Reimagining What’s Possible with AI: Confessions from an Advertising Creative Director

Confession: As a creative, I don’t trust AI. Creativity isn’t linear or predictable. AI can’t feel. It can’t understand what makes someone tick. So, can it do the job of a creative human? Not exactly. But it can help. Here’s how I went from skeptic to superuser in a matter of months.

It started with RC Labs. Similar to a “Think Tank,” it’s an initiative at Real Chemistry that invites employees to create AI assistants designed to solve a business problem. When I was invited to join RC Labs, my first thought was, I’m not a coder. But I leaned into my hesitation and approached it like any creative would – with curiosity.

I asked a lot of questions and knew one thing for certain: I was not going to create an AI assistant that wrote copy for me. If we’re only creating AI tools that churn out content like a studio, we’re missing the point.

So, I asked a different question. Could AI, given the right brief, come up with the tagline “Got Milk?” Since that tagline already exists in the world of content AI is pulling from, it’s an imperfect theory to test. But we could try.

I chose a campaign from a few years back – one that always stood out and had the right mix of insightful and clever. It was for a psoriasis treatment. I had the brief and the winning concept in mind. Could AI come close? After some trial and error, and a lot of coaching from the RC Labs team, I built an assistant designed to help a creative brainstorm. Then I tested it with the campaign in question.

We call it a Brainstorm Engine, an AI assistant designed to spark ideas, not write them for you. If it simply gets a creative started and overcomes blank page syndrome, that’s a win. If it can help creatives see a problem from an angle they hadn’t considered before, even better.

With that, I wrote the instructions for the assistant, mirroring the “5 Creative Criteria” we look for in great work here at 21GRAMS. Ideas should be Insight Driven, Campaignable, Reject the Default, Memorable and Make You Feel. I also asked the assistant to write a news headline, a platform idea (not a tagline, but rather a mantra that could lead to additional thinking), and 10 headlines. Finally, I asked it to dig deeper by coming up with provocative questions about the category. (TL;DR: This is where the magic happened.)

Here’s an example of the instructions I gave it: I'll give you research, background information and a brief that has an obvious insight, a deeper insight, the role of the brand, and a one-true-thing that we want to communicate (which we also call the 21 grams), and then, based on that, answer each of the above nine categories.

My hope was for the AI assistant to help bucket information into categories that a creative could then ideate around. The end game wasn’t (and should never be) to come up with the solution, but rather, to guide us to a place we wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise – or maybe a place we would have gotten to eventually, but AI can help us see the path faster than before.

Next, came the test. I uploaded the brief (not the work) that led to the campaign I had in mind. The first set of results was lackluster. The headlines were expected. So were the first thoughts. But that’s OK. Creatives have first thoughts, too. As Isaac Bashevis Singer famously said, “The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.” If a brainstorming assistant helps creatives get those first thoughts out of the way, we can move onto the good stuff sooner. Also, a win.

The key is human interaction. You have to want to dig deeper. That’s the job of any good creative. The AI asked a list of provocative questions about the category, which is where things got interesting. One of the questions mentioned the impact of psoriasis on mental health. That piqued my interest, so I asked the assistant to rerun the nine categories with mental health front and center.

The result got closer to the campaign I had in mind. Not quite there, but close. An experienced creative could take that information and push it further to come up with a campaign idea that nails all 5 Creative Criteria categories mentioned earlier.

So, can AI do the job of a creative? No. I still don’t believe it can. Or maybe the ultimate confession here is that I don’t think it should. We shouldn’t aim to create generic content faster. We should aim to use AI to create better content that connects with our audience on a deeper level, because we (humans) took the time to understand the needs of the real people our message is intended for. AI can help synthesize vast amounts of data, but we still need to put the pieces together in our own unique ways. It should make our work better, not create more of the same.

Human emotions, intuition, experience and artistic spin should always be part of the process. But there’s an opportunity here. This Brainstorm Engine is on track to save eight hours of churn, so teams can create more effective work faster than before. Work that connects with its audience on a deeper level.

It takes a human to connect the dots and bring AI to life.

For more information about AI at Real Chemistry, reach out to us here.

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