Reinventing Creativity with Generation AI

The real challenge is what will happen when the entire industry is reinvented with AI.

So says Stephan Pretorious, chief technology officer at global advertising giant WPP, adding:

Each of the business tools that we use in our industry, but also in every other industry, whether it is coding, legal or financial work, will be enhanced by AI in the future and the capacity of your organization Adopting these tools will determine your productivity.

When considering the impact of generative AI, marketing is one of the most commonly cited roles/functions. Last year, WPP signed a deal with NVIDIA to create an AI-enabled content engine for digital advertising. It was presented at the time as relying on WPP’s leadership in emerging technologies and generative AI.

Ten months of thinking around use cases are evolving, says Pretorious:

We all understand that AI is in general terms a transformative technology, but it is only when we address the true vertical applications in particular sectors that we truly understand what is possible and how things will change in the future… I think in general terms the debate or topics (around AI) go in two directions. First up is my new model, look how fantastic it is. So modeling competition. And the other: “Oh my God, this is going to take away my job.” So there’s this dichotomy between the end of the world and very exciting news all the time. And it’s really interesting to see every time something big drops, how the whole industry focuses on that for a few days until the next big thing comes along.

The “big thing” around generative AI happened 18 months ago, he claims, when AI got a user interface:

What happened when AI got a user interface was that it became democratized for the first time. I mean, open AI was just making models reporting GPT-1, GPT-2 and no one really cared. I think there was a New Yorker article, but when they opened up ChatGPT for the world to understand and experience, people’s understanding of what this technology means in terms of the ability of machines to create content , to think, to write, reason is well established.

Sell ​​Generation AI

From WPP’s perspective, interest in AI dates back to before ChatGPT began to accelerate the hype cycle, he says:

We’ve worked really hard over the last four or five years, but especially over the last 18 months, to really help our people understand what the impact of generative AI is going to be, but also how to use it and how to adopt these technologies in everyday life. We launched an extensive evangelism program throughout the company. We have 110,000 people worldwide (and) probably about five times as many customers in terms of individual people. We set out to really help people understand that we see generative AI as augmenting human creativity, not as a threat to your work, but as a new set of capabilities through which we can express ourselves and be creative.

So how does AI augment human creativity? It is a subject that has sparked a lot of controversy in recent months. Pretorious is very optimistic on the subject:

It was very exciting when I started going around our creative agencies in mid-2022 and I asked them what are they doing, what tools are they using, what are you experimenting with? How do you feel about this? It was a creative director in Toronto who said to me, “I’m really excited because prompt is just the new art direction.”

This meant that to use AI well, especially in visual fields, one needed to have studied design, photography, art, aesthetics, etc. in order to not only know what we wanted to achieve, but also to judge whether what is delivered or generated is good. This idea of ​​AI rewarding traditional humanities training and soft skills is something that I find very exciting and something that our people are very optimistic about. In fact, the creative community was the most enthusiastic and least threatened.

He cites examples of WPP’s work with clients, such as NIKE’s campaign to celebrate its relationship with tennis champion Serena Williams, in which avatars of her at 18 and her today played a match to see which one would win. Or Virgin Cruises uses deep copy of Jennifer Lopez to deliver a personalized content experience to passengers. These are things that:

You could have speculated about this in the past, but you couldn’t have done it without AI.

Marketing Problems

On the other hand, he suggests that marketing as a function has a problem:

Since the 60s and 70s, brands essentially went to an agency and the agency did everything for them. They created brands, they even created products, they named them. Marketing and advertising have become completely fragmented and siloed over the last 30-40 years. You have agencies specializing in media, public relations, digital and SEO. Most large marketing management companies today feel like glorified general contractors.

This is multiplied by these types of complex global organizations where many of our customers offer thousands of products in over 100 markets around the world. How to standardize your marketing methodology and your processes? How do you ensure that everyone works in the same way? How do you make sure people are using the same tools and data? And how do you manage all your relationships with third parties?

The answer to all these questions comes down to “this wonderful AI thing” that “everyone in marketing wants to use.” But there’s another problem, says Pretorious:

No one has a way to expand it. No one has a way to apply AI systematically throughout the marketing process. This is truly the heart of what we have built at WPP. Over the past few years, we’ve built this AI-driven marketing operating system to solve this problem. We call it WPP Open. It is an incredibly flexible, AI-driven, agile marketing orchestration system that allows us to execute any form and combination of marketing functions for our clients consistently across all their markets. We have applied AI not only to the vertical functions of creative production, media and commerce, but we have also applied AI to the entire horizontal process of marketing.

In the second part of this article, Asmita Dubey, Digital and Marketing Director at L’Oréal, addresses the topic of how gen AI can revolutionize marketing.