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grues-dinner 3 days ago

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.

iamacyborg 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, brands literally test creatives all the time.

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.

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.

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.