Can AI replace an ad agency?

As a fun thought experiment and also to see the skills that current AI tools have, I’ve tried to use only AI to answer an actual client brief.

I. The?Brief

For the brief, I decided to use an actual or at least real-enough brief from D&AD — https://www.dandad.org/en/d-ad-creative-inspiration-brief-templates/

Burger King 2018 Brief: https://www.dandad.org/download/463691/

In this specific case, I used the Burger King Brief from 2018 which focused on highlighting the ‘BECAUSE FIRE IS BETTER’ proposition, especially for the 18–24 year olds who have a different perception of Burger King and its burgers.

II. The?Plan

To start, I used the AI everyone is most familiar with — ChatGPT. I copied most of the relevant elements of the brief and let AI magic do its work.

III. The Result

Lo and behold (https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/lo-and-behold-internet), ChatGPT spouted out their advertising plan based on the brief.

Everything below is directly copied from ChatGPT:

Campaign Concept: “Flame-grill your way to the ultimate burger experience”

Insight: Younger consumers are skeptical of marketing claims and seek experiences and brands that are authentic. They also see fast food as fake and unhealthy.

Big Idea: To show how flame-grilling is not only better but also the authentic way to cook a burger, we’ll take over a popular burger joint and transform it into a flame-grilling experience like no other.

Execution:

Phase 1: Build the Hype

• We’ll start by creating a social media campaign to build excitement and buzz around the takeover.
• We’ll also create a teaser video that showcases the transformation of the burger joint from a standard fast-food restaurant to a flame-grilling experience.
• The video will end with a call-to-action to visit the transformed restaurant to experience the flame-grilling difference.

Phase 2: The Takeover

• We’ll take over a popular burger joint in a trendy location, and transform it into a flame-grilling experience with live flames, grills, and cooking stations.
• We’ll showcase the entire process of flame-grilling burgers, from selecting the meat to seasoning, to grilling, to serving.
• The burgers will be served on specially designed Burger King-branded buns with all the trimmings.

Phase 3: Amplify the Experience

• We’ll invite social media influencers to experience the flame-grilling transformation and share their experiences on social media.
• We’ll also create a pop-up flame-grilling station in a high-traffic location, such as a busy street or a music festival, to offer samples and showcase the flame-grilling process.
• To further amplify the experience, we’ll create a series of short videos that showcase the transformation and the process of flame-grilling, which can be shared across social media channels.

Campaign Messaging:

• Flame-grilling is not only better, but it’s also the authentic way to cook a burger.
• Burger King is the home and expert of flame-grilling since 1954.
• Experience the flame-grilling difference at Burger King.

Campaign Touchpoints:

• Social Media Campaign
• Teaser Video
• Influencer Experience
• Pop-up Flame-grilling Station
• Short Video Series

By showcasing the transformation of a regular fast-food restaurant into a flame-grilling experience, we can demonstrate how Burger King is not only better but also the authentic way to cook a burger. With this campaign, we can encourage younger, more cynical consumers to give Burger King another try and experience the flame-grilling difference.

The result is… actually not bad. It’s not entirely unique but it does help answer the brief in a creative way with all the usual elements one would expect in an ad campaign, from the big idea to the different phases to execute the campaign.

IV. The Deck

Now, we proceed to make this plan and make a nice deck with it to present to the Burger King bigwigs.

For this part, I used AI to create the decks and tried to use two options.

The first one,?beautiful.ai,?where I just input the info from ChatGPT into their AI, gave me these slides:

So, as we can see, most of the slides aren’t usable as is with some imagined data and information included as well. This means the team would still need to add their creative concepts/visuals and also arrange it in a way based on the storytelling they would like to do for client.

The other tool I used was?slidesAI?, which is an extension I added to Google Slides.

The result was a cleaner output in terms of the specific elements although it didn’t do anything to make it more unique to suit the idea. There are some weird photos included as well such as a candle stock photo to represent the big idea.

V. The KV

The key visual of the big idea, the image that can wow the client into agreeing to that expensive campaign that you’re presenting. The AI for the presentation creators didn’t really create something like it so with this, we shift to?Midjourney.

With the prompt,?advertising campaign key visual with the concept “Flame-grill your way to the ultimate burger experience”, we got these results:

As we can see, it’s pattern-based so it used pretty standard templates in presenting the product, specifically for burgers.

I did just choose one from the Option 1 outputs and prompted Midjourney for an upscale.

So, the KV for the proposal would be:

As we can see, there’s gibberish included in the image which can easily be adjusted by your designer. The burger also needs some cleaning up, especially for the bottom bun to make it more appealing.

For fun, I also did prompt Midjourney to create a social media post for example but maybe I needed to be more specific.

Nice images but nothing unique to the idea that was presented in the proposal so more specific prompts might be needed.

VI. The costs

So, looking at all the tools I used, here’s the breakdown of cost:

ChatGPT — $0

Beautiful.ai — $0 (Free trial)

Slidesai.io — $0 (Free based on character count for the prompt)

Midjourney — $10 monthly subscription for the Basic plan

So, with a final cost of $10 , you’ve got an advertising plan. Now, there is a lot of more work needed for each of the process but as we can see, there is opportunity for AI to assist at least most of the parts of the creation or ideation.

VII. Final Verdict

Right now, it seems AI can help in some parts of the process, from ideation of the actual plan to conceptualizing the visuals for the big idea/proposal.

But a lot of those will still need supervision from your accounts, creatives, strategists to ensure that it fits the brief and what the team understands about the client. Storytelling will also still be key in pitching to clients alongside the most important thing, which is to understand the audience, the human who we are trying to convince and reach.

But what about the future — with its continued improvement, I can see an ad agency run by a few people with a majority of the usual advertising functions done by AI. Is this good or bad? Hard to say for now, advertising is still communication and at the heart of that is talking to people, so it might be a question of who is better at talking to people? Fellow humans or AI?