Advertising Has A Sameness Problem, Not An AI Problem

You've seen the... industry evolve from big brand building work, the iconic work that we sometimes talk about, to a performance-led world or performance-led thinking, as it were.

And now we talk a lot about AI, I guess, as one of the things.

Where do you think we are right now? And what are we missing about this moment or almost overestimating?

It's, yeah, you know, it's really fascinating, you know, when I think back, you know, I started advertising in 1989.

So I wrote my first ads on a typewriter.

So it was pre-computers.

And I lived through that.

I lived, I then witnessed, as I was starting King Jams, I witnessed the birth of the internet and how that was impacting communication.

And so I was, in a way, living that.

living the change, every sort of dimension of advertising was changing constantly, right up to the point where when we sold, when we agreed to sell King Jams, there was no AI.

It was not being talked about as a factor that would impact the ad industry.

And now it's all they talk about now is the impact of advertising, I mean, of AI on the industry, not just on... on the jobs and people's jobs, but also on the kind of work that's being produced.

You know, a lot is said, you know, AI is impacting it in a very negative way and So I have a bit of perspective, I guess, because I'm not that guy that will romance the past or the golden era of advertising.

But I did live through the things that broke the industry largely or at least broke the way it appeared to be.

And I do, you know, let's be honest, prior to...

AI technology, if you look at the kind of advertising that was being made and a lot of it that was being brought out, advertising has always been largely rubbish.

90% of what gets produced is wallpaper.

It's mediocre.

And that's why I think that in a weird way, artificial intelligence existed before the technology existed.

There was people talking to each other and still managing to produce predictable work, you know, they somehow talk themselves into sameness.

And so the question now with technology and AI tech is that you can do it fast and you can do it cheaper.

You can do sameness faster and cheaper because AI is literally looking for solutions in very predictable ways, which is what humans often did anyway.

So, you know, there's a wonderful writer, Stephen Sidley Boyke, who I admire deeply and he's got a great, he does some wonderful writings and he recently published wrote an article on AI and he reflected on the fact that AI essentially what it does is that it goes and it can only replay and optimize known logic is the way that he wrote it.

And I think that if you treat AI like that, like give me a solution, it's going to go and find solutions just like and give it back to you.

And so it will be predictable.