By Jasmin Bedir, CEO, Innocean
You know the old adage: innovate or die. This has never been more true than today: our industry is going through the biggest change in the decades I’ve been working in it.
There is no choice but to stay ahead of the pace of change or raise a toast.
The only slight complication is that the pace of change is so rapid that if you blink you might miss it.
This all sounds a little dark, so I’m going to keep it light and explain it through the lens of a well-known story about a young girl who falls down a rabbit hole and lands in a fantasy world full of weird and wonderful . people and animals.
Yes, you know this one. And yes, that sounds a bit like our industry, doesn’t it?
We are in a new era of AI in literally every aspect of marketing communications.. And once you start exploring the rabbit hole, it’s very, very easy to get lost. And there is literally no way out. Everything is evolving: from strategy to CX to martech, advertising technology and of course creativity and storytelling.
Yes, of course, it is the creative concept that is always king, and yes, uniqueness and automation rarely go hand in hand. But the big word here is the word always.
Now more than ever, continuous learning and technological adaptation will be important to all of us who run and work in creative businesses. We need to invest in a new generation of creative thinkers: AI-native creatives.
I know this sounds like marketing bullshit, but hear me out.
Preparing our businesses for a time when many of the tasks we work on now can be done in the future by technology is the most important task of all. Just like the old fable, there are a few anthropological lessons along the way once one lets oneself fall down the rabbit hole:
How to add emotional thinking, human empathy, and original storytelling through curation, not creation. This is a significant difference in skill set, and it requires training and learning. Of course, there are always early entrepreneurs who push the boundaries, as we see in this article. The North Star example. But realistically, what we need is a retraining of our creative minds to amplify and redefine what we as a creative industry bring to the table and how we add value and how we continue to inject human ingenuity into communications that are essentially created without humans.
Let’s go on an adventure and I’ll be the Cheshire Cat. If you email me an image of your AI interpretation, I’ll buy you a drink. It will be real.
See also: Jasmin Bedir: The trap of shiny new AI tools
See also: Jasmin Bedir: Limits of AI in an advertising agency
See also: Jasmin Bedir: Ethical AI, the great oxymoron emerging from martech
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Top image: Jasmin Bedir
