The Democratisation of Creative
Richard Brooks lays out his vision for creative AI in a new article at Performance Marketing World - that we have reached a truly extraordinary ‘Gutenberg moment’
Forget 'one-size-fits-all' masterpieces – AI can now deliver endless relevant creative ads, built fast, built smart, and built to perform.
We are at a point equivalent to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. Suddenly (almost) anyone with an idea could get it printed by engaging a person working as a Setzer / Compositor to manifest their idea ready to put it into print. What this unleashed was a torrent of creativity, and a corresponding increase in knowledge.
The parallels with AI creative are clear. Now (almost) anyone with an idea can turn it into an image or video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many people will now be able to express themselves better? How much art will be created by people with a creative vision but no Hollywood budget?
And of course there’s adverts. Shooting ads was always expensive. Budget constraints meant it was a case of what you could afford to do, not what you wanted to do.
How many times did performance agencies like us have to make do with unsuitable TV ads, poorly adapted for online use and made to last months or even years? How many times have we been unable to run activity due to not having the creative required?
AI creative has arrived just in time. Modern ad formats and consumers have a voracious hunger for content – platform specific, up to date, personalised content.
A new kind of creativity
We don’t need a handful of great creatives. Great creatives will be defined by their relevance to the individual viewing them because that is what drives performance. We don’t need Leonardo da Vinci’s one Mona Lisa, we need Andy Warhol’s many Mona Lisas. There was no way the old creative approach could keep up.
But it doesn’t need to. Because now the barrier to entry for building creative has fallen to a point where we can create high quality creative at the required scale faster and cheaper than ever before.
In fact, Performance Agencies are perfectly positioned to do this, because we’re already experts at optimising activity and creative becomes another variable we can directly control.
You probably keep hearing that “creative is the new targeting” and now we can be in direct control of both.
Sitting between the brands and the platforms we can build the creatives that fit both the brands’ requirements and the objective at the granularity of any individual campaign, placement or audience combination. And being so close to the data, who better to analyse performance and rapidly iterate and optimise ad assets?
Read the full article at Performance Marketing World
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