Struggling to integrate A.I. creativity into marketing? Read this.
Why A.I. should be part of your creative team, next to the art director and copywriter.
This article is co-authored with my loving life and work partner, Gary Koepke, at Seyhan Lee. He is credited with making brands, i.e., Hummer, GAP, Cadillac, MTV, and PRODUCT (RED), with his former agency, Modernista! He also played a significant role in getting Converse sold to Nike, so he knows a thing or two about marketing. For this article, we combined my knowledge of A.I. creativity and his gargantuan experience in marketing to offer an array of possibilities to explain how you can use creative A.I. in your work as a marketer. All industries are adopting A.I. one way or the other, especially around data analysis, optimization, supply chain, et al., but these approaches reside outside of our interest realm as we, like Steve Jobs, did, credit our creative power to our intuition and not our intellect.
The point of advertising has always been to adapt to customers’ demands and find clever ways to raise awareness and desire for a product by uplifting the human experience. In the times of Madison Avenue Mad Men, advertising was about making people aware that the products were there and they were the wise choice. When products became parodies of each other, advertising shifted to creating emotional connections with the consumer. You had to interrupt their watching T.V. or reading a magazine to experience an advertisement, by way of clever lines, original ideas, and visuals, such as the iconic Absolute campaigns or Benetton. This gave way to the rising trend of using artist partnerships. Right now, especially since 2022, it feels like we have changed timelines. Attention spans are much shorter, reality is subjective, linear thinking is passé, and the marriage of technology and computer graphics has become our U.I. in life.
We see A.I. creativity impacting the industry in two main ways. One is rather pragmatic, and the other is creative. On the practical side, it is a no-brainer that VFX, pictures, and motion pictures generated by A.I. with human supervision take less time and labor and are much more cost-effective. Right now, many things that are second nature to humans are impossible tasks for machines, i.e., visualizing a man walking down the street. However, give it a few years, and we can make Brad Pitt dance like James Brown only by guiding the machine with words. The second central point is that this novel tool allows us to create mind-bending, never-before-seen, extraordinary visual graphics. See the example above, our film Connections for European appliance brand Beko’s sustainability statement used creative A.I. to visualize the seamless transitions between the patterns that repeat in nature and the human body.
Creative A.I. is birthing new ways to visualize and tell stories and many other ways to emotionally connect consumers with brands and products. A great analogy would be Dr. J and Michael Jordan capturing the audience’s attention with their slam dunks, giving birth to slam dunk contests. Progress is measured by challenging people to go beyond their current capacity for the good of the collective. This is exactly what our experience with creative A.I. has been. It invites us to open new doors of perception in our minds as creatives and invites the consumer to be part of these never-before-experienced worlds to enhance, enlarge, and enchant their own worlds.
A.I. used in concepting
This is arguably the most widespread adoption of A.I. creativity since Midjourney mainstream-ified text-to-image generation tools. As a creative director or art director, you can have a brainstorming session with text-to-image tools, i.e., Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Dalle2, RuDalle, and spice up your conception experience. We like to do this in our free time for no reason other than to expand our imaginations, so when we are looking for a creative solution, we have more “data” in our subconscious.
A.I. used in campaigns / art direction
This campaign above is not a real IKEA campaign; it is a concept by Jona Rotting. After his cat trashed his sofa, he had the idea of a cat-scratch-proof sofa: The Scratch Couch®. As the product did not exist, he used his A.I. creativity skills to visualize his idea. Now imagine all types of original stuff you can bring to life.
Buh-bye stock photography
The more generative tools become visually coherent, the more they replace illustrations and stock photography. We are not saying that people will stop commissioning illustrators nor buy stock photography, but it will become an option and not a default. If you are in one of these professions and currently feel threatened about your job, please read my article, How will humans remain relevant in the age of A.I. and Dalle2?
Visually compelling videos / A.I. motion pictures
In 2022, if you want your campaign to be relevant, you have to end up on the phone, competing with not only other agencies but also with the content of everyone’s auntie, cousin, crush, and role model. Right there is where A.I. creativity, especially videos created with A.I., appeals to humanity’s desire to be surprised with something new. Our campaign content needs to capture people’s imagination, making them stop at all costs. Due to its parallel processing nature, motion pictures created by A.I. look different than the way we experience the world around us, offering us a fresh new perspective. Thrilling, compelling, awe-inspiring, and most of all, captivating. A.I. videos provide new ways to engage with the consumer.
New ways to engage the customer with A.I. in AR, XR, Real+
Due to the generative nature of A.I. creativity, the latency of imagining something in our mids and seeing it in front of us became very short. Creativity, which was one reserved to those that had skills with their hands (IRL or digitally) is now accesible to everyone who can put two words together. This example above is a concept made by a Shopify engineer which demonstrates the future of creative customer experience. Some brands, like Apple, like to control the UX to the nth detail, and some like to give more free range of creativity to the consumer. This will be a great tool for brands who are interested in co-creating with their customers.
This outpainting tool by Dalle2 offers the creation of seamless storyboards. This will become an excellent tool for client presentations when we present ideas for a film and for directors who love their tight storyboards. We sympathize with you if you think that there is something terribly vulgar and crude about watching the machine “fill up the gaps” between a Munch and a Van Gogh, but let’s not forget that this is only a demo to show you how to use this tool and not an invitation to downgrade art to the lowest common denominator.
We advocate a seamless integration of these tools into the agency creative pipeline. Currently, agencies and creatives have fun with text-to-image tools such as Midjourney. As you have discovered in this article, the possibilities for A.I. creativity are much more vast. A.I. is not here to steal our jobs as marketers but to be an assistant to enable us to make more attention-grabbing, awe-inspiring content. A.I. is becoming part of the creative and production processes in the same way digitalism infused itself into the marketing world in the early 2000s. We create tools to uplift the human experience and open our minds to new possibilities. As Einstein said, “Imagination is everything. It is the preview to life’s coming attraction.”
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