Myths, magic, and machines

The world once dreamt the internet would weave a tapestry of knowledge and enlightenment, uniting all in a boundless quest for wisdom. Yet, in reality, the web's threads are woven with both brilliance and banality. It's a realm where cat videos dance alongside educational treasures, where echo chambers amplify prejudice as much as understanding. The internet fulfilled the dream of global connectivity, but its fabric is rich with both the golden threads of enlightenment and the darker strands of disinformation and distraction. It's a testament to the human spirit's duality, offering us the tools to ascend to wisdom or descend into shallowness. The internet revolutionized our industry also, ushering in precision and personalization, but also a lot of stupidity and fomo. In the mind of a digital marketer the internet transformed billboards into banners, data into dollars, and audiences into algorithms, as they weave digital stories, targeting niches with surgical precision, claiming the inevitable death of TV, print, and radio. And yet, there is no denying the impact of internet on advertising in the past 25 years.

The world is dreaming again…

Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out in late 2022, generative AI has dominated news headlines, board rooms, big tech, advertising, and our entire species so to say. GenAI is changing everything, and it’s being hailed as the mythical quill of the digital age, a magician's wand conjuring art, knowledge, and solutions. There’s a collective yearning for AI to be the ultimate muse, painting vivid masterpieces, composing soul-stirring symphonies, and crafting prose that captivates hearts. The past year saw massive development in this field with major bigtech brands like Adobe’s Sensei as well as many freshies like Descript, Synthesia, Musavir, and God knows what else. We hope it will be the oracle that unravels mysteries, the sage that deciphers ancient texts, and the scientist that pioneers new frontiers. Our dreams imbue AI with the power to transcend human limitations, filling our lives with marvels and making the impossible a tangible reality. In this dream, generative AI becomes a timeless collaborator, co-creating our grandest visions.

Some of us wonder though, with the human’s spirit’s duality in mind, are we about to ascend as a species or descend beyond our lowest point in history?

I had the privilege of attending over a dozen keynotes and panel discussion on the subject this year, both in and outside Pakistan. If one was to summarize the vast majority of these conversations it is enough to quote just one line from Richard Baldwin; “AI won't take your job. It's somebody using AI that will take your job". The most quoted line in all keynotes, all over the world, in 2023.

And then there’s Alex Brunori, a globally celebrated creative veteran, a digital trailblazer, and a marketing maverick. Hailing from the agency realm, he was last spotted orchestrating Google's MENA creative works. At Madsemble 2023 in Karachi, he boldly proclaimed that GenAI would not just disrupt but potentially oust human creatives. "Let's face it," he declared, "most of us are merely mediocre. In any field, it's the rare few who weave true magic, and GenAI is fast closing in on surpassing even them."

He left us with a question:

“Can humans be as creative as machines?”        

Like everyone else in the room, I didn’t have an answer. And here I am, embarking on my quest for enlightenment, deftly dancing with two more questions that swirl in the vortex of advertising's future during the GenAI era.

Q1: Will GenAI replace human creativity at ad agencies?

Bard says “AI will not replace human creativity; instead, it will enhance it. AI can analyze vast datasets, identify patterns, and generate insights that can spark human creativity”. ChatGPT agrees! “AI-powered tools can process market trends, customer sentiments, and historical campaign performance to provide creative professionals with data-driven inspiration. They can suggest compelling visuals, headlines, or even entire concepts based on what resonates most with the target audience”. Call me old fashioned but this doesn’t exactly sound like “collaboration” rather a symbiotic relationship where GenAI does all the work for creative professionals with little to no reliance on human intuition and emotional understanding we traditionally depend on to craft impactful advertising.

While most AI platforms can handle repetitive tasks, data crunching, and personalization at scale, there are also more advanced GenAI tools which even in their infancy, can deliver on ideation, storytelling, and design based on that data. What is stopping the machine from producing ad campaigns that are more innovative, relevant, and emotionally resonant? Why would we need the army of creatives most agencies are currently employing?

Q2: Are we about to enter an era where all advertising will be data-driven?

While data is a fundamental component of modern advertising, the myth that all advertising will be purely data-driven oversimplifies the complexities of consumer behavior and emotional engagement. Data-driven advertising emphasizes metrics, but it might not always capture the nuances of brand perception, cultural trends, or the emotional impact of an ad. Effective advertising often strikes a balance between data-driven strategies and creative content that resonates with audiences on a deeper level. But GenAI is all set to change that!

AI's role in advertising is not just about data collection but also about data interpretation and making sense of it. Both Publicis and WPP are testing their custom built tools that can analyze vast datasets, identify consumer preferences, and predict future trends. This will help advertisers create even more personalized, relevant, and effective campaigns, automated right down to the delivery of the message. I do foresee it crossing the chasm in the adoption curve much faster than any of its predecessors, soon achieving mainstream adoption. But I also feel it will create new problems for humans to solve… only if we are smarter than the machine. The global decline in human intelligence suggests otherwise!

Part of me is actually relieved; we are struggling with the getting quality work out of the young lot and GenAI is perhaps just what we needed. Most of the GenZ in the workforce today doesn’t want to do anything wholeheartedly. They lack persistence (or maybe they are born disillusioned), hate repetitive tasks, have little to no appetite for putting in the blood, sweat, and tears one pays as the cost of success in any field. Nevertheless, we can’t simply peer into the future of advertising with the inherent optimism and anticipation that accompany revolutionary technologies of our past, where we placed extraordinary expectations on innovations, only to realize that the actual outcomes are more nuanced and complex than our rosy predictions.

Remember, GenAI gets smarter on its own.         

It is unlike anything the world has seen before. And while we should approach our expectations with a degree of caution, the possibilities are vast, and the outcome depends on how we wield these tools but more so on how we craft legislation around its capacity to amplify negative effects, such as invasion of privacy, AI bias, and the spread of harmful content, before it hits mass institutional adoption.

As we navigate the next 25 years of advertising, we need to remember that GenAI despite its unique nature, is not a panacea... but a tool – the most powerful one we’ve seen – that reflects and amplifies human intentions and actions. Just as the internet didn't inherently bring wisdom and enlightenment but offered a vast platform for diverse human behaviors, the future of advertising through GenAI will ultimately be shaped by us. The lessons of past technological revolutions teach us that we must strike a balance between innovation and ethics.

Whether the next 25 years of advertising will be marked by the fusion of human creativity and AI's analytical prowess or just dominated by machine creativity, only time will tell. But I will leave you with my bold predictions nonetheless!

1. Copywriting will fade, but storytelling will endure.
2. Graphic designers will dwindle, while art directors will remain vital.
3. Editors and animators shall cede to autonomous tech, becoming hobbies we indulge in at our leisure instead.
4. Account management teams will be very lean, but they will still be around to give a human face to agency relationships.
5. Media planners, buyers, and communication strategy folk will also become one-person teams with a host of tools to wield.
6. PR, Activations, and OOH teams will also see massive automation and even smaller teams.
7. Connected professions like photography, sound and video production, research will also bow to tech.
8. General management departments like administration, human resources, and finance will also be largely replaced by tech. (Imagine an entire finance team of one spacebar engineer and lots of tech).
9. IT services and support teams will be focused on the upkeep of tech equipment instead of teaching the users how to clean their desktop or update their drivers.
10. And lastly, Aurora articles will be written by and for a change, also credited to different proprietary GenAI tools.

--

Written for Aurora Annual Issue - December 2023