Marketers are faithfully obsessed with newness when it comes to brand activations. So it’s no surprise that in the second year of having generative AI, marketers have been rushing to use it in their advertising.
But so far, consumers aren’t as enamored with AI-created generative ads as marketers are. Throughout 2024, marketers who have obviously used generative AI to create their advertisements (Toys R Us, Under ArmorCoca-Cola) or tout the possibilities of generative AI in their advertisements (like Google’s Olympics ad, they were removed following backlash) have seen their advertisements criticized by the general public, particularly the creative community.
Despite this, marketers and agency executives are expected to continue (and likely increase) the use of generative AI in 2025. Marketers regularly ask questions about how creative agencies are using generative AI and how they can integrate it into the creative process. for their brands. Creative agency executives, for their part, believe that generative AI is simply a new tool that they will continue to experiment with in various ways – even if most don’t see their experiences becoming entirely powered by generative AI , at least not yet.
“We are not looking or hoping for AI to replace everything or everyone, but simply give us access to more information about our ideas and accelerate their commercialization,” said John Cornette, chief creative officer at Creative Shop EP+Co.
As marketers continue to embrace technology, creatives need to take a hard look at why people have responded so negatively to the few ads they’ve seen so far and learn from them. The problem with marketers’ early iterations of generative AI-infused work wasn’t that they were using generative AI, but that the human element seemed to be missing in the creative process, according to eight creatives and executives. ‘agency.
“When you tell a really great story, you’re really authentic, you’re making a real connection,” said Eva Neveau, creative director of Omnicom Production. “What we see in the [AI infused] the job is that they are not authentic and contain no real emotion. There is nothing that takes you into a world that creates a spell. So you start saying, “Wait a minute, you lost focus on my emotions – and now I’m distracted by the fact that this hand has seven fingers. »
And these strange errors from AI-driven generative ads aren’t the only problem marketers and agency executives may encounter. Another, of course, is the backlash from online creative communities and consumers who use technology to create robotic and off-putting ads. And there’s the hype cycle in which brands leveraging generative AI for their marketing get a bit of industry attention. While marketers all want to make headlines for their work, noted Bill Oberlander, co-founder and creative president of full-service agency Oberland, doing so with work that will, at best, be forgotten won’t not help them in the long term.
“All these AI [ads]to me, are not memorable because they just don’t have the human spirit in them,” Oberlander said. “They don’t have the spark.”
Still, it’s easy to see why the idea of using AI to make ads faster and cheaper at a time when they’re under immense pressure to do more with less has its appeal. “There’s a seductive nature to being able to create things quickly, without going into a shoot, without spending millions of dollars and this, that and the rest,” said Paul Malmstrom, founding partner of the boutique. creation Mother in the United States. “It’s a race around time.”
But when that’s the main focus, it’s also a “race toward genericism,” Malmström said. “Since we’ve been doing this, our work has always been about distinction. How do you create something that has a distinct voice? How to create a distinct brand voice? It seems like that’s being left out a bit.”
In their quest to ensure they are on top of the latest trends, marketers can forget that what matters most to their brands is not that they use the technology everyone is talking about, but that They create great ads that actually connect with the people they’re trying to reach.
“Brands shouldn’t think that just using technology makes them ‘innovative,’” said Dave Snyder, partner and head of design at Siberia. But, in many ways, this train has already left the station. “There will be no shortage of ads and other experiences powered by Gen AI,” Snyder said. “And if they’re great, you won’t know.”
