How 4 Agencies Are Using Artificial Intelligence as Part of the Creative Process – Adweek

A couple of weeks ago, Coca-Colas global senior digital director Mariano Bosaztold Adweek he wanted to start experimenting with automated narratives, including using bots for music and editing the closingcredits of commercials.

Algorithms are already foundational to programmatic advertisingand will likely only grow to be a bigger part of media buying, but can machine learning ever completely replace the creative process? Its no surprise that agencies adamantly say no, that brands still need human creatives to handle strategy and come up with ideas. But creative shops are stillpreparingfor a timewhen there will be fewerpeople to handle some parts of the business, especially those that involve time-consuming and manual tasks.

To be honest, some of the first people who will lose their job because of AI will be marketing managers, said Firstborns executive creative director Dave Snyder. If your job is really to move numbers around a spreadsheet and optimizing it based on whats performing, the computer is going to be way better than you and faster.

Still, Andy Hood, head of emerging technologies for AKQA, said that shop has invested heavily in AI services but that the best is brought out of the human in the AI. At least for now.

At some point in the future, complete automation may be possibleit may even be desirable, Hood said. But I think for the more foreseeable future, were looking at these intelligent tools that combine with creative teams to find the best results.

Heres a look at how four agencies are using AI as part of the creative process:

AKQA is testing an internal tool it built using IBM Watson for clients that scours online platforms to find new groups of consumers for brands.

It finds new audiences and reaches out proactively to those new audiences that clients arent necessarily talking directly to, said AKQAs Hood. He declined to say which clients are using it, but you could imagine a travel brand being able to find peoplewho are talking about traveling without mentioning a specific brand.

However, the system is not totally hands-off. Hood referencedMicrosofts Taychatbot that spit out racist and anti-Semitic languageas an example of why AI still needs humans behind it.

It takes a degree of confidence in your automated system to just give it access to your public and turn it looseIm not quite sure that were there yet, Hoodsaid. There are still people involved in the process, but weve moved from just using the data and the machine learning to create testing and incredible targeting and actually brought it into the narrative and storytelling.

The shop is working with programmatic-creative platform Thunder to change digital ad creative on the fly, particularly regional and pricing information.

JWT Canada plans to use AI for its airline and bank clients to dynamically change parts of adslike someones location or the price of a flightwhile still using one idea across video, display and audio ads.

"Ultimately it leads to leaner, tighter briefs and work that can really move the needle but also be brand-building if you pull the right pieces together."

- Andrew Rusk, business director of demand creation at JWT Canada

[Targeting] specific markets is something that weve been able to do for decades, said Andrew Rusk, business director of demand creation at JWT Canada. Whats different is using data signals in order to figure out if youre talking to a traveler who is trying to go to Europe as opposed to someone who is traveling to Asia versus someone who has a family or is a single traveler.

The partnership showshow creative agencies are increasingly taking on media agency-like work such as targeting, noted Thunder CEO Victor Wong. We see creative agencies becoming more like consumer-experience agencies where theyre responsible for designing all the touch points for a brand, which oftentimes is paid media, Wong said. Theres still a person setting the strategy and vision, but the execution in the long term can be 100 percent robot.

That may sound scary tocreative shops, said Rusk, but ultimately, it leads to leaner, tighter briefs and work that can really move the needle but also be brand-building if you pull the right pieces together.

Firstborns Snyder said brands arent asking about AI explicitly. He thinks low-level collateral like regional car commercials with creative that typically gets slightly tweaked by location is ripe for algorithmic creative. I think a lot of that stuff 100 percent will be created through machine learning and AI, he said. Youre already seeing it exist nowload the system with a bunch of cuts, and then based on demographic data, it will kind of auto-create an edit thats appropriate for the demographic or psychographic.

He saidits likely to replace marketing manager positions or music editors, for example, who manually refine the sound of a commercial because there will be a point where you dont need that there, I bet.

But Snyderdisagreed with the notionthat AI can replace a creative idea or a human. It still requires training a system to work, he said. In a way, AI would just create a ton of more generic-feeling shotsits not really a narrative.

Saatchi & Saatchi LA has run three or four AI campaigns for brands including a Facebook campaign with Toyota in January that used 1,000 different interests to help people discover unusual activities using IBM Watson.

One ad, for instance, matched peoplewho had an interest in both martial arts and barbecueto serve ads encouraging them to try out an activity called taikwan tenderizer in whichthey used hand-to-hand combat to tenderize pieces of meat in their backyards.

It allows us to deep dive into insights that we normally wouldnt have access to, saidChris Pierantozzi, ecd of Saatchi LA. Were looking at machines to help us break into unique patterns that people have been talking about, behaviors that theyre doing or other things that we normally wouldnt see.

Pierantozzi calls those types of ads flexible storytelling, pieces within ads that can be changed based on data. You still have a story, you still have an idea, and what weve done is weve made the kind of stuff that makes it feel like its more personal to who you are, he said.

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How 4 Agencies Are Using Artificial Intelligence as Part of the Creative Process - Adweek