A big effort by the ad industry to hold back a “tsunami of AI sameness” is underway. It’s being led by Karen Martin, CEO of BBH and president of the IPA, who kicked off an event in London with a call to be bold, to lead the conversation on craft and integrity, and resist the pull of optimisation.
A group of leading creatives lent their support to Martin in making the case for original thinking. Asked what she would like to say to clients, Lynsey Atkins of Baby Teeth said forcefully: “You hired us for a reason, for our years of skills and expertise. We need to let people do their jobs.”
If only all clients were like Tony Moore at Audi, who came on stage to argue against reliance on AI. He said brands need to “Be distinctive or die… AI excels at pattern replication, not pattern breaking. It lacks soul and charm.” Moore showed a cautionary sequence of the kind of “AI slop” that is so easy to produce and then revealed how he and BBH use the technology. The “Zig” chart collects the kind of advertising (good as well as bad) that you’d expect to see in a category, and then uses it as a springboard for making less predictable work.
Lucky Generals’ Shelley Smoler pitted the discomfort and risk of unexpected creative output against the certainty and safety of the familiar. AI offers familiarity in spades and it’s something we all crave at times but, she said, “We have to embrace the anxiety of the job.”
The assembled creatives discussed plenty of advertising that breaks the mould; work that it’s hard to imagine AI ever coming up with. If you put Cadbury’s Gorilla, Marmite’s Love it or hate it, and Burger King’s Post-birth meals into an ad-generator machine, it would surely be incapable of finding a pattern to work off. It’s the kind of creativity, as Smoller said, that comes from having confidence in your own taste, experience and instinct; from building trusting relationships; and from people who are prepared to fight to make themselves heard.
With literally trillions of dollars being ploughed into AI, the battle against its low-cost efficiency and steadily improving creative output is going to be long and tough. But Karen Martin and her cast of advertising big guns (Smoler and Atkin were joined by Alex Grieve at BBH, Miranda Hipwell at a&eDDB, Trevor Robinson at Quiet Storm, Mark Elwood at Leo, and David Wrigglesworth at 4Creative) showed they are up to the task.
Let’s leave the last word to @whatsername1.0, introduced to the audience by Audi’s Tony Moore:
@whatsername1.0 Lemme have a think?
