Software That Produces Ads?
September 4th, 2010
The NYT
“BETC Euro RSCG, part of the Euro RSCG Worldwide division of Havas, has developed software that can produce elementary advertisements. The software is called CAI, pronounced Kay, for Creative Artificial Intelligence.”
(Posted in NYT comments)
In the late eighties I wrote a very complex set of software applications that took data and made legal arguments. It horrified people in the profession, who were, at that time, still addicted to legal pads and lofty self impressions. But we were able to increase a docket (the set of cases a lawyer could manage) from the tens to the thousands. Admittedly, this was procedural law, and not dramatic legal theater. But it was law and argument none the less.
The number of federal judges that have seen, read and processed documents, and adjudicated cases based upon arguments purportedly written by lawyers, but entirely generated by machine, and only given a cursory review, is in the many hundreds, and the cases the tens of thousands.
Ads are not much different. They are commodities. Visual and literary symbolism adds high permutations to those commodities. But that does not mean that they are not formulaic.
Except for perhaps the top half-percent of ads, and except for brand symbols like logos, almost all advertising (impressions that is) relies upon a very limited set of visual compositions.
Any sufficiently mature technology becomes clerical in nature. And 2D ads are a mature and fairly tired technology. It matters more that you can afford to insert it into the consumer’s environment a hundred times, than does the quality of it. And the quality of an ad simply decreases the cost of the number of impressions needed to stick an idea into the consumer’s head.
The reality is the reality: advertising is a commodity and it is rarely interesting, rarely innovative, and almost entirely derivative. And if it wasn’t it wouldn’t work.
Almost all current creative innovation is in the digital arena, simply because it’s a deeper technology that hasn’t been fully explored.
Current attempts at automating 2D ads are not all that impressive. But given a sufficient pool of images, a sufficient pool of phrases and quotes, and a sufficient influx of cultural symbolism, and a simple enough set of requirements, most ads are derivative and permutations rather than informative and persuasive, and as such most ads can be automated.
And given the diverse quality of ads (impressions, not media) the median of the curve of quality of ad would undoubtably shift to the better, given automation.
http://www.puretheoryofmarketing.com
Leave a Reply