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.