Merging Machines and Magic: How Multimodal Generative AI can enhance the end-to-end Creative Process

By Ho-Yun Raven , Business Director

I have the optimistic belief that the future of marketing lies in the partnership between technology and human creativity, working together to produce emotionally engaging and ethically responsible campaigns. This is a future, where technology and human creativity work together to produce unexpected and impactful outcomes.

The concept of AI and human creativity was explored in my earlier article,?[The Black Swan Effect: How Human Creativity and Generative AI Can Create Black Swans]

It explores how the combination of human ingenuity and the power of generative AI can lead to the creation of unexpected and impactful outcomes, like a Black Swan effect.

Multimodal Generative AI: Enhancing Creativity

In this article, I want to look deeper into how the use of multimodal tools and processes can enhance creativity. Generative AI, or Multimodal Generative AI (MGAI), is a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and process information across different formats, not just text.

This allows it to analyse data from various sources, including text descriptions, images, and even soundtracks, and use this combined understanding to generate creative outputs that blend these formats.

The Potential of MGAI

MGAI (Multimodal Generative AI) holds immense potential for creating engaging and emotionally resonant marketing experiences.

By analysing vast datasets encompassing text, images, audio, and video, it can understand user preferences. Used to help the creativity process, when it’s combined with human input, call it intuition or gut feel, this convergence can unlock new yet unclassified creative processes or new ideas of how generative AI can be used as part of the creative process.

Creativity has relied on human intuition, inspiration from other creative stimulus combined in interesting ways.

When I reached out to Daniel Hulme of Satalia, he offered the following build, wondering if we could use Generative AI to enrich the creative process by exploring potentially a new framework such as defining archetypes to a brand/moment to explore the 'creative landscape', this could then lead to the potential of millions of ideas being generated and therefore allowing the human creative to surface the most interesting, novel, new idea quickly.

By using the potential of Multimodal Generative AI, we could potentially define and map archetypes to a story arc, for example a “Hero archetype” that aligns with stories from the large data sets used to train the multimodal data from, images, audio and video-based stories such as Rags to Riches, Overcoming the Monster, transformational journeys, such as Ulysses portrayed in films, songs or other novels for instance. This offers us the ability to break free from conventional thinking and uncover novel creative directions or spark inspiration from seemingly useless ideas that often lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

For marketing campaigns, the creative ideas are usually iterative, creatives concept for ideas, and as a team we continue to explore further, looking at whether the idea might get killed, for instance, when not it’s not original enough or it’s too stereotypical or when we expand by adding other elements. By using Generative AI to iterate with us, we can arrive at the more novel ideas faster.?

The Human Touch

While MGAI offers exciting possibilities, such as combining the power of archetypes, story arcs, and AI, you can use it to create a powerful system for exploring the creative landscape.

However, human curation and refinement remain crucial with this approach, whilst it can significantly enhance the ideation process, leading to more innovative and impactful marketing campaigns. It’s the human experience and empathy that cannot be copied by artificial intelligence that’s key in the craft of making creative content, whether that’s film, a music composition for an Audiogram or Podcast.

It’s about bringing together a unique blend of human artistry and craft together with multimodal tools in new ways to create emotionally engaging experiences.

At Hogarth, we have a comprehensive suite of capabilities, from strategy, content planning, creative origination, production for content in all formats, from social media cards, podcasts, TV advertising to serving personalized content in performance banners, we make a lot of content for many, many brands.

I’ve often quipped to clients that just about the only thing we don’t do is media relations and I suspect that too is also on the horizon.

With new tools being introduced regularly, as well as the new Generative AI tools available from WPP’s Open Studio, a platform that includes GenerativeAI models and experiences into one seamless solution. The tools available gives everyone at Hogarth an unparalleled opportunity to unlock new and exciting ways in which we can craft and create content. I am giving an unashamed plug here for our company because I do not know of any other business that has at their fingertips the array of tools that we have available to us.

The Benefits of MGAI

• Innovation at Scale?–We’re using advances in AI to craft tailored content to audiences that would have been impossible with human input alone. Launched at Cannes last month, AI Powered Production Studio at Hogarth, part of WPP’s Open Studio, is the end-to-end production application that heralds a new era of content creation, giving clients scale, speed, accuracy and creativity for their marketing campaigns. Developed using NVIDIA Omniverse, it streamlines and automates the creation of text, images and video, transforming content creation and demonstrates first-hand the value and magic of Multimodal generative AI for our industry.
• Sustainability?– Hogarth is now ADGreen, with our approach to sustainably made content. Virtual Production stands out in its ability to create content without the expense and logistics of globe-trotting to create sunsets in remote locations.
• Content strategy & planning for omnichannel experiences. With an extensive array of tools to help us plan and craft content, we’re looking at ways in which it can be re-purposed or adapted to work to the strength of each media channel and all the while, we’re maximizing the ways in which AI can help us craft content that’s relevant and timely.
• Unexpected outcomes?– with new and emerging technology, we have the new tools and the opportunity to imagine the impossible for our clients and to bring craft and use our human ingenuity to bring these ideas to life.

Uniting technology and humanity to create magic

It’s an exciting time, just as the Internet of the 90’s made information widely accessible to everyone, we are at a moment in our industry where a similar seismic shift is happening, where humans and machines can collaborate in natural language to create emotionally engaging and ethically responsible campaigns at an unprecedented scale. ?

Brains’ is the brainchild of WPP and its AI company Satalia, innovating to provide “brains” to produce brand specific content for clients using “Brand Brains” or “Audience brains”.

The magic lies in combining various inputs (Just as generative AI multimodal framework takes input from different types of sources) from brand guidelines to tone of voice, brand assets; when combined with deep expertise in branding, understanding of training neural networks, advanced techniques from academia and accessing early technologies from leading technology partners, WPP and Satalia is developing sophisticated techniques to power solutions for clients and brands we work with and most importantly,

“The Brains approach is not a theory; it’s in use across WPP, and already in the hands of our clients” – Daniel Hulme , CEO @ Satalia | Chief AI Officer @ WPP

With the power of Multimodal Generative AI, we can unlock new levels of creativity. And whilst all this new technology is available and fast becoming mainstream, the imperative to be human and to actively choose to curate quality will be vital.