When it comes to artificial intelligence, agencies and brands need to get over themselves and stop talking about it and just do it, writes James Dunne.
I worry when smart people dismiss the need for a debate. I don’t really understand the resistance to a frank airing of ideas. I don’t think this is just avoidance. It’s much worse than that. It’s dismissive. And it will cost us.
If you care about the future of agencies (and I very much do), the AI conversation for us in this space, for people in those agencies, is existential stuff right now.
Allow me to get technical for a second; talking about shit is how we work shit out.
It’s messy, at times completely contradictory, frustrating and – when opinionated gadflies such as myself weigh in – intensely irritating. That said, if you own an agency, employ people, or work in an agency with responsibility for people, I’d argue we need more, not less ‘banging on’ about this AI thing.
On any given day Generative AI can be a force multiplier for our work, or it can feel like we are sleepwalking ourselves into early retirement. Therein lies the inherent tension of innovation. Change is, by its very nature, tense. Lots of points of tension, lots of pain. And decisions. But dismissing AIl isn’t going to hold back the disruption.
The Stoics Vs the Deniers
Whilst Gen AI’s rise is not completely in sympatico with the rise of digital, there’s enough there-there in Adland right now to trigger some serious PTSD in me. Selling digital as the shift, rather than a channel back in the day was a brutal beat. You were continually confronted by two tribes in Adland. Digital deniers – mid-senior level people, to whom digital was but a passing trend. And the digital stoics: the sort of leadership level people who said things like ‘social is good for buzz, but it’ll never scale’.
I felt a degree of sympathy for the deniers. They couldn’t see the opportunity. But I’ve no love for those digital stoics. They were simply smarter but chose to either dismiss or distort what was on glaring on the horizon. To dabble rather than debate, to critique rather than commit beyond token gestures. Because digital was a power shift. And Rome got properly roasted. Jobs were lost. Agencies shuttered. All because paying lip service is an easier gig than getting stuck in.
The Agency Turnpike
Today, agencies – particularly small, independent agencies – find themselves at another tech turnpike – sooner than many would’ve liked, but hey, here we are again. Technology – like rust – doesn’t sleep.
The same sort of tribes are now forming are around the AI issue. AI deniers will point to the existing gaps and downplay the potential of the current AI tool kit, engaging through the prism of their intensely personal perspective – ‘AI will never be able to write/design/animate/direct/shoot like ‘me’ – the ultimate mic drop/hot take which misses the point entirely. They don’t like the vibe shift.
The AI stoics on the other hand will adopt a plastic punk attitude of ‘can we just get on with the work. ‘Stop banging on about AI’. A contrarian stance, – the sort that looks aces as a slogan on festival merch but has the same ring to it as ‘clean coal’ out in the real world.
We should know better than this – a slogan isn’t a solution.
(Sidebar: Remember music people hated drum machines and samplers. Hated them! Musicians didn’t like the idea of technology supplanting their skills, their status. Record companies told us home taping would destroy music. File sharing was theft. It was all so binary, so static, so blind to the opportunity. It was us or the machines. They didn’t want to have the debate).
AI stoics will hover above the issue, with the distance of the critic. They’ll talk about the challenges of humanity, the hay days of ‘real’ creativity, about the Eldorado of Cannes, (before it devolved into a bad rosé fuelled circular firing squad for agencies trying to out peacock each other and recapture their lost relevancy of the 90’s).
They’ll also wax on about culture being the secret sauce. They’ll say things like, ‘AI is great, but we get just on with it’ or triumph their ‘back to basics’ approach. And when the change arrives fully, it will be blamed on big-tech, neo-liberalism, even progress itself. Those kids with their pesky Bebos. Those robots with their damn three legged pictures. AI stoics will cling to the punk purity of that slogan on agency merch, picked up at a corporate beach party.
Real punks don’t do merch (how’s that for a slogan).
I’m left with a gnawing feeling that I had in the late 00’s, early 2010’s. One part of me is hopeful about our future. One part less so. On one hand I see a future defined by increased creative and strategic value, a premium on human nuance, knowledge and nonsense, more strategic speed and production alacrity. Another future is marked out by the hollowing out of agencies I really love and respect. One future embodies Dieter Rams’ maxim ‘less, but better’, the other is pure Mad Max anarchy meets The Road levels of cannibalism.
It’s Called Capitalism
I’ve said this here before: I am no advertising romantic. I don’t get dewy eyed for the ‘simpler times’ of this business or society. I don’t see what we do as ‘art’ – an opinion I know offends a great many people in this business (instead, we are artisans, I argue). Look, I came up through digital. I’m in business to serve businesses and brands. Nine times out of ten, that means creativity deployed in the service of commercial growth. It’s called capitalism. Does that sound awful? Get over it.
These days, I co-own a small strategic shop where growing part of the gig is to make sense of this change. We’re realists. And optimists. We do change.
So don’t dabble; adopt, adapt, advance. Get into it.
Because the work follows the change. It was ever so.
