Caution: GenAI will Deliver Bad Creative Faster

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) provides a monumental opportunity to dramatically improve the efficiency of the process of developing advertising.  This has major implications for the time-based charging creative agencies presently enjoy.

The question here is, will GenAI also improve advertising effectiveness?

The conclusions Forethought has come to are:

• Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) promises to revolutionize advertising efficiency.

• Properly leveraged GenAI, grounded in marketing science, can and does, outperform traditional methods in both efficiency and effectiveness.

Doomed from the Outset

In most instances, the primary objective of advertising is to stimulate brand preference and/or brand choice.  For that job to be done, the underpinning of the marketing communication should centre on the rational and emotional category drivers of choice.  You might say that statement is blindingly obvious and yet, advertising based on a proposition built on the scientifically identified rational and emotional drivers of choice is perhaps, far less common than you might imagine.  I would say scarce.

In advertising today, what is communicated and where it is placed should largely be a product of marketing science.  How that marketing message is expressed should be a matter of creativity.  Trouble is, in my experience; most marketers and creative agencies have a deeply ingrained belief that what is communicated and how it is said should both be product of creativity.  And therein lies why most advertising is doomed from the outset.

What is communicated often bears no relationship with category drivers of choice but instead is the product of creative imagination which, incidentally, is sometimes right but more often, just yet another excursion into the marketing communications abyss.

As I have previously written, ‘It is common to hear marketers talk about being famous and distinctive but omitting the essential element of that intention; famous and distinctive for what?  And worse still, abrogating the answer to that most fundamental question of marketing success, to the creative agency.¹’

So long as this malpractice is embedded into GenAI produced creative, GenAI will not improve advertising effectiveness.  All it will do is deliver poor advertising faster.  Success comes to those whose brand is distinctive for a rational and emotional category driver.

The naivety extends to advertising testing.  Rather than pretesting the advertising for its ability to activate drivers of preference and choice, instead, the main proponents of ad testing apply a cocktail of made-up measures such as likeability objectively shown to have little to no relationship with preference or choice drivers.

On the other hand, if your GenAI Content Store™ (think prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation) includes the input that scientifically can be shown to drive and predict buyer behaviour, then GenAI will routinely outperform traditional creative on both efficiency and effectiveness.  BrandComms.AI is a Gen.AI service that draws on a “content store” of a multitude of scientifically determined marketing inputs but most importantly, category drivers, to produce creative ideas that have as their foundation, the scientifically inferred chosen drivers of choice.

Differentiation of Anything

It does beg the question, how did imagination become such a mainstay of marketing communication?  In a bygone era when there was a dearth of applied marketing science, Theodore Levitt penned ‘Marketing Success Through Differentiation—of Anything.²’  It was the “Anything” that became the seed of 45 years of the application of vivid imagination over marketing science.  According to Levitt, ‘Only the budget and the imagination limit the possibilities’ of differentiation.  Astoundingly, this application of imagination over science continues today.  It is the absence of any application of science in screening the “differentiation” candidates that severely dates the article, the thinking, and moreover, the practice of creative agencies pursuing differentiation rather than purposely driving brand preference and/or brand choice.

The goal should not be differentiation but rather, competitively distinctive on the chosen category driver/s.

All in All

GenAI is bulldozing its way into creativity.  Indeed, studies have predicted that creative writing will be entirely replaced by GenAI.  American futurologist Roy Amara, notably stated that ‘We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.³’ There is no overestimating the effect of GenAI on the advertising industry.  You do not need to be a prophet to foresee the structural change that will be led by GenAI.  Indeed, those changes are upon us. 

Repeating a past conclusion, ‘My advice is to immerse yourself in Gen AI.  This is not like the rise and rise of social media that was left to the new kids and the interns.  Gen AI is transformative to processes, inputs, and outcomes.⁴’

Sources 

1. https://www.greenbook.org/insights/customer-acquisition-retention/famous-and-distinctive-for-what
2. https://hbr.org/1980/01/marketing-success-through-differentiation-of-anything
3. Susan Ratcliffe, ed. (2016). "Roy Amara 1925–2007, American futurologist". Oxford Essential Quotations. Vol. 1 (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001
4. https://www.greenbook.org/insights/customer-acquisition-retention/the-gen-ai-drizzle-becomes-torrential