Someone Has Built Us a Car and We’re Treating It Like a Horse: What Can We REALLY Do with AI in Advertising?
This ad by Coca-Cola is quite exciting. It’s had lots of positive feedback. It also uses generative AI - but in a really creative way. Very much unlike those standard, bland ChatGPT answers, no matter how many expert prompts you may try to feed it in the hope of creating a great article.
But let’s not fool ourselves: the cool Coke ad is just a bit more of the same stuff we’ve seen on TV before, just with a twist. The advertising industry is using the amazing opportunity of seemingly limitless creative possibilities to be lazy, but in a cheaper and quicker way. This is what we’re hearing a lot of when it comes to Gen AI: you can simply do the same thing quicker.
Luckily, you can also do some things differently. Let’s see how we can make advertising better for creatives and brands and, ultimately, for the consumer.
Remember a Golden Rule
AI originally promised us everything: good, cheap, quick ads. However, the golden rule holds true: you can only ever have two of those three, whether it’s in data driven marketing or in purely artistic endeavours.
Generative AI does allow any business or individual to produce quick ads, in huge numbers. We all have the same barrier to entry, and this can be a blessing, like we’ve seen with the democratisation of creativity. But where everyone can produce at the same speed and in the same quantities, not everyone can match quality. AI therefore becomes less of a business advantage, and more of an opportunity to fall behind, together.
Data Is the Real Opportunity
If you fully understand and use data to train language models, the story can be written differently. At Automated Creative, we’ve discovered that we can use AI and automation to help brands understand what drives creative effectiveness. And, from there, the next step is using that DNA of an effective ad, as quickly and in as many iterations as you want, to drive results.
When we surveyed a wide range of senior executives in advertising and marketing for our recent white paper on compounding creative, we found that many didn’t feel that they had the data they needed to make decisions on their ads. Over ⅓ of marketers therefore don’t optimise their digital campaigns once they go live. Unfortunately, a lot of their competitors do this - another way in which not capitalising on data and AI can lead to falling behind.
However, if we’ve learnt anything from trying to fully automate advertising, it is that advertising is a human pursuit and will continue to be for a while yet. The key thing to remember is that Gen AIs don’t understand the content they are making, even though their command of language makes them seem smarter than they are. We’ve been working with AI in advertising for almost six years and we’ve not yet reached the point where we can simply let it take the reins.
So, What Should Brands Do?
Great advertising is the overlap between what the audience wants to hear and what the brand wants to say.
To make this happen, we need data, creativity, and a blend of automation and optimisation. Automating simply by cranking out new content, without looking back at what works and why, and without using that human touch to make decisions, will not get you very far. Creative optimisation, or doing the optimal thing with your creative, is where the magic happens.
The imperative action today is to use technology to save time and money. Not because it will make better creative, but because all your competitors will be doing the same thing. So, the first step is to experiment: what does generative AI allow you to do, beyond just saving time and money? What will it allow you to discover about your consumers, and how can you use that data to further increase your creative effectiveness?
Ultimately, human creative thought comes from training a unique and inaccessible data set - your brain. In a world where any ad will be made instantly, your competitive advantage will be you and the ideas in your head.