The Art of Automation
In this guest post, Antony Giorgione, talks about the divide between automation and human-generated creative content and how the less creative should start worrying about being replaced.
Which image is the fake Rembrandt? On the left is a detail from ‘An Elderly Man in a Cap’. Though it bears Rembrandt’s signature and was painted during the 17th Century it has been reappraised by critics as the work of one of his contemporaries, deliberately rendered in the master’s style.
On the right is a detail from ‘The Next Rembrandt’ – a computer-generated image derived from the analysis of over 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt’s actual work. Its creation is described:
“The process to create the finished 3D-printed painting took over 18 months, following painstaking work involving a team of data scientists, developers and Rembrandt experts.
The real hard-to-replicate trick is lateral thought Even in a copied Rembrandt there is none. Yet the best advertising is full of it – a leap which makes it interesting. To your point, bad run of the mill advertising is ripe with formulaic thinking. So why bother getting humans to do it? I’m sure in the future boring pasta sauce ads will be done by computers. I’ve long questioned why clients even bother going to agencies only to force them to do the same ad we’ve seen for decades.
“To your point, bad run of the mill advertising is ripe with formulaic thinking. So why bother getting humans to do it? I’m sure in the future boring pasta sauce ads will be done by computers. I’ve long questioned why clients even bother going to agencies only to force them to do the same ad we’ve seen for decades.” – Unfortunately thats all thats required, product and price. Eventually most agencies will go as marketing departments finally find away to justify their existence, running Algos.
@Bon. I agree. What seems to be lacking in these technologies is the ‘associative’ or lateral aspect. To flesh this out a bit, I’m going to reverse engineer one of the images from the google exhibition featuring human face with a dog’s nose. At present, the algorithm has identified ‘nose’ and juxtaposed it as a ‘like for like’ object.
But say you’re a business providing healthcare products for pets, and your ‘front-end’ human derived strategy plays on the idea that your pet may look healthy, but that’s not what’s actually going on inside it (worms maybe). This strategy may be summed up in the line: ‘Is your dog lying to you?’. At some point, it may be possible for the technology to trawl our massive information base, discover that Pinocchio is an analogy for lying, and then produce an image of a dog with an extended snout to run with the headline for a piece of collateral.
This is admittedly a relatively lame ‘concept’, but still one that introduces the lateral aspect to automation. It would be fascinating to see the ideas a computer would generate along these lines – some completely unusable, but others perhaps as obliquely-derived as those from a human. Then it’s down to the CMO to pick a preference.
I think you’ve also nailed the key point, it’s not that we creative professionals may be any less creative, but that the expectations of the clients are determining the relative ‘low grade’ of the communication concept. The difficulty in all this is that there is no consistently demonstrable causation between ‘great creativity’ and effective marketing. In other words, sometimes the mundane (and annoying) works as well.
I don’t think the sky is falling though, as Brad Bennett points out in his excellent piece sitting just above mine in the opinion column; ‘Traditional brand communications are losing their effectiveness on a biological level.’ When the computer can replicate our methodologies, it may be that our perceptive evaluation of the communication has advanced beyond it. The best stand-out work will exist in counterpoint to (or at least alongside) this formulaic and programmatic approach.
Thanks for your feedback.
@the future is now. While advances in technology might suggest a reduced workload for agencies down the track, I don’t think every consumer category is going to be led by a pure ‘product and price’ proposition.