It’s no surprise to anyone that AI continues to grow and become ever more present in our everyday lives. Like most companies, we view its arrival with a mix of awe, excitement and trepidation. Whilst even a cursory investigation illustrates AI’s astounding capabilities, most of us recognise the need for a degree of caution. The benefits of AI in advertising may be immediately obvious but what about the downsides? In fact, the whole notion of AI in advertising seems to throw up as many questions as it does answers.
The key to effectively using AI in advertising is recognising its limitations
First off, let’s get this clear. AI is a long way from taking all our jobs. As impressive as it may be, at the present time there are too many limitations, legal and ethical concerns surrounding AI to make an advertising industry staffed by robots a realistic proposition.
Advertising relies on our ability to innovate creatively and tap into people’s emotional drivers, AI cannot deliver this. Our brains make thousands of conscious and unconscious observations and choices every hour. AI at present, cannot mimic the “human touch”. We’ve seen nothing to suggest AI is capable of effectively interpretating this. Generative AI is far from providing the nuanced approach that really makes creative messaging resonate.
In addition, AI by its nature it is fed by pre-existing material. This renders it unable to make the creative leaps our brains are capable of. If cheap, AI generated content starts to undercut the authentic work produced by a human then there is a real danger than innovation will stall. After all, if human writers, creators and producers become lost in a wave of artificially generated content then where will we get our new ideas from?
It also needs to be remembered that AI is far from infallible. Recent research conducted by the BBC found AI assistants significantly distorted information when asked to summarise news articles. This illustrates the care needed when using AI models and shows just how easy it could be for factually incorrect information to be duplicated and distributed. Well informed, knowledgeable and experienced humans are essential for keeping accuracy on track.
AI – Your digital communications assistant?
We’ve all read AI written copy, you may not have realised it at the time but I can pretty much guarantee you didn’t find it engaging. Writing a hundred product descriptions for a catalogue? AI is probably fine. Writing a decent novel? Not a chance.
What AI is great for is getting you off the starting blocks. AI can help support ad agency staff to work with greater speed and efficiency, allowing projects to move forward more quickly. AI allows you to push the fast forward button when it comes to developing ideas and concepts. By making it easier for us to explore new ideas, AI enables us to provide our clients with more innovative responses to briefs. This is a massive tick in AI’s favour. As we all know, happy clients who feel their needs are being understood and met makes for a happy advertising industry as a whole.
AI is also fantastic for data and incredibly useful for media planning and buying. With the right commands, a morning’s worth of analysis can be performed in minutes. But a human eye is required to spot the anomalies. AI won’t know that the page in Woman’s Weekly was ridiculously cheap as a competitor missed the copy deadline or that a particular sales house are almost at their targets and selling space with volume discounts. When it comes to data in advertising, using AI is like having an assistant, someone who can churn through the numbers but needs guidance into how to translate that into real life communication challenges.
There is no substitution for human input
Most importantly, as human beings we thrive and perform at our best when we collaborate with others. AI cannot smooth over a difficult client situation, it cannot effectively respond to the brief that is no more than “show me something new” and it cannot negotiate with partners to get solutions that work for everyone.
What we love about AI is it’s ability to save time, to take on the boring bits and free us to get stuck into the bigger challenges. It won’t take our jobs but it will give us more time to focus on the more interesting parts of them.
In a nutshell. Can AI produce an advertising campaign? Yes, sure. Would it be any good? Almost certainly not. As amazing as AI is, it still cannot match us humans when it comes to real creative thinking.
At the moment AI is an incredibly useful tool. It can help us use our time more efficiently and more effectively. There will undoubtably be companies who will use these efficiencies as an opportunity to reduce their headcount but these won’t be the companies that thrive.
Those that will do well into the future will be the ones who use this extra resource as an opportunity to innovate. To give staff extra training, to spend more time with clients and media partners, to invest these resources in business development and find even more effective ways of doing things. We’re excited to see what the future looks like and how we can better use AI to streamline our processes and offer even better value for our clients.
If you’re happy to let a human guide your advertising, find out more about our services. If you’d like to talk to a real person about your advertising, get in touch.