A Question of Craft (and AI)

“The advertising out there doesn’t look as good as it used to,” barked the gruff old art director sitting across the café table from me. “There’s just no sense of craft anymore.”?

Often dismissed as the rose-tinted ramblings of advertising’s old timers, the idea that craft skills have declined is one that you’ll often hear from industry types of a certain vintage, stated either quietly or loudly depending on their employment status. And while it’s not a new sentiment, it may have become even more relevant to the fortunes of creative agencies.?

?

With AI tools likely to make routine content creation more accessible and cost-effective for marketers, the question of whether craft skills are in decline becomes less of a curmudgeon’s grumble, and potentially more of an existential question for an advertising industry that makes a disproportionate amount of its livelihood from asset production, rather than its strategic or conceptual thinking.?

?

Let’s suppose for a moment that my cantankerous art director friend is right. If we are to accept the charge that craft skills are in decline, this becomes a serious problem for the creative advertising industry. Craft skills – and visual craft skills in particular – are the product of practice, repetition, and deep focus; for all the YouTube tutorials in the world, you cannot hack your way your way to mastery of a craft. Or, as an account handler once said to me while observing a grizzled production veteran in action, “you cannot fake experience.”?

?

However, speak to the industry’s remaining veterans and you’ll hear tales of creative agencies stacked with overworked juniors who have no one to teach them and no time to learn. The advertising industry’s relationship (or lack thereof) with experienced staff, and the reasons for it, is frequently discussed; suffice to say, there are no quick fixes.?

On the other side of the agency-client relationship, I’ve spoken to marketers who lament the fact that they are frequently disappointed by the finished work produced by agencies. Not that the work is necessarily bad, they say, but too often the level of finish struggles to match the brilliance promised in the pitch deck.?

?

With fears of a recession likely to cause further tightening of marketing budgets, combined with the continuing improvement of inexpensive AI content creation tools, it’s not a huge leap to suggest that much of a marketing client’s bread-and-butter work will move in-house, overseen by a handful of internal creative staff. Why would you pay an agency to do the churn work when you don’t have to??

?

A small hop further down this path of thinking would suggest that the only work to be outsourced to agencies will be major brand-building setpieces. Sometimes described as “culture” work rather than the “collateral” work, these highly creative projects require top-tier specialist talent and are highly resource intensive.? They are also, by their very nature, rare and hard to execute. In a world such as this, a particularly Darwinian agency management type once told me, “the weak will die - and probably quite a few of the strong too.”?

?

Looking at this optimistically, we could see these challenges as the pressure cooker in which a newfound focus on excellence is forged, the start of a creative arms race amongst agencies that could even usher in a new golden age of outstanding output.?

?

Less optimistically, we could take the view of my gloomy art director friend. “Seeing the iceberg is one thing,” he notes. “Turning the ship is another.”?

?

About the Author??

Jamal Hamidi is a creative communications leader with two decades of experience in advertising and communications agencies. A writer by trade, he has worked as a creative, executive creative director, and managing director for agencies in Australia, Hong Kong, the UK and New Zealand.??

Now based in Sydney, he works directly with marketing clients, helping them to tell their brand stories. Most recently, he’s worked as part of a NEON Leaders team supporting a multi-national foodtech start-up to develop highly impactful communications campaigns.?

About NEON Leaders?

Founded in 2019, NEON Leaders is a global community of leading marketing experts, working independently; committed to the potential of collective support.? Together we unleash our best potential to unlock greater value for ourselves and the businesses with which we work, whilst having fun along the way! We welcome the best senior independent marketing talent to our community whilst building a diverse collective of skills and expertise.???

Find out more at www.neonleaders.com?