Two words on innovation.

Where AI in advertising leaves the rest of us.

I just read the last article on yesterday’s brilliant Charting GEN AI newsletter.

The article is about the new commercial, entirely made with AI powered Veo3, which aired during the US NBA finals: an event that would normally pay close to $50000 for an ad, had this one made for about $2000.

For all the ills that have been attributed to advertising (mostly deservedly), the advertising industry had one clear saving grace: it’s been an extraordinary job creator.

For decades the animation sector in the UK maintained itself through adverting. Like other creatives, freelance animators (as well art directors, DoP, musicians and artists working with live-action), learned or perfected their craft working on ads. This not only paid their bills, but also made real innovation possible, as many artists would often have an unpaid and self-financed project running alongside their day job where they could experiment with new styles and techniques.

The big-brands commercials and music videos made memorable for their originality were usually a direct result of the work that those artists had created in their own free time, as advertising agency and production studios seldom had the incentives or the capacity to finance and develop new voices internally: it costs a lot and, naturally, most experiments would never be used. Instead they found it more efficient to reach out to those artists and directors whose beautifully finished short film demonstrated that something new and truly original could work —and could be sold to a client.

Some of those artists could reap the rewards of their non-paid efforts by being asked to direct or design a well paid commercial, while for many, many others, that would be the job that pays the bills for the next 4 to 12 weeks and perhaps allowed them to keep working on their own side project.

This is one of the few ways in which gigantic corporations redistributed dawn to the grassroots some of the wealth they accumulate, allowing them, for a change, to have a truly positive role in a large economic ecosystem.

Then all those innovative adverts and the films that creators made at their own expense got hoovered up (illegally) by the AI companies who trained their models on them, and the all ecosystem is about to go out of the window.

Those who made the real innovation possible are supposed to graciously resign themselves to the ‘inevitability of progress’ and accept that this is how commercial are done now — that the fact that it is literally their work that we are watching when we see an AI extruded ad does not matter. It is ‘fair use.’

The only ones who stand to gain from this are the entities who already have all the wealth: now they can keep 95% more of it when they try sell you stuff you probably don’t need, giving back nothing to the grassroots. And then, of course, the AI companies gain from this process, which makes them the self-appointed gate keepers.

The artists who for decades made the advertising industry thrive and were kept alive by it are watching their livelihood be taken away, and we, as a society, are supposed to consume the same gruel for ever, the product of a recycling machine stuck in the endless revisiting of past inventions.

The next time you hear someone say that generative AI is innovation, think of this.