A friend who runs an agency called me and was ranting before I’d even said “No I don’t want any…”
“What the hell is it with creatives right now? They’re all clutching their pearls about AI and I don’t understand it. Why are they worried we’re going to sell them out?”
So I told him.
But before I tell you, let me preface my answer with two caveats. First, I, like most people, am not an expert on AI. So take what I say about it with a rather large grain of salt. And second, despite my ignorance (or worse), I am actually pro-AI, if for no other reason than I know that anyone who has bet against the technology has lost. (There are other reasons but that’s a really good one to start with).
But back to the phone call. Because my friend was not wrong. Online, in bars, via emails and text messages, I was hearing it too. “AI is coming for our jobs!” “I’m gonna be replaced by a robot!” and “I’ll burn the industry down before I use it.”
So why? (other than, I concede, that freaking out tends to be our first reaction to things)
Okay, well, let’s start with the unsettling observation that by and large creative in advertising in the 21st century is little more than a commodity. And it has become commoditized over the decades by 1) account people who will do anything to keep clients “happy” and revenues flowing (albeit on 90, 120, 180, and even 365 day pay schedules), 2) media people who view it as merely the interchangeable fodder for carpetbombing digital media plans which they would A, B, C, and all the way to Z test when allowed (“make a blue one” “make a yellow one” “make a yellow-ish blue one”), 3) Senior Management who blithely gave it away in spec pitches (Proving that “That which we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly” is as relevant today as it was in the 18th century), 4) Senior Creatives who chased international trophies over actual results for clients (and were warmly rewarded for their behaviour with the choicest jobs in the industry) and 5) holding companies whose obsession with shareholder value not only squashed profits, but drove HR departments to terminate senior creatives and their salaries and replace them with prematurely elevated (and therefore cheaper) junior creatives who they would overwork and understaff – that is if they could find any who hadn’t be lured to the more glamourous and lucrative worlds of Hollywood, gaming and digital media startups (more on holding companies in a second).
Now, you may disagree with that fairly bleak assessment of our industry but roll with it for the purposes of this essay
So, if creative is a commodity, merely an interchangeable widget for media plans, which people can give away and has no real impact on business, then why wouldn’t creatives be concerned that something that could produce more of it faster and cheaper would be a threat?
Moreover, why wouldn’t they think that Senior Management and Account Service would flock to it in an effort to give clients more options faster (because “more” is the lazy man’s version of service, and faster the mediocre man’s substitute for quality)?
Indeed why wouldn’t that actually be what service means to generations of clients who were raised during the commoditization of creative to believe it’s what advertising actually is?
And if using AI had the added benefit of further cutting agency costs to meet the ridiculous financial demands the holding company was, um, holding them to (so that’s why they’re called that…) and created a little more room in the budget for them to keep their jobs (after, of course, they “passed the savings on to the client” in a furious race to the bottom) – well then they’d actually be stupid not to do it.
Plus, honestly, if creative really is a commodity, why would anyone in their right mind spend one penny more on it than they absolutely needed to?
And yes, a creative just said that last part out loud.
Because the name of the game at many agencies – and the holding companies who milk them for all they’re worth – isn’t really about driving sales for the client; it’s about making lots and lots of ads to be every possible place the potential customers might possibly be to create the illusion that they’re doing something for the money they’re being paid
And AI is really good at that. Really really good at it. And creatives know it.
So that is why they are, as my friend so archaically put it, clutching their pearls.
Now, there’s one problem with all of this, and it’s this: More of what I don’t care about doesn’t make me care about it.
That is, you can show me a million ads for, say, flan, across every media touchpoint I have – every tv show I watch, every billboard I pass, every app I use, every website I visit – and you can do it repeatedly, morning noon and night for as long as I live and breathe and guess what? It won’t make me care about flan. More of what I do not care about does not make me care about it. I do not care about an ad for Flan because I do not like it, Sam I am. And more of those minutely tweaked ads are not going to make me care about it. They’re just showing up and saying “Here’s flan. Buy it”.
What humans however bring to the equation – what the best advertising has always done in whatever form it has taken for whatever client it has been created for – is to make people care about stuff. Especially stuff they previously did not care about. (And for what it’s worth that often involves something that is somewhat illogical. Something that shouldn’t work, but does. Which isn’t how algorithms built on providing you with the next most logical answer based on past behaviour generally work. Which is how I understand AI to work).
Of course, eventually people will remember this – will remember that using advertising to actually sell things, to actually get people to care about things they don’t care about, is actually the point. And that it, on occasion, works. But when? When will they realize this?
When sales go down and stay down. When companies start to go out of business and are desperate not to go out of business. When the conversations in the how-come room are “Why is the advertising failing?” “I don’t know, it’s everywhere everyone is!” “Wait. Maybe advertising is not about banners and billboards and social galore. Maybe advertising – perhaps – means a little bit more.”
But it won’t happen right now. Right now, clients will flock to it and agencies will provide it because, well like I said, why would they not? And zillions of ads will go out and they won’t work because they’re not focused on making people actually care, so no one will, so no one will buy, so companies will go out of business and won’t be able to pay their agencies that made these ads for them, so those agencies will go out of business too. But the CMOS who made those calls and the agency heads who facilitated them? They’ll be long gone, having ridden their publicity about using AI into better gigs long before the shit hit the fan.
And this feels like a good place to remind you, dear reader, of what I said before; that I’m pro-AI. I think it’s actually a good thing. Do I have a death-wish? A quotient of self-loathing that would make a Mets fan blush?
No (well, yes, but not where AI is concerned). I continue to think that AI will, eventually, help us achieve things we can’t imagine achieving today as I’ve written about elsewhere.
But that’s all well in the future. Which is a long way off. Right now things are different and right now my friend who runs an agency is on the phone asking me why creatives are worried that agencies are going to sell them out for AI.
“They’re worried, old boy, because you will.”