Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In the old world, there was no effective way to target individuals searching for niche products, so the companies that succeeded — the household names, so to speak — offered products that appealed to broad swaths of people, and advertised by reaching thousands, and in many cases, millions of people at once (see: Super Bowl and radio ads). The companies who ran successful advertising campaigns through these mediums, then, tended to be of a certain ilk, whether restaurant chains, car brands, department stores, insurance agencies, or brands under the umbrella of a larger consumer goods company.

Enter the modern era, and the internet has flipped the traditional retail model — one characterized by massive investment into retail locations and brand advertising — on its head. Distance between buyer and seller no longer constrains sales — a consumer in Japan could just as easily obtain a watch manufactured in Detroit as a consumer in Detroit could obtain a Sake produced in Japan.

The internet has given buyers and sellers unprecedented access to one another; it has never been easier for a buyer to find a seller who has what they need, just as it has never been easier for a seller to find a user who needs what they have.Google and Facebook ads are a microcosm of this effect. No longer is the cost of individual consumer acquisition so high that reaching a million consumers at once is the only effective way to advertise. Now, through Google and Facebook, niche businesses can target specific individuals whose data determines that they are prime candidates for said niche product or service. ...

The conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning today seems de rigueur, particularly in light of the recent introduction of “chat bots” by Facebook and other notable tech companies. With each new advancement in the field also comes the obligatory pronouncements of the impending 'robot apocalypse'. Not so much in the Terminator, Skynet-esque sense, but rather the extent to which robots can eventually replace humans in roles where decision-making is more constrained. 

While there have been some promising developments, machine-based intelligence is still at the stage where it can increase efficiencies to an almost infinite scale, but still struggles to provide adequate context to the intended audience. How then can there be a role for them in creative process?

I would argue that AI can be used to drive creativity today, but only in tandem with input from human designers....

McCann pitted the robot against human creative director Mitsuru Kuramoto to create an ad for Clorets Mint Tab that conveyed the message: "Instant-effect fresh breath that lasts for 10 minutes."

The client was asked to fill out a form with all the elements they wanted to appear in the ad. The AI robot then scrambled the database for ideas (humans were required to actually produce the final creative).

The two spots would then be thrown to a nationwide poll, where consumers could vote for which ad they preferred. See if you can guess which ad was created by a human and which was created by a robot...