The year 2023 is well nigh over. Hasn’t it whizzed by all too fast? Even as it has, if I am to look for one phrase that has had the global world of business engrossed this year, there is no contender to match artificial intelligence. AI has promised the moon and delivered the entire solar system. This baby has grown up to be an animal all its own. It has delivered. It has morphed. In terms of ability, speed and a 360-degree embrace of all kinds of businesses. AI today works as a key component in the much-touted Israeli Iron Dome as well as in the advertising industry, which has typically touted that human creative can never be replaced by machine creative.
What then is AI and what is its promise? The answer is simple. When your computer (and remember your smart phone is one) is able to fulfil tasks just like you do, sentient AI has arrived. AI is the ability of a machine to learn just like you and I; more so its ability to keep learning continuously. Add to it the ability to excel in repetitive chores. Add the lack of bias. Garnish it with speed, and you have a potent cocktail of what’s going to rule us and our imagination in the future, starting 2024. The future, in many ways, is already here.
The year gone by has seen me working closely with AI applications in many businesses. For this piece, I will take the friendly industry of advertising that all of us understand. We are a generation exposed to advertising of every kind all the time. Let me tell you the learnings from my work in this space.
AI is inevitable in the most creative of creative enterprises, advertising included. I see the advertising agency broadly involved in two efforts. One is creating the advertising. The other is distributing it. While the first is called the creative, the second is media. Both spaces are being significantly impacted by Al. Both are led by the magic algorithm that sets aside pure human effort and replaces big chunks of it with machine effort. As of today, AI is a subset of human effort. Expect it to become the superset as machine learning gains traction and the machine gets to be as sentient as the creative copy-writer in the agency of yore (that is, 2023). AI in an ad agency will mean more precise work, more measurable outcomes and work that gets progressively corrected on-the-go, faster than ever, for better business results.
AI is taking gut-feel out of advertising work. This in itself is gut-wrenching for the creative soul. Lord Leverhulme (and John Wanamaker after him) once complained, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Machine learning (ML) today already knows which half of expenditure is not working, and is displaying the ability to do a quick and automated re-adjustment of media expenditure and choices. And this data trawl is not old. It’s as current as 5 days young. And this is seen to be a real-time business- enhancing process by brand and marketing companies that use the advertising agency to do just that. The advertising agency needs to be ready for this upheaval.
AI is making deep inroads in creative copy testing formats basis ML. Algorithmic re-compositions are the norm. AI is today able to tell us which key words work best in the advertising for a category of detergent in India. First, it does 360-degree work and checks out the top 10 campaigns that have worked beautifully for brands in the category in recent history. It throws up words and phrases, just as it identifies visuals that have clicked with consumers, language that has worked, jingles that have scored and key brand propositions that have worked. Simultaneously, it checks out everything that has not worked. At the end of this exercise, the machine tells us what to do and what not to. What high ground must the brand take in terms of its creative articulation of the key brand proposition? And what must it avoid? No guesswork here. Pure math. A bit of chemistry. And no biology (of the gut-feel kind) at all.
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AI within advertising agencies is working on a key theme put forth by Yuval Noah Harari, who said that the operating system of humans is language. Words make language. Within the context of the advertising agency and my recent research, I have a clear case for action in the evolving space of this operating system at the receiving end of advertising communications. I have research evidence that has probed the realm of words. Which words cause what action among consumers? Which words cause awareness enhancements for the brand? Which cause to build a flaming desire for the product or service? Which cause the action of sale? And which cause for the very important satisfaction cue, which is important for a repurchase? AI is also asking whether the entire gamut of the AIDAS words— awareness, interest, desire, action and satisfaction—must feature in a single piece of communication. Must you also use the word that is applicable to all, or a word that is applicable to the highest common denominator consumer, or must you take the path of least resistance and advertise to the lowest? Interesting questions. The answers vary category to category, case to case.
At the end of the AI journey in the wonderland of advertising, we will soon have what I will call dashboard advertising. The heart of all work will be the machine. An intuitive and sentient machine. The machine with a dashboard that will be run by a human.
All this human has to do is to push those virtual buttons. The machine will tell you the keywords, key visuals, key moods, key time movements and more. You can then decide whether the copy will be written by man or machine. Whether all the work that follows is to be done by man or the beast. The AI beast. Knowing all the angst these written words of mine will cause among advertising folk, we might as well call the machine ‘The Beast’. Don’t call me one though.
Don’t shoot me. I am only the messenger.
Harish Bijoor, Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc