Just as tech changed the way music is distributed; AI is changing how advertising is created. New capabilities are being added daily, and the quality is so good that you can see where this is all heading: soon, you won’t have to pay for anything that you used to have to pay creative talent for: photos, videos, copywriting, etc. I realize this isn’t a groundbreaking statement, but it has become extremely clear to me with each new post about AI’s generative capabilities for creative and design that we are here. Napster’s technology completely disrupted the music industry, creating a stark before-and-after: Before Napster and After Napster. Advertising and marketing are experiencing it as a series of moments that have now stretched out over months, and soon, years. This slower drip makes it feel less like a dam-breaking moment and more like a leak that is only getting worse no matter how much we wish it wasn’t.

In thinking about Napster and the parallel to music, what did Napster accomplish. Really? At first, a lot. But over time, all it did is shift money from the old players in the music industry to new technology companies. That’s kind of it. Consumers are still finding, enjoying, and paying for access to music in either actual dollars or eyeballs on ad units for the right to listen–even though Napster’s initial intent was for this to no longer be the case. But yes, Napster broke the old music business model. Turned it on its head. Pipelines and plans thrown into disarray. Album sales went down, way down, as people stopped wanting to pay for B-side songs they never had any intention of listening to. Basically, the status quo of how business got done stopped, and a new path forward was needed not just for the business of music to survive, but for the music artists themselves. 

In the advertising and marketing industry, we are in the chaotic stage of the Napster Moment. No one can accurately predict what comes next. All we do know is bottom-of-the-funnel digital and social advertising just got A LOT easier to make and distribute, not just for a professional with talent and experience, but for anyone. For example, I saw yet another video this morning on LinkedIn showing how it only took 10 minutes to find some photos and turn them into static image ads, all with a few prompts into an AI machine. The author of the post thought they were amazing ads, and while I couldn’t disagree more, it’s hard to argue with how easy it was to make the ads. To put a finer point on this post and all the posts like it, they all are saying in no uncertain terms, “Now anyone, yes, even you, can make ads for a business. Any business. Big or small. No intrinsic and/or expertly developed talent required. This thing? It only took me mere minutes.” But where does that leave our 100+ year old industry? From my vantage point, it leaves us in a not-great place. A place where there is now an unlimited supply of cheap, easy-to-make, mediocre (at best) advertising that will continue to flood every empty ad unit of every digital and social media platform. We are here. Now. And we will remain here for quite some time. 

What about the professional advertising talent and the professional advertising businesses you ask? Or maybe you didn’t ask, but you’ve read this far, so here it goes. It has made the talent in this business expendable. It has made a historically hard business, that much harder. But that doesn’t mean we give up. Just the opposite. What I have always believed, and now believe more than ever, is that, similar to the music business or any professional creative business, talent will win out. It always does. But it will take some time. In happened in music and it will happen in advertising and marketing. Consumers demand excellence. Even if they don’t say it out loud. The old saying in retail rings true here as well. That is, consumers don’t tell how they are feeling, they simply vote with their feet and wallets. When it comes to advertising and marketing consumers want to be entertained. Great advertising and marketing do this. Bad advertising and marketing don’t do this. Let the past shape how you view and build toward the future. 

So, what comes next? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think anyone knows. I do know I have recently seen some impressive episodic longer-form storytelling work from Cobra Golf that is great and can have a long shelf life if the brand wants it to. This type of advertising can’t be adopted at scale across all mediums, but I appreciate and love that they are trying to do something unique and different. It’s entertaining, enjoyable, and lets me know what Cobra Golf all is about. Great work. We are going to need more and more of this type of different approach, so we are not just stuck telling stories only through the ad units options offered by digital platforms and media companies. 

One last thought: Is it just me, or is it strange to everyone else, that with the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars that have been poured into generative AI to date, that one of the first groundbreaking advancements is putting advertising and marketing professionals out of work. Why? Maybe it is because advertising and marketing and advertising are businesses people care about? Or maybe everyone wants the world to know they too are creative, and this allows them to do that. In the same way everyone wishes they could sing or play the guitar. I firmly believe that, deep down, Sean Parker started Napster because he failed at every musical instrument he tried. Or maybe, just maybe, the AI companies have no idea what they are trying to disrupt and why, and advertising and marketing was the easiest path to show progress. Whatever the answer, those of us still here living and working in the advertising and marketing business need to find our way through to get back to the moment where the talent is not only selling out venues but selling music outside those venues for a fair price to the audiences that want it.

In my earlier post on Brand and Direct Response, I finished up by letting you know where I felt you needed to find the other 70% of your customers once you’ve found and exhausted the first 30% of your customers, or 100% of your possible direct response audience. I started to write that post, and it turned into this post. Apparently, I have something I need to talk about before.

Let’s start with this question: Why did so much noise and money go to the direct response/digital/ programmatic/social ecosystem in the first place? Because you could make money finding and selling to your customers using this approach. This is a very true statement. But it turns out just not as much as you thought you could.

The direct response/digital ecosystem that was propping up the DTC narrative is the real canary in the coal mine. Going back to the Nike example in my earlier post (Link HERE), Nike is just the company that believed in data so much it took the red pill (performance marketing) and threw out the blue pill (brand building or Demand Creation in Nike-speak), only to realize they really need the blue pill more than the red pill. You can only shop a digital catalogue for so long before you get bored by looking at the pictures and the pricing. Without brand, performance marketing will crush a company if you have enough blind belief in the purity of data, don’t value genuine human connection as a driver of value, and are given enough time to see the painful realizations of your decisions. Brand always needs to be at the center of a thriving business.

Let’s talk about broadcast TV advertising. Why? Because TV advertising remains the literal backbone of the entire advertising/marketing industry. TV advertising was supposed by dead or well on its way to being dead by now. But not only isn’t, it’s thriving in pockets. The biggest pocket is live sports and entertainment. There is nothing like it in America to get a very large audience of people across states, time zones, beliefs, religion, to come together and have the same shared experience. This is missing from American society and live TV programming absolutely fills that void – Olympics, Super Bowl, NBA Final, Women’s NCAA Final Four, Emmy’s, Oscars, Presidential debates, etc. That is why sports and entertainment media rights keep going up and up. You are about to tell me it’s not the broadcast TV rights that are driving the price up, it’s the digital and social pieces that are. I hear you, and respond with, the Broadcast TV rights piece is definitely not going down. And group shared experiences are essential to being human. We need to remember fundamental truths of human behavior when looking at what works and doesn’t work. Advertising and marketing are no different.

What does this all mean for a brand, if you want to be taken seriously as a brand? It means that you need to do whatever you can to be on those shared experience broadcasts. And when you show up on those broadcasts, you cannot show up with unmemorable advertising that is forgotten 30 seconds after you saw it. But that is happening way too much now. Where is the humor? Where is the jingle? Where is the doing something different? How many ads can you remember from growing up? If you do, I can assure you it either had humor, a jingle, or moved you emotionally (even if it angered your neighbor). Remembrance and emotion drive sales.

In my opinion brand leaders have lost the belief in why they are making ads. Belief can often be hard. Especially when you are the contrarian in the room. To see your belief through you must stay true to a vision that you can clearly see, even when others cannot or do not want to see it. Now is the time to believe in what built the entire advertising and marketing industry in the first place: creative talent and their ideas. Why will it work again? For the exact reason it worked before. Talent in any creative business IS the differentiator. Hard stop. Nothing is different this time around except the creative talent and their ideas are now pushing against the direct response/digital/ programmatic/social ecosystem and all the money that was poured into it.

What is the fix? By doing what the advertising business did in the first place, to make this business what it is. As uncomfortable as this might make some brand leaders feel, like all great art, you need to put the artist first. We need to put the creatives back in the driver seat. Right now, most brands have pushed their creative counterparts (advertising agency or in-house) not just to the back seat, but to the third row. Behind the growth marketers and the data analysts. Let them back in the driver’s seat! Even if the car goes left, then right, then back to where it started, then left again, straight for a while, then right again, all before it goes straight again. Let it. Let the creative process be the creative process. It is an uncomfortable, messy, unpredictable, confusing and sometimes strange process. What it isn’t, is a straight line. And this is normal. Very normal. The great creatives will park the car exactly where they should, at the exact time they need to, even if it felt that much of the time from briefing until finished asset that there is no way it was going to happen. It’s just how the whole thing goes. As advertisers and marketers, there needs to be a much bigger embrace of getting more comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable. Greatness is in the uncomfortable.

Creativity is kind of a big deal in advertising. (How’s that for a provocative intro?) Because of that, we creative professionals are constantly pulled between two poles: the fun, playful world of ideation and coming up with award-winning concepts, and the soul-crushing anxiety of imposter syndrome we wage war against on a daily (hourly?) basis. And that was before AI entered the chat. 

When ChatGPT and Midjourney exploded onto everyone’s feeds, creatives the world over were rocked. Up until then, to make a living as a creative professional meant having unique skillsets honed to for a perfect fit between art and commerce. Suddenly, their livelihoods were at risk. Pitchforks were sharpened, torches were lit, and the world’s creatives denounced AI as it was (and still is) drawing on copyrighted IP in anything it output. Fortunately, things have settled down, and we’re seeing AI for what it is: a powerful tool to augment creativity instead of one that replaces creatives. 

How We’re Welcoming Our Robot Overlords

• Research. Before a creative can spin up lightning in a bottle, they must become experts on all things related to their client: the products, how consumers use them, the competition, and the industries. In the Before Times, that meant hours of online searching, forum browsing, reddit scanning, and more. Granted, those things still happen, just with much less time getting spun up on understanding the basics. A significant amount of that work is reduced with AI, as it analyzes sources and summarizes them in an understandable way. While we’d love to take AI’s word for it, part of Hijinx’s process is to read what AI outputs as well as check its references.

• Scratch Track Voiceover. The days of asking already-busy people at the agency to take a “a few minutes” to find a quite spot in the office or home office, read a voiceover script out loud into their smartphone, and send the best takes to the editor are over. Now we use ElevenLabs, an AI-powered voice generator that provides all kinds of tones and “vocal” performances. To be clear, we only use the service for scratch tracks to get client buy-off on early cuts. The final cuts are always reserved for professional voice actors.

• Concept Visualization. It’s one thing to come up with an idea and use words to imagine it. (Looking at you, copywriters.) It’s another to take that idea and use pen, paper, and pixels to turn it into something eyeballs can process. Art directors and designers have spent many nights and weekends grinding out comps to bring ideas to life. Now? AI tools like Midjourney have exponentially accelerated this process. However, Midjourney and other AI image generators come with all kinds of caveats. Chief among them: trademark infringement. At Hijinx, we take great care to only use AI for concept visualization. Any art we create that makes it IRL is original. If it does incorporate trademarks or other IP, the art and has been properly vetted and licensed appropriately.

• Existing Creative. To paraphrase the iconic Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original.” As much as we creatives would love to say every idea we have is as unique as a snowflake’s thumbprint, reality insists otherwise. So we use ChatGPT to search for words, phrases, and conceptual elements related to our creative idea. We’ll also do this when creating taglines. Between AI and the new US Patent and Trademark search, we’ve had good results in spotting and eliminating options that have already had their time in the spotlight.

• Proofing and Editing. To be clear, AI is a long way away from replacing either, especially editors. For proofing, Grammarly works about as well as most of the spelling and grammar tools built into word processing software. It offers suggestions for misspelled words or incorrect tenses and whatnot. Some AI models like Hemingway can even point out where sentence structures are too complex and would benefit from simplifying. It’s a fantastic tool. But it struggles when tasked with generating a replacement sentence or phrase. Sometimes it’s the wrong tone, other times it’s simply not communicating what it’s supposed to. Put another way, we’ve yet to use any AI-generated copy, but we have rewritten copy that AI has flagged as incorrect or hard to understand. 

How We Know Our Jobs Are Safe (For now)

• Storyboarding. We’ve tried it a couple times now. AI is fantastic for generating a single frame. The challenge is replicating the artistic style (loose and fast pencil sketch, for example) across multiple frames. We’ve had some success, but never to the point where an art director or designer didn’t have to jump in and adjust, which only adds time and hours to the project. In the end, a talented storyboard artist will be able to draw frames faster and more accurately.

• Concept Generation. AI is trained on what’s been done and, importantly, how often something has done. It’s why AI can generate a solid sitcom script where it can draw on formulaic frameworks and cliché dialogue, but struggles with original characters and dialogue. Now, if there’s a creative concept that centers on a corny sitcom, a copywriter could generate a script that would include the usual tropes and styles to save time (not to mention their sanity) as they would no longer have to subject themselves to hours of obvious punchlines and canned laugh tracks. 

• Video. It’s startling how fast AI is evolving video. It’s far from perfect but we’re getting closer and closer to a reality where we can utilize Sora and other AI platforms to generate proof-of-concept videos (also known as “rip-o-matics,” one of advertising’s all-time great words). Sora struggles with many of the challenges Midjourney and other AI platforms experience: applying too many or too few appendages on people and animals, soulless eyes, inconsistent lighting from frame to frame and scene to scene, and more.

There’s no question that AI is here to stay. Even if it wasn’t providing anything useful, there’s been far too much invested into it for it to suddenly fade away. And that’s okay. Because while AI improves by learning from humanity’s collective knowledge to improve, we can learn to utilize AI to improve as creatives, as businesses, and as an industry.