AI: The Perfect Tool for the Independent-minded

Creative agencies are having a crisis of confidence and identity. Because they know that the world around them is evolving at speed. The consumers they are trying to reach with their exciting ideas are changing their shopping habits and their media and entertainment consumption. And because artificial intelligence and machine learning is slowly but surely beginning to pervade all kinds of businesses from stock market trading to healthcare.

Advertising agencies cannot afford to ignore the potential benefits of using AI to deliver better solutions for their clients. Initially it might go against what agencies believe is their USP – the very human (some say divine) spark of creativity; the lightening in a bottle that leads to inspired images and concepts, such as a gorilla playing the drums or a boxer dog on a trampoline.

But embracing the potential of AI and big data will turbo-boost an agency’s potential. We have taken the first steps at Atomic by becoming the exclusive creative agency partner of Blackwood Seven, a tech company that uses predictive analytics and AI to devise the optimal online and offline media plan for a campaign. 

The power of connected creativity and media is boosted a thousand-fold when big data-crunching algorithms are in the mix. Growth and profit in its most basic form come from how businesses manage the value-building levers of branding and efficiency-driving levers in combination.

Working with an agile, AI-driven media plan based on dozens of data touchpoints will mean an agency’s ideas will have the best chance of reaching the end consumer – and also ensures the agency comes up with the right mix of media assets, so the client does not waste money. It’s the old ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no-one round to hear it’ argument. The best ads in the world are useless to a brand owner if no-one ever sees them – and it’s even better if the right person sees them at the right time.

This means honing creativity to be totally optimised.  It’s not just learning from experience of previous media plans, but mapping creativity to a level of individual execution, channel, context and moment in time. It’s what we know about programmatic but applied to the whole media plan from TV to PR to Social Media.  This is not just about channel planning and expenditure phasing, but message and format optimisation.

AI can also feed creativity by finding patterns in data in amazingly quick time.  We know that AI can predict creative success – Netflix can already ‘predict’ if a new TV series will be a hit before it even makes it, so I’m sure AI can also identify the anomalies that fresh creative thinking depends on. Insights that are true enough for a number of people to recognise, but rare enough to offer a different way in to the creative brief.

For instance, travel company data could reveal the travel buying habits of outliers and lead to Airbnb using its most remote locations in its advertising. Or Uber could use the transactional profiles of car pool users to find out if weekend night party-goers use the cars as some kind of social pre-toxing service to get them pumped for the night and devise services accordingly.

We are not alone in taking pioneering steps and others, such as CP + B and Saatchi & Saatchi are playing in the AI sandbox The former developed a bot for Domino’s (below) while Saatchi’s Team One actually brought a film created by machines (trailer below) to the Cannes Lions festival this year.

These are toes in the water, experiments to examine the potential of AI, test and learn how it can be applied to a client’s problems. They also illustrate the inquiring mindset that has always been the hallmark of the best advertising agencies. Creativity is built on open minds, not closed minds and if advertising agencies want to survive and stay relevant they must rediscover and reignite their innate curiosity.