In the context of the hole digging analogy, it seems like a lot of holes didn't need to be carefully hand-dug by experts with dead straight sides. Using an excavator to sloppily scoop out a few buckets in 5 minutes before driving off is good enough for dumping a tree into.

For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think. Most actual humans ignore most ads at a conscious levels and they are perceived on a subconscious level despite "banner-blindness". Website graphics are the same, people dump random stock photos of smiling people or abstract digital image into corporate web pages and read-never literature like flyers and brochures and so on all the time and no one really cares what the image actually are, let alone if the people have 6 fingers or whatever. If Corporate Memphis is good enough visual space-filling nonsense that signals "real company literature" somehow, then AI images presumably are too.

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ben_w 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable.

For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing next to him was pointing a handheld scanner at his belly which revealed he was pregnant with a cat.

Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no recollection of what it was selling.

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thwarted 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no idea what it was selling.

A friend of mine liked to point out that if you couldn't remember what the brand was or what was being sold, then it wasn't effective advertising. It failed at the one thing it needed to do/be.

And there's a lot of ineffective advertising. Either people don't notice it or they don't remember it. Massive amounts of money are poured into creating ads and getting ad space, much of which does very little in the getting you to buy sense.

By this measure, advertising is generally very inefficient. Large input for small output. The traditional way to make this more efficient is to increase the value of the output: things like movement of digital billboards (even just rotating through a series of ads) to draw the eye and overcome lack of noticing it among miles of billboards. There's another way: decrease the cost of the input. If I can get the same output—people don't see the ads (bad placement) or people don't remember the product/brand (bad stickiness)—by not using human creatives and using genAI to make my ads, I've improved efficiency.

Unfortunately, this doesn't make advertising more effective or more efficient as an industry and does flood the market with slop, but that's not any individual's goal.

The people who are creating ads that don't work, despite getting paid, are in Bullshit Jobs (in the David Graeber sense). Replacing bullshit jobs with genAI, where the output doesn't seem to really matter anyway. It would be great if people/companies didn't commission or pay to place ads that don't work, but since they do, they might as well spend the least amount possible on creating the content. The value of the input then approaches the (low) value of the output. No one is going to remember the ad anyway, it impacts no buying decision, why bother spending to make it good?

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grues-dinner 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think a lot of advertising is extremely effective in that it implants the brand in your subconscious through repetition and familiarity. I would much rather go to a local sandwich shop that a Subway, and I've been to a Subway maybe 10 times in my entire life, not once in over 15 years, and am not especially impressed by what I got for the money, and yet every time I go past a Subway my brain immediately goes "ooh look a Subway" and I have to almost deliberately go "no, walk on" to myself.

Which lines up with the rest of what you say that if it's just about hammering the recognition into your grey matter, it's not especially important if the hammer is gold plated.

	▲	thwarted 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's an advertisement that's working, and not what I was referring to. There are a lot of ads that don't hammer anything about the brand or product into your head, either because they are not memorable, don't communicate their subject matter well, or are placed/appear where they aren't effective.

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iamacyborg 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think.

You think wrong.

This stuff is easy to measure and businesses spend billions in aggregate a month on this stuff. It’s provably effective and the details matter.

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grues-dinner 3 days ago | parent [-]

Do they though? Saturation bombing the Superbowl with Coinbase ads might be effective, but will it significantly change the conversion if a person in the background of the shot has a fuzzy leg that merges with a fire hydrant?

Businesses presumably spend billions on things like office carpet too and very few of them care exactly what neutral-ish colour it is.

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iamacyborg 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, brands literally test creatives all the time.

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grues-dinner 3 days ago | parent [-]

And yet they'll also spend literally millions writing just the company name 100 times around the periphery of a sports field. That's not creative, that's just repetition.

On the graph of spend over the spectrum between that to a genuinely creative live-action advert that is actually memorable for being real (maybe the guy doing the splits between two Volvo™ lorries?) there is a lot of area representing of dross that can be replaced by minimal-input advertotron output. For example 100 million TVs and radios playing in the background while embedding the actual advertising payload of "did anyone say just eat?" into 100 million brains.

Come on, you must have seen a delivery food ad recently. Did the protagonist really have food in their hand or was it AI? What were they wearing? What model was the car in the background? Who cares, that wasn't the purpose of the ad.

Obviously if a creative is bring hired the hiring manager will want to have the best creative they can have for the same money and have the applicants compete with each other for it. But the company board would rather still just not employ that creative in the first place if all they're going to be doing is boilerplate forgettable delivery vehicles for the brand name and you can get 90% of the filler content for that to pop out of your enterprise tier adverts as a service subscription for $50 a month per user.

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selimthegrim 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Essence festival in New Orleans had a Coke sponsored ad recently that I’m pretty sure had AI generated food in it.

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iamacyborg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> And yet they'll also spend literally millions writing just the company name 100 times around the periphery of a sports field. That's not creative, that's just repetition.

Read up on marketing mix modelling and lift testing.

	▲	grues-dinner 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		None of that precludes replacing huge swathes of advertising content with generated content, though? I'm not sure I understand the relevance. In fact, being able to produce unlimited numbers and variations and combinations of adverts and have them compete against each other in the real world and be scored on tiny deltas in metrics becomes much more possible if you can automate basically the whole process. But it's a multimillion spend if you have to recruit actual actors and actual film crews and actual food photographers or drone pilots and car drivers and location scouts and so on to film and edit just a handful of variants let alone thousands. Maybe there will always be a creamy top layer of increasingly-expensive artisanal handmade advertising but I predict we will end up with a huge sloppy middle ground of generated advertising that is just there to flash bright colours, jingles, movement and brand names into your brain. I'm not saying it will be good advertising, very much the opposite (not that I think most much non-AI advertising is "good", it's mostly repetitive crap) but I think it will be very cost effective. Maybe it won't be as effective as "real" ads but it'll be a hell of a lot cheaper and getting 80% of the bang for 5% of the buck means you can do a lot more of it in more channels (or pocket the difference). Every penny you save is a penny you can use to bid for the better slots.