By Jasmin Bedir, CEO, Innocean
You know the old saying, innovate or die. This has never been more true than now – our industry is going through the biggest change in the two and a bit decades I have been in it.
There are no other options than either staying ahead of the pace of change or you’re toast.
The only slight complication is that the pace of change is so quick, if you blink you may miss it.
It all sounds a little bit glum, so I’ll keep it light hearted and explain it through the lens of a well known story about a young girl that falls down a rabbit hole and lands in a fantasy world that is full of weird, wonderful people and animals.
Yes, you know the one. And yes, it does sound a bit like our industry, doesn’t it?
We are in a New Era of AI in literally all aspects of marketing communications. And once you start exploring the rabbit hole it is very, very easy to get lost. And there is literally no way out. Everything is in flux: from Strategy, to CX to martech, ad tech, and of course creativity and storytelling.
Yes, of course it’s the creative concept that is still king, and yes uniqueness and automation rarely go hand in hand. But the big word here is the word still.
Now, more than ever, continuous learning and tech adaptation will be important for all of us that lead creative businesses and also work in them. We need to invest in a new breed of creative thinkers: Native AI Creatives.
I know this seems like marketing bollocks, but hear me out.
Preparing our businesses for a time where large parts of tasks that we are currently working on, can be executed in the future by technology, is the single most important task there is. Just like in the old fable, there are some anthropological lessons along the way once you let yourself fall into the rabbit hole:
How to add emotional thinking, human empathy and original storytelling via curation, not creation. That is a significant difference in skill set, and it requires training and learning. Sure, there are always the early self starters that push the envelope like we see in this Polestar example. But realistically, what we need is a retraining of our creative minds to amplify and redefine what we as the creative industry bring to the table and how we add value and how we keep injecting human ingenuity into communications that is essentially created without humans.
Let’s go on this adventure and I’ll be the Cheshire Cat. If you email me an image of your AI interpretation of that I’ll buy you a drink. It will be real.
See Also: Jasmin Bedir: The trap of shiny new AI tools
See Also: Jasmin Bedir: Limitations of AI in an advertising agency
See Also: Jasmin Bedir: Ethical AI, the great oxymoron emerging in martech
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Top Image: Jasmin Bedir