The one thing that dominated all other conversations this year was the sundry agency CXO suite’s obsession with talking about generative AI and their insistence on how their respective organisation was at the cutting edge of it.
Interview after interview had people from the creative ilk and other honchos waxing eloquent about how AI was fundamentally changing the very nature of the business and how they were rapidly adapting and developing deep expertise in it.
A quick peep, however, into the actual workings of most organisations showed, at best, a minor blip in life before and after AI. Some copywriters are using ChatGPT for churning out post copies and a minuscule percentage of art directors are using Midjourney and other generative software for storyboards and layouts. Period. No more. No less.
I’d have loved to see the highly targeted and personalised content, almost at an individual level, that AI makes possible. I’d have loved to see data being read at scale to deliver sharper insights and content generation at scale with even more effective media targeting. But we all know how the real world works. And we know how consumers react in the long term to tedious industrialised marketing.
Will AI change the world of advertising as we know it? After nearly a year of dealing with it, I honestly think not. Not in a hurry. Of course, there will be changes. There will be an evolution of work flows and efficiencies. The mass cut backs in jobs that the Pollyannas of doom had predicted, aren’t happening in the near term. There’ll be pressure to be somewhat more creative (or interesting) than an app. To use it as a brand new tool to find newer ways of surprising the consumers. Practitioners of creative will need to learn how to navigate this world to be able to do their jobs better. But no one aside from the very terrible are losing their jobs in a hurry.
I’ll believe the C-suite’s claim that AI has fundamentally changed their agency, when I see revenues remarkable enough directly linked to it.
Till such time I’ll just continue to treat it as a cheap third world that frees up a little bit of our time for slightly better pursuits in life. Or in advertising.
I don’t believe in posturing as some tech guru. Because I know understanding real consumers is tougher than a machine reading through lined up data sets. AI will surely take some tedium out of agency work.
Real insights will still take some real people.
