies should use the efficiencies gained to free their talent to spend more time on what they do best – creativity. Roles and hierarchies will change, but the streamlined industry that will emerge will have one currency alone - ideas. 

Stage Three: Redemption. AI will enable, not kill. 

AI creates a halo effect of human strengths. Our insight, emotion, empathy, experience, aesthetics, culture, optimism, desire, independence and personal context are unique and our industry will always feed from them. The idea of AI being used alongside creativity isn’t new. David Cope is a composer who began creating music from AI in 1981, over 25 years before Jukedeck was established. Now the technology is sufficiently available and easy to access that it can be applied in day to day processes. Moving AI out of the realms of the obscure and inaccessible, such as a single composer, to the masses, like Jukedeck has enabled an entire generation of creatives to use musical AI. 

Currently there is no machine remotely sentient enough to connect even abstract ideas and turn them into something culturally relevant or exciting. Even when we get to ‘artificial general intelligence’ - the term used for a machine that can perform the full range of intellectual tasks equivalent to a human – creativity will be low on the list of priorities. Most networked agency initiatives to harness AI to create big ideas that incite emotion have fallen flat, or have been mere PR stunts. The reality at the moment looks like an expensive cloud-based filing cabinet for personnel data and historical campaigns, albeit with a cute name. 

Stage Four: Atheism. Creativity is not God.

The armed neutrality between AI and creativity is a fantasy. While that war may be lost, it has never been a more exciting time for an agency creative with an open mind. Creativity as a concept is rapidly evolving under the rampant demands of instant, multi-platform, personalised communications. AI can scale ideas faster, wider and more efficiently than any human. Robots can write. Deal with it. Edit with them and make them better, because what true writer really wants to write 300 personalised messages based on their brilliant original copy? AI will ensure your work impact on millions more people that you could have hoped. 

Read about AI and technology beyond how it affects advertising. Tim O'Reilly is a good positive place to start. He believes we will never run out of work, just the jobs we do to fulfil the work will be different. “Technology is the solution to human problems. We won’t run out of work until we run out of problems”, says venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. Advertising is full of talent, great at solving big abstract problems, and let’s face it, the world has a lot of problems to solve.

The truth is that there is no battle between efficiency or empathy, algorithm or aesthetic. They are not mutually exclusive. AI is the next frontier of advertising whether we like it or not. Our creativity can become more powerful and more resonant with AI - but that’s not the end of the big idea, it’s the beginning of new bigger ideas. Combining things in new ways and thinking different is what we champion in our industry, so make peace with AI and use it as an ally for better work and a better world. 

Steven Bennett-Day is CCO of Feed, one of the world’s fastest-growing independent digital agencies. Overseeing their dedicated creative division across their offices in London, Berlin, San Francisco and Manchester, Steven has won over 20 industry awards for digital creativity and effectiveness.