Long and winding discourse across Linkedin and industry editorial will have you thinking that AI is here either to destroy creative jobs entirely, or revolutionise the way ads are made.
At Sonder we wanted to find out a little more, beginning with an agile project on Toys 'R' Us' first OpenAI Sora campaign - finding out, quite simply, do people care it's AI generated?
Taking a simple approach, we showed the Toys 'R' Us ad to two groups; one who knew it was AI-generated, the other who did not. We wanted to test if this knowledge garnered different responses to the ad.
Well - it didn't. It turns out consumers care much less than marketers do (shock). The fundamentals of good advertising apply regardless of creative format (double shock).
If anything, we saw a slightly improved opinion of Toys 'R' Us amongst those who KNEW it was AI generated (perhaps indicating innovation?).
It is testament to the marketing bubble that so many in our team were surprised - we have a tendency to assume that what we're talking about, is what everyone is talking about. A bias we have to fight day-in-day-out to ensure accurate and predictable research results.
Our next steps are to go much, much deeper. Blind test-and-control studies on AI-generated advertising to understand what implications there are long-term, both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. We want to know whether the average TV viewer notices, whether AI improves the average quality of creative, and what the ethical considerations are for the utilisation of this tech (deep-fake, anyone?).
If I had to guess, I would imagine that we radically over estimate how good AV ads are at current, and that the utilisation of AI creative tools will bring the average performance of campaigns up. It will learn to utilise the frameworks that we know work - distinctive brand assets, story telling, woven brand stories - in a way that humans often neglect to do. I think benchmarks will improve, but that top-performing (award winning, but crucially brand-changing) campaigns will still be driven by human creativity; those insights and executions that sit outside of a logical, teachable framework. In other words, your average ad break will be better, but truly game-changing campaigns will continue to come from human-led strategic truths and creative platforms.
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