Why AI Is Making Creative Strategists Lazy (And How to Fix It) | Hannah Houg & Matthew Gattozzi

So let's talk about this.

So one is like, how do we go through and help people make better ads? Because I think right now what's happened is, you guys have talked about it, you know, AI comes through and it's become a volume game.

And it's like, how quickly can we get this stuff out? So...

Where is the process being messed up? So I think right now, let's just as a creative strategist, a lot of what people are doing is, you know, they're utilizing AI for research.

And that I think that's OK.

And I think that seems to be good.

I think that where we have seen a degradation in quality of and also like help doesn't help in making a better ad is within the briefing process.

I don't know what you guys think, but it's almost like you look at somebody who's Mr. Anti-AI like Harry Delmege, and his team is deeply researching, and that's what they're doing.

And he talked about that in a previous episode.

And so what do you guys see in terms of those that are actually making – Ads that are absolute bangers, you know, are they is it that they're researching, you know, manually or they're using maybe a little and then they're briefing manually as well? Or what is it?

Yeah, for me, I mean, I I. I'm with Matt on like going back to the basics and keeping things very simple because those are the things that have worked time and time again.

And so like making sure that we're focused on just like the basics of advertising principles.

Is it real? Is it simple? Is it novel? Is it going to solve like the problem in the viewer's mind? So those are like, from a very high level, some of the things I'm seeing, but I feel like right now, and I don't know, I feel like more of the thing that I've been heightened and aware of is what's making like poor decisions and poor ads right now.

And I know that that's crazy because we always want to focus on like what is making a good ad but that's the whole point of even kind of like my hypothesis around um around this is like you when it comes to ai like what i've realized it cannot do is come up with the big idea like in plain old david ogby's like understanding.

And that's where I've seen it fall short time and time again.

So if you don't have a big idea and you don't even have a format that you're like thinking of between those two things, what do you actually really have? And so I've just seen like this, this very ineffective form of prompting, hoping and doing all seemingly the right things with AI, finding, extracting your personas, understanding and pulling out customer data to support it.

But when it comes to like actually building the ad, the literal idea the connective tissue of it like falls completely short and that's just because ai doesn't have the opportunity to visualize an idea to an extent that the human mind can we can find one really strong winner and plug it into ai and say like hey how can we make like multiple formats And it will give us some surface-level ideas, but nothing will, at this point in time, be able to beat the human ability to sit down and to understand all the different mechanisms from that audience perspective, format-wise, that are possible within a simple ad.

So right there, you're already breaking down because you're leaving... ads on potential ads on the table within something that's already worked before.

And so I think like the the trap is like trying to use it to find not only yes, we're short cutting thinking right now, which we can get into a little bit later.

But we're also like short cutting our end result or the open loop in our head because the open loop becomes just efficiency, getting the ad out there versus like actually coming to AI with a true hypothesis.

And now what I'm seeing is more and more strategists relying on AI to give them those hypothesis that are running their strategies.

And I think that's such a dangerous game to play.

And I have found myself, I found myself in that exact same trap before.

And the trade-off is you're not able to validate.

And if you don't have human mind that's able to validate both with intuition and data, then you're actually walking blind.