014: Time to speed things up
[After - Session 4] Also - tomorrow I'm moderating a panel on AI-generative creativity and you can attend
I feel like I’m juuuuussssst starting to get the hang of shipping a newsletter with consistent rhythm. It’s different than blogging (at least for me) which I define as “An idea just appeared in my head that must become a blog post, so I better stop what I’m doing and file it into Evernote now and then get it written and published relatively soon because the idea will not stop nagging me until this is done.” Welcome to my crazy.
The newsletter has more constraints/focus. It’s “assigned” writing versus freewill happenstance. I hope you’re enjoying it.
This week marks the 4th session in the Future of Advertising course at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the first of our “major themes,” Commerce & Selling. Of course, the Super Bowl occurred; so it felt appropriate to incorporate all that into the class. Now that the dust has settled, I’ve got three reflections:
EVALUATING CREATIVITY: A FRAMEWORK
My friend
shared a nuanced and useful framework for reviewing creative work, aka Super Bowl ads. Imagine using this upfront to facilitate a conversation between marketers and agency partners, i.e. “Here’s how we’re going to agree to evaluate ideas.” The marketers get the comfort of process and a means of accounting for subjective thoughts, and the agency gets some assurance around the rules of engagement. I’m going to steal this, and so should you. Thanks, Jose!DATA SPARKS CREATIVITY
Speaking of stealing,
and Faris partnered with the data+creativity team at Zappi to provide a deep wealth of big game advertising analysis by surveying 11,250 SB ad-watching humans. How can we make our creativity “better?” Well, you need data to fuel the conversation, and this report has lots of useful data. I thought Google’s “Fixed on Pixel” was the best ad, and Zappi’s panel ranked it 4th. Hmmm. How do my thoughts align (or not) with theirs?
FEB 16: AI-GENERATIVE CREATIVITY EVENT
Tomorrow night the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) is hosting a panel on AI-generative creativity, inside the legendary ad agency Carmichael Lynch (where I once served as Executive Creative Director and Head of Interactive).
I’m moderating the conversation with four curious, talented people who represent creativity, strategy, technology and law. To prep for the event, I played around with several of the AI-generative tools (ChatGPT wrote my script, ElevenLabs created my voice, and D-ID generated me talking) to create this Deepfake Tim video.
We’ll be live in person and online. I think you’d get a lot of useful insights from attending.
On the topic of AI-generative tech, Wharton prof
offered the following timely advice just this morning."We can’t get comfortable knowing what generative AI is capable of, because capabilities are increasing very rapidly, and small changes can increase what they can do by a large amount. An approach to AI that worked last week won’t work this week.”
Clearly, the business of creativity is only moving faster and faster.
See you this coming Sunday with a “Before” post setting up class #5 and the next major theme: Infrastructure - Sites, Tools, Web3.
Oh, and today marks my middle son’s 16th birthday. Happy natal day to a silly, confident, talented, curious, and generous young man!
