Unreal advertising

Adobe's released a way of marking your AI outputs, so you can tell people what they're looking at and how it was made. It's basically a fancy watermark. Among the first adopters, Marty Swant reports, is Publicis Groupe – one of the world's biggest agency groups and necessarily, an influential part of the marketing industry.

Personally speaking I can't really see any downsides to this. It seems clear to me that people should be able to tell whether or not they're looking at an object that exists in real life, especially in the context of media that's trying to sell them something.

There are, however, marketers that will be broadly opposed to this. Perhaps they believe the time taken to watermark assets is time wasted, or that the label will somehow put consumers off. Perhaps they find it tiresome.

This week, I wrote about how some agencies in the UK have begun using a program called Unreal to create ad campaign assets. In case you're not familiar, Unreal is a 'physics engine' – software which runs a simulation of a world according to the rules you set. Game developers have used it to create levels for donkey's years.

In advertising, this is an emerging discipline. The tech has only recently become capable of rendering photorealistic settings (and it still can't really do hair or fur or food), but you can build 3D environments and then take static renders, or animated scenes, from it far faster than the normal methods of digital animation. The speed it enables, and the scale that can ensure, poses some interesting questions for production studios and creative agencies, some of which I explored in an article earlier this year.

What makes it relevant to the gen AI watermark discussion though, is that it could lead advertisers and agencies to lean even more on digitally rendered creative.

Gen AI tools aren't the only route to an advertising environment dominated by the rendered, rather than the real. And nobody could mistake the Saatchi & Saatchi UK / Collective campaign for anything except a virtual environment, it's not hard to imagine the same techniques used to visualize a new car ad set in Barcelona, or a supermaket spot nominally shot in Basingstoke.

Should those pieces be watermarked too?

Something for the weekend

• A week after we reported on Ogilvy's use of Adobe gen AI tool Firefly, Havas struck a partnership deal of their own with the company. If you want to understand why they've bothered, here's our original piece.
• I spoke to the founder of US agency Mekanism, a year on from selling to a much larger firm. Apparently, he's had to get used to having a boss again.
• And I interviewed the CEO of SocialChain about their plans to get back to profit.