Tom Roach explores the implications of the GenAI revolution on creativity, and takes an optimistic view that this advertising revolution will be a more creative one than the last.
Brands today have to balance competing needs: more digital content to drive engagement, but also more consistency to drive long-term effectiveness.
Advertising today is a myriad of smaller things, not just a few big things, and the ad industry needs to more fully embrace this reality or continue to be disintermediated.
As GenAI grows, brands’ visibility and associations in the data sets of large language models will be key – if marketers can link them to market share.
Brands and agencies are already using GenAI and AI in myriad ways, from segmentation to creative testing, and from media planning to measurement.
Solving the attention issue in digital advertising is key to improving creative effectiveness. It will take a combination of good old-fashioned creativity and a good new-fashioned understanding of what works on each platform. Simple, but hard.
Don’t delude yourself about returning to a ‘golden age’ of offline advertising. There’s plenty of evidence you can build successful brands with today’s media.
What is it, why are you stuck on it, how are you going to get off it?
Too great a focus on return on ad spend (ROAS) is leading to short-term thinking and under-investment, which in turn is stifling growth, and it has the potential to be far more damaging than ROI.
Advertising’s not dead, it’s not dying and no one’s going to kill it any time soon. It’s never been more alive, so instead of taking aim, let’s be dead proud of it.
These fundamentals of marketing communication will always be true because they’re based on how our brains work, not on how specific technology works.
It doesn’t seem right that most of the industry uses a template built on three layers which are each mostly wrong and not strongly supported by marketing science.
From Delony Sledge to Fernando Machado, marketers with a coherent brand philosophy produce better and more consistent advertising.
Diversity in advertising means more customers feel seen. When people feel seen they feel good, and making people feel good drives brand growth.