Artificial intelligence, the joys and sorrows of advertising agencies
Some ad agencies rejoice and see artificial intelligence as a godsend, others imagine a catastrophe. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is the first brand to have signed a contract with Open AI and this could be just the beginning of a long series of collaborations. Le Monde article
In the last year – we read in the Le Monde article – the main advertising groups have intensified their partnerships with the giants of technology and artificial intelligence. They hope to take advantage of this technological revolution in terms of increased productivity and the possibility of producing breathtaking creations.
A museum full of masterpieces. An uninspired student. And a blank sheet stared with disappointment by his teacher. At first glance, nothing to write home about. Except that… a sip of Coca-Cola – and a strong dose of artificial intelligence (AI) – will allow the lonely student to find inspiration in a breathtaking two-minute commercial. The bottle will pass from one painting to another, from Andy Warhol's Large Coca-Cola to Wonder Buhle's You Can't Curse Me, from Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl to Munch's The Scream, changing texture depending on of the works crossed and the artificial intelligence techniques used.
This global “Masterpiece” campaign would never have seen the light of day without artificial intelligence generator Stable Diffusion, or London-based start-up Stability AI. In February, Coca-Cola signed a partnership with Open AI (owner of the ChatGPT, Midjourney and Dall-E image generation software) and with the Bain consulting group for its future advertising creations. This change of direction was immediately interpreted as an eloquent symbol of future upheavals. Coca-Cola is the first brand to sign a contract with Open AI.
That's enough to whet the appetite of the big cats of the media world. Within a year, the car started up. Publicis was the first to enter the game. In October 2022, the world leader in terms of market capitalization signed an exclusive agreement with Open AI and then, following this, with its major shareholder Microsoft. In 2017, its artificial intelligence platform Marcel already signed a partnership with Microsoft, making extensive use of Open AI.
In April 2023, it was the turn of John Wren, boss of the American Omnicom, the third operator in the sector, to sign an agreement with Open AI itself, which gives him direct access to its algorithms, but without offering him the possibility of design an advertising campaign using your data. Finally, on May 29, WPP, the world's number two in the market, signed an alliance with chip giant Nvidia. The war on generative AI has been declared.
MORE AND MORE CONTENT
But what's so amazing about it? While brands are seeing production costs fall, advertisers are being asked to produce more and more personalized content for social networks on an almost industrial scale.
Gone are the days when agencies were content to design specific products for each of the five major media: television, radio, print, billboards and film. “Today, we sometimes have to produce 300 pieces of content (videos and reels on social networks, text messages, press releases, emails, radio spots, etc. This content will be distributed in different formats, languages and even packaging. If we employ staff to doing this, we would no longer be profitable," he continues. We've been using AI for a long time, with productivity gains of up to 30%."
Charles Georges-Picot, president of the Marcel agency and of Publicis Luxe, agrees and summarizes the figures: “Before, without Google, it took a week to produce a nice mock-up and draw a storyboard [a scene breakdown for scene from a commercial film]. Then, with Google, we managed to do it in three days. And now, with Midjourney or Dall-E, in two hours! But that still doesn't replace the time it takes to create."
Meanwhile, a number of tasks have been automated, such as fitting to size, format and title constraints. “We can take a thirty-second commercial and adapt it to different social networks: we will opt for such a long format for Facebook, a very mass communication medium; for Instagram, it will be 15 seconds which will be edited in a much more artistic way because it is a more 'artistic, aesthetic' social network; and finally for Twitter a video of a few seconds, edited in a much more informative way”, adds Frédéric Tresal-Mauroz.
OTHER FORMS OF CREATIVITY
The creatives are thrilled. Artificial intelligence paves the way for other forms and areas of creativity, for new types of expression and images,” exclaims Andreas Markdalen, creative director of Frog, the content production subsidiary of Capgemini. I can make a film that combines the styles of David Lynch and Sofia Coppola. It's a new tool that will disrupt everything: the way we work, the way we think…”.
Mathieu Plassard and David Raichman, respectively president and creative director of Ogilvy (WPP), confirm this. “This technology offers us speed and quality in terms of content and images, as well as a higher level of creativity,” they assure. Their agency was the architect of one of the first AI campaigns: “La Laitière”, inspired by Vermeer's painting, revised and corrected by AI with the addition of spectator characters reproduced “in the manner of”. The most extraordinary voices, sounds and images become commonplace. Only the creative idea will make the difference.
But the added value of this technology also lies in its ability to get into the consumer's head, sending him messages that correspond to his most intimate preferences. This is an approach already favored by sector operators through the collection of hyper-personalized data. AI can be trained to record and then interpret the emotions of Internet users by linking it to a certain amount of content on Facebook, TikTok, etc. which correspond to "click" and "like". The AI then learns to figure out who likes what.
“All emojis are already emotion sensors, so Meta knows how people react and has long been integrating emotion sensors into its AI layers,” explains Stéphane Guerry, president of Havas Play. Better still, AI is proving to be particularly valuable for immediately measuring the effectiveness of content posted on various social networks and even for anticipating what will work best, including on television.
From here to the construction of scenarios the step is short, and it has already been done. “When we create a new product, there will be three quarters of the expected scenarios and the AI will be able to measure its advantages and disadvantages, even if it will only be based on past data,” explains Jean-Pierre Villaret, former senior executive advisor by Capgemini Invent.
COMPILE BUT DON'T INVENT
The past! This is the AI's Achilles heel, as ChatGPT remains locked in its responses to dates, events and people prior to September 2021. Regular updates have allowed the information to be updated to later dates, but so far the AI has not been able to able to search for data on the web autonomously. “This is possible now, thanks to plug-ins that Open AI added in March 2023,” explains Eric Delannoy, vice president of WNP. These plug-ins allow you to access external sources and databases, and even search for information directly on the web.
Remarkable when it comes to gathering information, AI is much weaker when it comes to proposing a disruptive, unusual or unique idea capable of shaking the rules of the game in a given sector of communication. The co-president and creative director of BETC (Havas), Stéphane Xiberras, had a bitterly funny experience: “I enjoyed collecting all the slogans of the campaigns we have designed over the last thirty years for our client on Evian babies association, to see if, by chance, a brilliant creative idea would emerge. ChatGPT put it all together and proposed “Drink and Live Young”.
Like all great technological advances, this one is likely to be accompanied by social tensions in the media buying and production industries, where a number of jobs are likely to be automated. “In production, we have a huge automation project,” explains Frédéric Tresal-Mauroz (Prodigious). “Thanks to the daily use of ChatGPT and Midjourney, a number of jobs and activities that had been outsourced will be able to be processed automatically within the company.” The work of the paginators, storyboarders, documentalists and researchers will all be carefully vetted. “At the same time,” he continues, “we will no longer have large teams of assistants during filming. More and more often it will be only the director and the photographer who will make the decisions on the spot”.
Filming in distant locations is set to become increasingly rare. At Publicis, Prodigious has set up a “real-time 3D” studio, where the walls and ceiling are covered with LED screens, inspired by the example of The Mandalorian (Star Wars). It is an immersive world, in which the images are reflected and the actors are "inlaid". Again, there is no need for fitters: “Just say 'raise the sky by 2 metres'”, explains Frédéric Tresal-Mauroz. The cost of building a studio of this type represents a substantial investment of €3 million.
THE SEEDS OF A SOCIAL CRISIS?
In response to these concerns, the advertising groups highlight the education initiatives undertaken with the creation of the Wunderman Academy (by WPP) and Havas University. An important internal training program has been launched at Prodigious, while other professional figures are emerging, such as that of the prompter, the employee who takes care of the ChatGPT briefing and provides him with as much information as possible, while in the past he was the prompter at take care of retouching and cropping by hand. Jean-Luc Bravi (DDB) is more pessimistic: "We are talking about new profiles, new hires, but this will represent a ratio of 1 to 5 between the person hired and all those who will have to leave".
The head of DDB France sees the seeds of a future social crisis. We will have to tell all these people who bring no added value, that we no longer need them,” he says. Suddenly they will no longer feel 'degraded', which has been the dominant sentiment up until now, but worthless. For the moment, there is no real awareness of this, because many people are concerned above all with their purchasing power and believe that these debates on artificial intelligence are matters for the elites…”.
This analysis is in line with the observations made in the Financial Times by Mark Read, CEO of WPP: “It is much easier to identify the jobs that AI will disrupt than to identify the jobs it will create”. For the moment there is no time for debate. “We have no open discussions with the unions. They didn't try to question us about it,” says Raphaël de Andréis, president of Havas France.
But generative AI isn't just a concern. “It is also a tool of democratization. AI will help small organizations that don't necessarily have the means and resources to carry out productive and creative activities,” says Benoît Clavé, director of strategy at Herezie. “This is very likely to have a major effect on our industry and reconfigure it.” Although, after an unhappy year, the sensational comeback of Mamaa (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Alphabet), which were already heavily involved in artificial intelligence technologies, puts it into perspective.
Faced with them, the big brands, also forced to produce thousands of contents on a permanent basis, have begun to gear up. Unilever already owns about thirty content production studios and continues to acquire more, as well as Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Reckitt, etc. The agreement signed in February between Coca-Cola and Open AI could be just the beginning of a long series.
“How will agencies justify the value of their creative work and content, both in terms of time and money, in the face of advertisers who can use AI to produce storyboards, photos and even short promotional films?” worries Gilles Masson (Australia. GAD). And how can we avoid becoming – once again – more submissive to the technological giants who will have data and tools at their disposal? The challenges are multiplying for major advertising groups. And for some, the current euphoria over AI may soon give way to a very real hangover.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/intelligenza-artificiale-gioie-e-dolori-delle-agenzie-pubblicitarie/ on Sun, 18 Jun 2023 05:21:25 +0000.