T-Shaped #3: I fucking like humanity, dude!

What is the role of creativity in advertising, and why will AI make humans in the process even more important?

The counterargument to the importance of human creativity in the future of advertising is that with generative AI people will be served personalized, automatically generated creations that will be more effective than Big Ideas created in the creative studios and served in a mass-media way—the old-school process.

I agree with this approach. I have been talking about personalization of creative execution and doing lots of small experiments with different executions instead of big ideas for years now. Generative AI is making this process even easier than ever, and brands definitely should pursue this approach.

… but there is another side to this generative creativity coin

We tend to like things just because other people did them. A picture drawn by my daughter is 10x more important and valuable to me than stuff done by people who graduated from a fine arts academy.

Dots painted by Damien Hirst are worth more than dots painted by other artists, and probably even more than dots painted by me!

Soup made by my grandmother will be 2 times (maybe 1.5x) better than soup made in a Michelin restaurant.

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We value things because of the meaning we attribute to them, not because of how they look, taste, smell, or feel.

We might like it or not, and some people will even say that it’s irrational, but most things are meaningful not because of what they are but because of who and why did them.

One can argue that consumers will never see the creative team behind the communication in advertising, right? Wrong. More and more advertising campaigns are using artwork and artists themselves in communication. Just remind yourself of all the campaigns with famous singers.

It’s very much possible that in the future, all the campaigns, ads, banners, etc. of worthwhile quality will be digitally signed by the people who made them, because this will be a signal that the company running them actually cares about humans.

Speciest like us: enter generative AI

So, how will generative AI influence this situation? Gen-AI will make the impact of the author and human element in the perception of ad creativity even more robust because it will turn out that artworks made by two people who use the same tool (Midjourney, for example) will be completely differently perceived and evaluated just because of the fact who used the tool.

Gen-AI will make us all realize that the reasons behind artwork (rationale) and authorship of an artwork is where the value of an object resides because most of the other factors will be evened out by the AI.

It was a famous conceptual (and not only) artist, Marcel Duchamp, who was the first to observe that it’s not the object but the artist who decides that something becomes art. He famously did that by putting the urinal on the exhibition as a work of art.

Of course, this is an extreme and provocative example by Duchamp to teach us something about the importance of artistic gesture: beauty does not make art. What makes art is the act of creation by a human being actively deciding, I will create something.

The conclusion is simple: most of us are specists like Musk and we will want to know that movies, music, commercials, and other (even the most utilitarian) objects are made as human gesture.

After all, we tend to fucking like humanity, dude!

Profitability multiplayer of advertising

But is creativity in advertising important in itself? The short answer is YES unless you like to waste money.

The profitability multiplier is a measure derived from the net profit of advertising (revenue from advertising minus its cost). It offers a more accurate gauge than ROI (revenue from advertising divided by its expense), which can be skewed by factors like budget size and diminishing returns, complicating direct comparisons. The purpose of the multiplier is to provide insight into the usual influence of a particular factor on profitability.

Many studies and analyses revealed that the most crucial component of advertising that marketers can directly influence to maximize return on investment is creative execution. While various factors related to media planning and strategy were also essential for success, creativity stood out as a unique factor that could produce exceptional outcomes.

Companies excelling in creativity tend to outperform in tangible financial measures.

The only component of marketing that has higher profitability multiplayer than creative execution is brand size. Therefore, creativity is the primary tool at our disposal to significantly boost marketing ROI.

Towards the world of meaning

The higher the standards of living, discretionary income, and civilizational level of people, the more symbolic creatures we are becoming.

Creativity, art, and narratives that are injecting meaning into our lives will have a wider mindshare of consumers, so the impact of them on the profitability of companies will be growing fast. Generative AI might help us fulfill this need, but creators (people!) and the idea of authorship will become more important than ever.

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