If, like me, you’re an extremely online person, you will have seen people getting excited by AI generated art over the last few weeks. Whether it’s DALL-E or Midjourney, we’re getting a chance to play around with artificial intelligence in ways we hadn’t thought of a few years ago.
Of course, brands noticed, and, unlike other recent trends that start with a W and end with a 3, this one could be fun to explore. Heinz jumped in and created a campaign using DALL-E’s AI to generate different versions of its iconic Ketchup bottle, an extension of last year’s campaign in which it asked people to draw a Ketchup bottle from memory, and of course, most drew something resembling a Heinz bottle. I love the original campaign because it showed consumers that Heinz is the category leader instead of the usual approach brands take of telling people.
It then makes perfect sense to follow this up with “What AI draws when you say Ketchup”:
The message is clear, even Artificial Intelligence thinks of Heinz when it thinks of ketchup. Check out the campaign video.
I’ve been playing around (and by that I mean obsessed) with Midjourney, since Dall-E is harder to get into. I tried “Ketchup bottle” as a prompt, and it didn’t really give me Heinz vibes:
When I then tried “Heinz ketchup bottle” I got this:
Regardless of how they got their outputs, it’s wild to think that a piece of software can come up with these images from a simple text prompt in a few seconds. I haven’t had this much fun online for a long time. I could spend hours seeing what Midjourney comes up with, trying different prompts to get a more realistic image, or a crazier one.
I then got into a wormhole of trying to recreate iconic ads from the past with Midjourney. The results are… interesting:
(the last one is actually pretty good… if you want to win a Cannes Lion)
Can this type of AI replace Creative agencies? I’d say no, not yet, or probably in the near future. Can this become a tool to help us all build, refine, and play with ideas? Yes, I absolutely think so. Being able to bring ideas to life for clients is a huge part of what we do, I’ve seen great ideas die because we weren’t able to get the clients to see the vision that was so clear in our minds. Similarly, I’ve met many clients who have a great vision but have a difficult time articulating it. The dreaded “I’ll know it when I see it” approach…
I for one have the drawing skills of a 2 year old, no offense to 2 year olds who are probably better than me. My mind though is able to come up with crazy ideas, and I like to think I have a decent way with words. These tools open up so many opportunities for me, and those like me, to express our thoughts in new and interesting ways.
Why I’m Skeptical.
While the fact that an A.I. can conjure up really elaborate imagery from a few words is objectively amazing technology, it's still in its infancy. I think of it as a baby, or an alien, that has an immense talent but we don’t yet know how to communicate with each other well. The pieces are mostly all there, but it will take time and a lot of interactions for these A.I.s to seriously challenge the last bastion of humanity, Creativity. I’m sure we’ll see more brands play with DALL-E and Midjourney in upcoming campaigns, but they’ll mostly be stunty like the Heinz campaign. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but not really a challenge to our livelihoods. There are of course a lot of questions about A.I., the dangers it poses to society, moral and ethics questions on what to do if it become sentient, and yes, the perennial fears that machines will take our jobs. To be fair, algorithms have already taken a lot of jobs from Media agencies, whether we talk about it that way or not. Can machines take over creativity? There’s quite a few startups that offer A.I. powered copywriting and having tested a couple for fun I have to say they’re better than you’d expect. I can’t imagine they’ll replace copywriters on big campaigns, but for small brands looking for some copy on a website or a social ad? I can absolutely see it (not saying it’s a good thing…). Whether we like it or not, our industry has been in a pinch for a long time, agencies have struggled to maintain healthy margins pushed around by procurement departments, and replacing humans with automation has been seen as a solution to some leaders. Not great news for us humans who work in said agencies…
Why I’m Optimistic.
I can’t get enough of Midjourney. At first I was curious to throw different prompts at it to see what it would come up with. That slowly morphed into the challenge of finding the right combinations of prompts to get it as close as possible to the vision in my mind. Looking at the incredible work others are doing with it is fascinating, it is truly a new way to make art. Check out the feed, you'll be blown away.
Here’s one of my favorite outputs so far (Predator working in an office sitting in a cubicle typing on a laptop):
How this type of A.I. evolves, time will tell, but can it play a role in our industry? Absolutely. We churn out hundreds of thousands of digital ads every month that could probably be easier and faster to make with humans telling A.I. what to produce. We could focus more of our time on the craft and less on the assembly line nature of what a lot of advertising has become. Will replacing this type of work mean we will have less jobs for humans? An age old question since the days of Henry Ford, and I hope one that we are all in agreement should be a resounding no. We need to free ourselves of the busy work that has made working in advertising a bore and a chore, if A.I. is one of the solutions, I welcome it. That is if it helps its human colleagues get better paid and work more “human” hours.
A.I. has been such a hot topic for so long in Marketing circles with little to show for, I’m excited to actually see it in action and get involved in how it might impact Advertising.