AI is making creative strategy better.
Great news this week, especially for those wondering how AI will affect creative strategists. Bottom line: strategy used to happen before the work. We’ve got three dispatches from the field this week on how AI is turning creative strategy into an always on, always engaged, ever growing practice. No more “brief the team, get reassigned”. Creative strategy departments are (slowly) embracing a different mindset of insight, ongoing experimentation and consistent optimization. Good news if your chosen field is strategy, especially if you are chose that job so you can stay close to the work.
Luma (analytics company) integrates with Dumbstruck (AI video company) to intelligently edit videos.
A common strategist frustration: you have an insight, want to use it to adjust creative, but the time and cost of change is too great. You watch the ad get served, knowing that one change could increase its efficacy. Luma and Dumbstruck (quite the name) are going after that. Dumbstruck’s audience/emotion analytics can know be fed agent-style into Luma’s video platform to make edits down to the frame level. The gap between knowing something and doing something about it is collapsing, bringing strategists and creatives really close together.
Marketing Architects tries to define “good ad” before asking AI to evaluate any.
Strategists are valued for the knowledge they show up with, as much as the work they sit down and do. A big part of that established knowledge is a sense of what a good ad is. They know the qualities that define good from both aesthetic and commercial perspectives. You can ask an AI if an ad is good, but without a framework, you invite chaos. Marketing Architects (another interesting name. people must constantly say “Marchitects”) built a method to bring that framework into the strategic toolkit defining seven creative qualities and asking AI to evaluate creative based on those. It’s a step toward having AI work for you, as opposed to “instead of you”. The machine works way better thanks to the human in the loop.
BTW: that is not far from how I generate this content. I defined 4 elements of how AI can improve agencies and run news and reports through it. The value comes from sorting and scoring the news based on a thesis. And a reminder that all that works in the background. All the words you read are written by me. =G.
Horizon Media doing The Thing™: clients pay on results.
In a great, wide-ranging interview Horizon President Bob Lord talked about how AI is changing agency economics, and how that shift transparency around it should be shared with clients. Five years ago (he says) performance based on compensation couldn’t be done, because tech couldn’t be integrated. AI makes connecting media dollars with results easier, and they are shifting to a performance based model. Of course, “shifting” may mean one client or a small percent of a fee. But the point is strong and bound to be appreciated by clients and (our focus this week) strategists. If the agency gets paid on performance, strategy and optimization have to be always on. Having one insight, in one brief that generates one set of ads is way too risky. With pay tied to performance, agencies will need a greater hand in optimization. Which, again, brings the strategist deeply into the campaign, for the life of the campaign.
Mover of the Week: Strategist billable hours.
AI is (for now) replacing tasks way more than it is replacing jobs. Strategists have generally been assigned one key task: brief the creative and media team. They then get shuffled off to the next job or pitch and the work continues down the track. AI is collapsing the gaps between seeking, learning and doing, and the job guiding this is going to be the strategist.
Thursdai index: this week’s numbers.
Experimentation Capability: 8.6
Learning Quality: 8.4
Laboratory Reliability: 8.0
Market Traction: 7.5
Watch that growing gap between our ability to make stuff (Experimentation Capability) and how much we can trust the results (Laboratory Reliability).
The Thursdai Index and report is the work of 61 Hawk founder Gary Stein with assistance from an OpenAI research agent. The agent sources, sorts and scores news stories. Everything you read was written by Gary, a real human being.
