Rob Morrison: The problem with AI dates back to 1995

It sounds like a bad sci-fi plot, right? An artificial brain travels back in time to destroy something dear to all our hearts. And yet 30 years later, here we are.

Let me explain.

On 5 October 1995, the Trade Practices Commission ruled that advertising “accreditation” was basically a price fixing scheme. In those days, to buy media you had to be an accredited advertising agency. There were no specialist media agencies. And clients couldn’t buy their own. We had massive media departments who were part of client team.

So, the way agencies made money was to put a random percentage (think 19.5% or 17.5% or 24.5%) on top of the media they booked for any campaign. And because media was the biggest share of the total campaign budget (think 85%+), agencies didn’t need to charge for creative or production.

In effect, everyone in every creative department was free.

But, when the “accreditation” house of cards fell, agencies panicked. They all had to find new ways to charge clients (those WPP shareholders need their dividends, right?). So, they added services – first direct, then digital, then mobile, then social. But those cunning finance department types focused on a new weapon.

Enter the audited timesheet.

Clients loved it. Creative was no longer judged based on how good it was but how long it took. Pitches were decided by procurement based on the lowest hourly rate. Or the smallest monthly retainer. The work became a secondary priority. We trained clients to want everything faster. Not better.

That’s on us.

One of the best pitch leaders I ever worked with almost seems like a time traveller now. He was committed to cracking the idea early on every pitch. If you had 2 weeks from brief to presentation, then the idea was decided in Week 1. No exceptions. Week 2 was strictly for sharpening lines and visuals and rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing.

Why?

In his words, “Because clients can’t tell the difference between a 7/10 idea presented brilliantly and a 10/10 idea presented half-assed.” He was right then and he’s right now. We won a lot of business with 7/10 ideas presented with passion.

The bad news? AI is brilliant at 7/10. It’s a million times faster getting to the shitty, obvious, client-friendly first idea that creatives would banish to in the bin. It writes unreadable babble faster than a copywriter can read the brief. And it delivers cliched visuals faster than a “Businessman in a meeting” Getty search.

The good news? Looks like 7/10 isn’t working like it used to. Customers are developing a Haley-Joel-Osment sixth sense for it (“I see dead campaigns”). It can’t do charming. It can’t do witty. It can’t even do insightful.

So, what now?

The way I see it, we have three tough options:

1) Retrain clients. This could be as simple as taking AI generated work and improving it. Pro bono. Even if it’s already run. Plus, we need to showcase the business impact of excellent work – to clients not just other agencies. Cannes Direct Lions is a brilliant showcase of creativity that delivers numbers. We need to forget the beauty contests.

2) Reinvent our model. We need to find a way to charge for ideas and not time. To be fair, it may still be too late as we should have been doing this for the last 10 years. But “Fast and Cheap” will never be as popular as “Brilliant and Cheap”.

3) Be better together. Lots of agencies are successfully embracing AI. Smart communicators are using it as a tool, not a solution. The monster won’t go back in the bag so, we need to learn to live with it.

Or maybe we can all take the blue pill from Orpheus, help Skynet become self-aware or take a job on the Severed Floor at Lumon.

Rob Morrison is a rarity in advertising – a grey-haired creative. Rob’s experience includes time as a Creative Director at Ogilvy, BWM (now Dentsu Creative), George Patts (now VML), Campaign Palace and Wunderman. He now runs his own consultancy – morrison.collective.

Here are two more opinion pieces from Rob Morrison: