The Greatest Challenge Between Insight and Creative

If you are a marketing researcher who has been around a while, you will have witnessed all too often research findings that were intended to inform marketing communications, largely or entirely cast aside once they were in the hands of the creatives. What might not be so apparent, is that brand owners often experience the same feeling of exasperation. Brand owners often prescribe a strategy to the creative agency only to receive back, creative ideas that are all too often, “off-strategy.”

There is another side to this story. That is, the brand owner issuing poor creative briefs that do not capture sufficient information for creatives to produce commercially effective work.

The dropping of the baton between insights, brand owners and creatives has been a perennial issue for communications effectiveness.

In the last couple of years, I started asking myself, if all of this is so predictable, why am I still hoping for a different outcome?  I wondered if perhaps it was how researchers were communicating with creatives that was the problem. What effort had our fraternity made to converse in creatives’ language? And so, Forethought commenced a journey of using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to visually express research findings in our clients’ creative briefs, that is, to converse in their language.

The unintended consequences of expressing research findings visually have been for brand owners to start naming our visualizations “animatics” and then, pretesting the animatic and sending it directly to production, thus bypassing the creative agency. At one level, the failure to embed research findings into creative was addressed. At another level, the cooperation and perhaps, tenuous relationship between research agencies and creative agencies was jeopardized in one fell swoop. We reasoned that client success needed to be prioritized.

100% of Creative will be GenAI Driven by 2030?

I was recently on a panel at a marketing conference and the moderator asked the panel members, by 2030, what proportion of creative agencies’ work would be completed by GenAI. The estimates ranged from 70% to 100%.

At Forethought, we have seen enough to state that well trained GenAI, will produce marketing communications that on average, statistically significantly outperforms corresponding advertising creativity. And instead of a time-based charging system that stretches out to sometimes 12 weeks, once trained, GenAI will faithfully produce quality marketing communications in the blink of an eye. This revolutionary approach is what Forethought calls BrandComms.AI™.

In our capitalist system, GenAI will first replace areas where there is a hefty economic cost arising from unreliable human judgement. For consumer facing organisations, that in part means marketing communications.

The GenAI community has been figuratively sitting at the edge of their seats waiting for the text-to-video generation, OpenAI Sora to be released. Recently the first brand film created with OpenAI Sora technology was released by Toys”R”Us. This is yet another brick in the wall of shifting creativity from story boards to prompt engineering.

All in All

GenAI will make good and bad ads and the difference with be the “content store.”  That is, the breadth and depth of category and brand codes embedded into the prompt. Meanwhile, I recommend you look at the negative comments about this journey on YouTube posts such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTVlnehpRHQ.

It is not about how good or bad the software is in this formative stage. It is about where the trajectory of this momentum is taking us and whether we choose to stand in its way or embrace it.

Holden Saddlery was a company established in 1856 in South Australia. In 1908 Holden began manufacturing cars and in 1931 became a subsidiary of General Motors. To the best of my knowledge, Holden was one of the few examples of an organization that successfully transitioned from horse-drawn to engines.  At one stage, carriage manufactures were lobbying US Congress to outlaw motor vehicles.

Ask yourself, how are you embracing the GenAI change?