136: The hard part is saying “yes”
Farewell Cannes Lions 2024; Target's Store Companion AI; GenAI in Hollywood
“Ideas are scary,” says the GE advertisement. It’s one of my favorite ad metaphors. Because ideas really, truly, are scary—to approve, to fund, produce and ship. It’s always easier to just say, “you know…no. Let’s not do it.” (Even Apple’s legendary “1984” Super Bowl ad almost didn’t make it on air.)
So I tend to look at award-winning work wondering how often the creative team, their leaders, the account teams, the marketers, or the board could have said “no.” How many brilliant, career-changing, business-elevating ideas never made it?
An Ira Glass quote I’m fond of sums it up: “What it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.” In other words, it is much easier to play it safe. So kudos to the Sydney Opera House, agency The Monkeys Sydney, director Kim Gehrig and actor Tim Minchin for their Grand Prix Lion in Film, celebrating the brave curiosity of the architectural marvel in its 50th year. (Even more inspiration in this supporting “making of.”)
Back during the Super Bowl I remember someone saying it took Reddit users maybe nine minutes to crack the ridiculously long DoorDash promo code (here’s one example via TikTok). It wasn’t my favorite ad at the time, but after giving it a think, I can see why the jury gave it the Titanium Grand Prix. An ad that doesn’t just reference all the Super Bowl ads but purchases one of everything mentioned—it is the DoorDash product, personified. Now imagine how many times they could have said “no” on the path to making this idea real. Courageous work from Wieden+Kennedy and DoorDash.
Dave Trott wrote a great summary related to saying “yes” over-and-over in the face of uncertainty. He called it questioning the rules. And it serves as a poignant refrain as the curtain falls on another award show season in the south of France.
AI 101 for Corporate Teams
I’m giving another Generatively Better presentation this week for a corporate leadership team; then I’m addressing a group of CFOs next month. If you or yours might benefit from a 60-minute deep dive into AI across strategy and creative, let’s book time to understand your needs.
AI+Creativity Update
🤖🎯 Target just announced Store Companion, a generative AI tool for its employees only which “serves as a store process expert and coach, helping new and seasonal team members learn on the job.” The app is in testing at 400 stores. This is exactly the right approach: Using AI to streamline a specific focus on (generally) known operations. More via CBS Morning News.
🤖🎨 Midjourney’s made a number of updates in the past week, specifically around SREF (style reference) codes to allow blending, prioritization, and personalization; i.e. greater control. Solid recaps here via PromptDervish and John Walter.
🤖 Think With Google released a report headlined, “We used AI to analyze over 8,000 top ads.” And the prospect sounds great:
Using a custom large language model to extract insights, including sentiment, themes, visual elements, spoken language, music, cultural references, and more, the team found hidden connections between seemingly disparate videos from Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, the U.K, and the U.S. Next, they deployed an algorithm that clustered videos based on their semantic similarities.
That video analysis yielded 750 insights and signals per category — and that was before Gemini 1.5 Pro came into play. Gemini distilled thousands of insights from our documents into key takeaways, uncovering trends, best practices, and the subtle nuances that set top-performing videos apart.
But that’s where the insights stop. Or, rather, don’t even begin. What did their AI analysis show? “Brands continue to increase representation,” “advertising celebrates self-expression,” “Brand stories increasingly depict community",” “Creative teams embrace magic and fantasy” and—I’m sorry but this is not useful at all. Just clickbait. Sigh.
🤖📋 Bain Consulting published its recent Quarterly Executive Survey on AI. “More than 60% of companies surveyed see generative AI as a top three priority over the next two years, but only about 35% have a clearly defined vision for how they will create business value from generative AI.” Truth is, the promise of AI is proving harder to implement. Last year’s hype is this year’s friction.
🤖🎥 This conversation around “GenAI in Hollywood” with Doug Shapiro, Robert Fishman and Michael Nathanson is definitely worth your time. Interesting to see the tensions around creative leadership rubbing up against open source innovation.