4A's Noteworthy News - 21st Edition
Greetings from 35,000 feet on my way back home after another great week in NYC ad Advertising Week 2024. I'm still processing everything, but wanted to share a few highlights from my experience there:
Firstly, it's not AI-related, but I was honored to moderate a fun panel called Play it Forward: How Gaming Immersion Unlocks Player Attention, featuring great insights from Pete Basgen at Wakemaker, Najee Stephenson from CeraVe US and Jordan Shlachter from Activision Blizzard. Big thank you to Jordan, Jessica Reid and the rest of the Activision Blizzard team for putting together a strong group. Here’s a nice shot of the crew moments before we went on stage:
One of the key themes for me was also the expansion of AI use cases. Brands and agencies continue to experiment, and you hear mostly about AI usage in strategy and early in creative processes. But we're also moving beyond those use cases. Take the partnership announced between Akkio and Horizon media for example. From the release: "Akkio’s AI-powered marketing analytics platform integrates seamlessly with Horizon's cloud infrastructure and securely connects to Horizon’s blu. data ecosystem. This enables relevant users, both at Horizon and on the client side, to effortlessly interact across millions of complex data sets through simple chat interfaces which generate comprehensive insights that drive maximized client impact throughout every phase of the campaign lifecycle." Ultimately this will enable non-technical users to interrogate data using natural language rather than complex SQL queries.
The challenges of AI bias came up in several places and in casual conversation around the show. This is a very real and complex problem - great to see it getting more attention. Solutions remain difficult and manual, but just raising the issue and discussing it is a step in the right direction.
My colleague Phillip Stelter also shared a great insight from a session I sadly missed - featuring Jimmie Stone from Meta. Jimmie said something to the effect of "Creative will be automated. Creativity never will be." I love that sentiment, particularly at a time when many in our industry are facing a bit of an existential crisis around the future of our work. The human element will remain important, while AI takes over mundane low-value tasks that most of us could do without anyway. The other way I've heard this said is "AI automates grunt work, and liberates great work."
Lastly, there was some discussion around AI education broadly. Some of it is educating our teams and our clients about what's really possible. But there's a bigger issue lurking that surfaced this week: the need to educate end consumers. There is a lot of fear out there, and much of the proposed legislation on the topic seems to start from the point of view that AI is inherently bad - that ANY AI usage is problematic and should be disclosed to the end user. We need to protect consumers, and there are already strong protections in place around truth in advertising and the like. But there are also legitimate, responsible uses of AI that don't harm consumers, and penalizing brands or agencies for that responsible usage feels misguided. Like bias, this is an extremely complex and nuanced topic that will require much more discussion and debate to arrive at solutions.
Lastly, I also got to play around with Meta's AI tools and created some new headshots. This one kinda sorta looks like me. :-)
