170: Mixed Bag

Last post of 2024; AI+Creativity update

🧺 Housekeeping: What you’re reading is my last writing update of 2024. I’ve got a fifth Curiosity+Courage podcast episode coming out this Thursday. Then we’ll return to the usual flurry of writing, book reviews and podcast episodes in January—there’s a lot of scintillating content in the works for you.

🙏🏽 And thanks to the dozens of new subscribers over the past weeks. I appreciate your investment in my writing and ideas.

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Where are we in the creativity timeline?

For a very long time creative people serving business had perhaps two constraints to master—writing and design, mostly. There was that point when scratch-n-sniff printing technology stood out, however briefly. Imagine you’ve been solely focused on typography, illustration and word-play, and all of a sudden Radio arrives and you’ve got to master vocal inflection, casting, even music. It’s the first real pivot. Your creative constraints expand but so do the risks and obligations to understand what’s possible. Then TV introduces theater, special effects, locations, make-up, wardrobe, and timing. Imagine the first creatives who wrestled with their concept and their clients to convey an idea in exactly 30 seconds. Did they begin by creating a full page newspaper ad, then ask, “how can we film this?”

When the Internet arrived—the second pivot—and I started writing online I fell in love with the word “inter-active.” All of a sudden this new constraint suggested a requirement—brands had to engage, and recognize communication is now two-way. For the first time in the history of advertising, consumers could react to ads by making and distributing their own content to the masses. On a device in their pocket, at any time, any where.

And now there’s AI.

If you were fortunate to experience the second pivot, this third is culturally familiar. The resistance. The waiting to be told what to do. The first few examples which illuminate an impending trough of disillusionment. But also a few rays of hope which paint a different path forward.

Last week a group of us experienced a demo of idea-storyboarding AI platform Katalist. It used to take a long time and specialized skills to convert an idea from something in your head into a coherent frame-by-frame expression, so you could convince other people this was an idea worth investing in. There were gatekeepers between you and the means of conveying your work. Katalist throws all of that bureaucracy out the window.

So do many of the latest AI tools—the best which enable idea people to express their intentions quickly and maybe even coherently, even if they’ve never had experience with specific techniques like drawing, writing, photography, filmmaking and editing. Knowledge is free. The cultural tension of this third pivot is absurd because what’s happening feels absurd. Creative talent is being enabled in unimagined, and un-planned for ways. The age old, “who gets to be creative” power struggle exists now in a much larger arena. I’ve seen first year ad students leverage AI to produce :30 TV prototypes which rival the conceptual and production values of professionals.

On the other hand, I’ve seen legendary musicians sit down with busted old equipment and create life-changing art.

I think it boils down to your intent, your passion, and your willingness to risk it all to change others. AI seems to be helping more people give it a try.

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AI+Creativity Update

🤖 🛠️ I think 2025 will be the year of end-to-end AI mar-tech platforms taking root, at scale. From business issue definition… to actionable audience strategy… to creative concept… to comms planning… to tactics production and distribution… all those tasks delivered within a singular experience. At least, that’s what partnerships like Brandtech and Adobe are promising. “Clients…will be able to interoperate seamlessly between Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and generative AI workflows within Pencil Pro – a game-changing leap forward in a platform that, uniquely, already allows users to do everything from creating insights to generating creative content at massive scale, predicting performance and quality scoring, to media deployment and creative optimisation.” (More from the Adobe blog.)

😵‍💫🤖 OpenAI’s 12 Days announcements also hint at this trend in standardizing AI across a range of tasks. In the Day 7 video, they talk about Projects which are akin to Google’s Notebook (minus podcasting) in the sense you have a single “area” or “folder” of content you want the AI to help you engage. As one of commenters put it, “showing but never mentioning the AGI tab is genius level trolling.”

And of course you should check out the series of videos which accompany OpenAI’s release of their text-to-video model, Sora, on Day 3. In my first experience, I prompted, “A gorilla playing a drum set in an empty room” (as an homage to Cadbury chocolates).

But before Sora renders anything, it suggests a storyboard. I think this is a huge benefit, akin to the experience of Katalist above. Of course OpenAI could just render something—but what’s the likelihood that initial effort hits your mark? Better yet, do you even know how to prompt video effectively? So I applaud OpenAI for inserting this storyboarding process to help confirm, and educate, users. Note how my simple prompt got expanded by Sora.

The interface rendered two :05 videos, and provided cursory editing and display functions. But holy smokes—this level of visual quality was not even possible a year ago. Is it great? Of course not. Is it “right?” Who knows! But when you consider what sorts of interactions and decisions this kind of output might enable, the progress is astounding.

🤔 Brand consulting firm Prophet released “The Rise of the AI-Powered Consumer” recently. This aligns well with my fourth question for leaders in the age of AI: How will our customers use AI to change us? In the same way the second pivot unlocked interaction from audiences to brands, we would be wise to give time to consider how AI-empowered customers are thinking about and engaging with us.

📓 And in keeping with year-end reports, I strongly recommend you fill out the simple form and download the 108-page Martech for 2025 communiqué by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma. As they astutely put it,

“AI is not really a single Hype Cycle, but a multitude of them, all at different stages, many entangled with each other.”

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🎶 This post was written to “Letter To Self” by SPRINTS, “Stay” off Looking Through by Warm Weather, and “King of the Slugs” off WOOF by Fat Dog.

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