Creative is making the mistakes that media has just learned from
Opinion: Strategy Leaders
It seems absurd to counter our dwindling attention span with the instruction to ‘make more stuff’, writes Mindshare’s strategy partner.
Democracy is not for everyone. It’s pretty bad news for autocrats or those who seek power for personal gain or glory. – in other words, your average agency CEO. So, its unsurprising that the rise of AI and its potential to democratise the process of content creation is being met with resistance in certain quarters.
And yet AI is among us, and it’s remarkable, and if you’ve played around with an AI platform for even five minutes it’s hard not to romanticise its ability to make us all more creative. After all, every workshop that we’ve ever attended has promised us that even Keith in accounts can have good ideas.
According to the AI Marketing Benchmark Report: 2023, published by Influencer Marketing Hub, some 44% of business have adopted AI, to some degree, for content production.
And yet even as we master its creative potential, its hard not to question if AI is making us humans look a bit ridiculous (which is what those sneaky robots want in the first place).
The problem with ‘thinner and thinner margins’
According to McKinsey, AI is a ‘machine’s ability to perform the cognitive functions we associate with human minds, such as perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting with an environment, problem solving, and even exercising creativity’.
I came back to this definition after reading in The Media Leader how Heinz is using rapid advances in AI to maximise the effectiveness of its ads.
Heinz produces over 20,000 pieces of content annually. When you realise that Heinz markets hundreds of food products in over 200 countries around the world, 20,000 different executions isn’t as dramatic as it initially sounds, but AI is helping to generate learning — that guides tactical execution — to optimise the performance of each piece of content that Heinz produces. Just like the McKinsey definition promises.
It’s super-smart, but as Heinz’s Matt Cosad recognises, it’s an exercise in pursuit of “thinner and thinner margins” as AI allows every brand to present on every channel for limited consumer attention. For example, over the 2022 Fifa World Cup, Heinz used AI technology to drive a 5% increase in its view-through rate, as the technology determined how best to present Heinz products. These gains may feel marginal but, when added up globally, they amount to millions of additional eyeballs.
The niggling concern is that we’re sending creative down the same cul-de-sac that media has only just reversed out of. A fascination with technology meant that for the last 20 years we’ve been sweating the small stuff while we got the macro investment calls all wrong.
We may be aiming AI at the wrong thing. Overnight, the advertising industry collectively agreed that AI’s killer application was to make and publish lots of cool stuff really, really quickly, because who doesn’t want lots of cool stuff? Oh, that would be those pesky humans again.
Strategy is about not doing stuff, too
As Heinz is fast learning, there are circumstances where AI can make advertising better, but we don’t always need to pull the trigger. We don’t always need to publish. Maybe AI’s greatest contribution to the advertising industry isn’t ‘making stuff’ but in aiding the other cognitive functions that McKinsey cites, namely perceiving, reasoning, problem solving. I’d love to see AI used to provide a client with concrete proof to run with the bravest work, not the pared-back compromise.
Until then, we simply have to question how many creative assets we really need? How many AI tweaks are really required? We’ve already witnessed media’s ability to optimise itself into a sub-optimal position; we’re in danger of pushing creativity down the same path.
It seems absurd to counter our dwindling attention span with the instruction to ‘make more stuff’ or to simply make the pack shot longer, the logo bigger, the sea less turquoise.
While AI can exercise creativity, it can’t exercise restraint. It needs an autocrat to tell it to do that.
David Grainger is strategy partner at WPP media agency Mindshare