The Harmonization of AI Generated Creative

Generative AI is going to change the way we work. The applications to marketing and more specifically creative are vast.?Generative AI can produce copy, imagery, video, and audio in rapid succession, something that would have taken a team several weeks to align on and produce, is now ready in minutes or seconds.?It’s easy to understand the desire to apply AI driven content to marketing.?This also means we’re entering a period where I think we will see the “harmonization” of creative.?Everything is going to have a “sameness” feel to it.

See the problem with AI driven creative is that it is generated from models that are fed a large and vast set of data, but the goal of the AI is to create something that as closely as possible represents your desired end product.??If we were to go back 5 or 10 years ago it would be the equivalent of seeing stock images.?Everybody recognizes the sanitized office person doing something in a stock photo, or “future looking” laser head to represent technology. ??Generative AI driven creative is fostering that same feel, there is sense of “this is cool and fresh” today, but as more organizations and people adopt the “fresh” will move to “old” and repetitive quickly.?

Organizations that look to adopt AI driven creative directly out of the box, will be at risk of losing their brand identity and feel.?It will become AI Washed, leaving it indistinguishable from what other brands using the same tactic for creative generation.?Now this isn’t to say we won’t get there. I absolutely believe we will, but it will be the large enterprise organizations that can afford to train their own models and subsets of data that they keep propriety.?For the rest though what to do?

Using Generative AI to produce your content can help cut down cycles but having a human touch to bring it over the line and refine the output can be the difference of being lost in the sea versus standing out.?Using different variations to refine your copy to determine where you want to create something that can pop and stand out.?Using creatives to take multiple storyboards created through AI to develop a final version, taking the best elements, brings both the human element back that can shift something from being flat and uniform to something that resonates and pops to the viewers eye.

Organizations can also use generative ai in reverse to look at creative and content for brand inconsistencies,?in cases where you want to ensure things are the same such as fonts, logos, colour swatches, AI can help accelerate the proofing phase where we rely on human driven creative.?Improving the speed to approve and publish content, as well as reducing organization drain on reviewing the minutiae and instead bringing focus on the impact the creative can have, the performance it can drive and deliver.

Organizations big and small should begin testing the waters of Generative AI capabilities, develop and understand what is possible and what works for their business, and what does not.?Figure out how to slipstream simple use cases into the early phases of production that still have the right gates and controls to ensure brand identity and creative impact resonate, as well as ensuring thing such as copyright and legal requirements are still met.?It’s an exciting time to experiment and develop with the technology and what it can offer has unlimited potential. It's also a time to not lose what makes your brand human, what makes your brand stick out, don't lose the soul of what makes your creative elements unique.

About The Author

Brent Chaters has taught interactive marketing for Harvard’s Global Executive Master Digital Business offering and is the author the Author of Mastering Search Analytics, has contributed to the book Multichannel Marketing Ecosystems: Creating Connected Customer Experiences, and was a technical reviewer for the 2nd edition of The Art of SEO, co-host of Marketing Disrupted with Amber Mac, and presented a TedX talk on Embracing Opportunity.

He has also provided services to a large range of fortune 500 companies across a wide variety of industries and verticals covering both B2B and B2C marketing, with a deep expertise in Digital Marketing and Strategy. Brent is a board member for the Canadian Marketing Association, as well as the Chair for the Finance Committee.?Brent is the Executive sponsor of the Indigenous Employee Group within Accenture leading change across the organization including Reconciliation, while also rediscovering his own personal Indigenous heritage. He is also the founder of Raising Voices a program focused on create job opportunities in marketing for under represented people.

Views and opinions are his own.

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This post also appears on my blog gabmonkey.com