Ads With AI, Cool! Ads Without Humans, Meh!

Oh! Those days. When watching a TV-soap was also about waiting for a favourite jingle. When sitting down for a cricket match in front of our screen was so much about wondering what new ads will be played this season. From Doordarshan to Superbowl, ads (wait, let me rephrase that) well-made ads were not the interruption but the protagonist too. A good ad was the cameo of the day that we loved to see after the film was over. We would eat it up devouringly with our eyes, then discuss for days, and then wait again to catch a glimpse of while we had their music and lines memorised by heart and etched in our brains.

Alas! Something happened in the last decade. Every ad now seems a replica of another one. Creative bankruptcy or just sheer lack of passion- whatever the reason, it is so hard to find ads we love to see again. We just itch to hit that skip-button. Nothing is good or different enough to arrest our interest anymore.

And then comes AI. With that squirt of hope. Maybe, just maybe, now we will be back to the age where advertising was not an interruption but the feast.

After all, AI can surpass human capacity by miles when it comes to production-values, immersive visualisation, tailor-stitching the message to an individual, and executing ideas that seem too impractical to shoot with real-life people and objects. Yes, that’s exactly what AI delivers when we see a slew of recent experiments done with AI tools.

Some are done by professional studios, some in small regions as pilots by big brands, some as proper roll-outs and some by AI craftsmen twiddling their thumbs around new tools. Nevertheless, these ads give a glimpse of what could happen if we leave this once-very-imaginative and utterly-creative world to AI.

There is a Nutella ad that shows what AI is capable of- the squirrel, bird-sounds, soothing and cozy kitchen walls, and the soft texture of the product- executed with lovely masterstrokes. There is a BMW car ad that drops a viewer right on the road whizzing past pine trees, cruising through hills and landscapes in an immersion-delight. There is Volvo’s ‘Come Back Stronger’ for Saudi Arabia market that shows no cars and is apparently made solely with AI (which shows, somehow). As Petromin’s Chief Marketing Officer said, “By harnessing AI, we have transformed the way stories are told, delivering a film that is both visually stunning and executed with remarkable agility.” Yes, these ads are visually-stunning. But so is the Volvo ad that Creator Rick Deckard whipped up using RunwayML Gen-3 Alpha and created something from concept to final cut in less than 24 hours. And so is Adidas ‘Beyond the Blue’ conceptual piece of AI advertising.

AI makes things faster. It creates lip-smacking visual treats. With audio-effects that transport us into another world- in a blink. And at a very less pinch on the wallet. But it can easily run into the danger of making clones.

An Advertisement does not stand out in a consumer’s mind because it is affordable, was made quickly or feels like a video-game. An ad stands out for what it says, and how well it says. Staying in your mind long after it has played.

The best example, so far, in the AI sphere is that of Coca Cola Stable Diffusion AI. It shows a Coke bottle being passed over in an art museum from one painting to another, jumping from ships in stormy seas to Andy Warhol’s swirling colors to Rodin’s statue- it is amazing to see how a text-to-image deep learning algorithm was used to execute a creative concept. And how the AI was used to train itself on various art styles and techniques of artists from various eras to capture that art’s theme and essence in the bottle every time it hops till it reaches an art student sitting in the museum. The ad makes you feel like watching it again because there is some theme, some logic, some story behind the use of AI’s genius.

Without a reason behind the technique, an AI-generated ad can be hollow. It needs its essence. It cannot be done without that elusive human insight or out-of-the-box leap.

AI delivers a lot. Great visualisation. Hyper-personalisation. Capital production-quality. And the brilliant capacity to execute a big creative thought. However, we still need that ‘creative’. Without human brains to think of the story, the persuasion, the appeal, the message- an ad made with AI is nothing more than a cookie cut in the same factory. You can as well be watching a shoe ad as a car one- the visuals, the jump-cuts, the fade-outs, the colours, the sound effects simply compelling- but also simply same.

Advertisements and pamphlets are not the same species. There is a reason one stands out and desires more money, more time, more brainstorming and more CPM. If human designers, copywriters and brand-custodians add the soul – then only these ads will actually run where they want to reach. AI can give ads the super-fast shoes they need, but ‘creative’ is what gives them ‘where to run’. The direction, still, matters.

Without that compass, brands run the risk of being similar, and turning into the word they dread the most- commodities. Thornton Wilder could not have captured it better – “In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.”

Alas, that ‘soul’ has been missing for some time. We cannot depend on AI to help us find it. It has to come from passion and creativity hidden deep within ad agencies and creatives. Give us back those ads we look forward to, we hum, we remember, we talk about and we save softly in our nostalgia wardrobes.

Give us back those ‘breaks’. Break the mould. Break the slumber. Break those ‘five seconds’.  Viewers don’t hate ads. They hate noise. They hate bad ads. Please, give us back our ‘Mad Men’.