Capitalising on the Power of AI in 2024

For both the advertising industry and public at large, 2023 was truly a catalytic year for everyone’s relationship with AI. Thanks to platforms like Midjourney and ChatGPT, artificial intelligence had never been so accessible - and its encroachment on our lives seemingly shows no signs of slowing in 2024. In every boardroom, publication - even at family dinners - you couldn’t escape the questions around AI: ‘Is it going to replace our jobs?’, ‘Does this lead to the apocalypse?’, ‘Have you seen this cute image of my dog that I generated? Look! He’s half-dragon and fighting Godzilla…’

To some, AI poses an opportunity - if not an existential threat - to revolutionise creativity and perhaps even life itself in a way not seen since the invention of the World Wide Web. However, its critics are also wary of its perceived lack of originality, a lack of existing best practices and guardrails, and the impact of removing the ‘human touch’ from the processes it’s applied to.

While differing opinions exist, they’re not all that new. In fact, many of adland’s creatives and creators have been utilising AI tools in most corners of the industry - within agencies, VFX studios and elsewhere - for quite some time.

Exploring this, LBB’s Ben Conway has sought answers to the questions: What really changed in the year that AI took over everything? And as we begin a new year, what does the future of AI in advertising look like in 2024?

Today, we hear perspectives from the bodies around the world who have made it their business to advocate for, advise and inform the industry’s talent - associations and consultancies including The 4A’s, CreativeX, Murphy Cobb Associates and Deloitte Digital.

Read their insights below.

Jeremy Lockhorn

SVP, creative technologies and innovation at The 4A's  

AI is not new. The term was coined in the 1950s and has been deployed across a wide variety of use cases in the advertising industry for decades. What's new over the last year is that AI has suddenly begun to approach human-level performance for some tasks, and simple chat-based interfaces have made it accessible to non-technical people. The implication for agencies is that you suddenly have a wicked-smart co-worker who is always available, doesn't get tired and has access to the knowledge of the entire digital world. 

Like humans, though, this new collaborator isn't always right and may not consistently generate the best ideas or insights. But – used appropriately and responsibly – this AI partner can augment and enhance human expertise. We hear from member agencies that it can help solve the blank page issue, automate routine tasks while freeing up time for more strategic and cognitively-challenging work that still requires human creativity and ingenuity, and it creates new ways of working. Agencies can use AI for insights and inspiration, and can move from idea to storyboard at the speed of a text prompt. But what hasn't changed is that human-powered domain expertise remains important. Unskilled prompting is likely to lead to a sea of uninspired and ineffective sameness. 

The people who bring a strategy-driven approach, backed by expertise and innovative thinking that a machine cannot offer, will deliver the most impactful and differentiated work, whether they are using ‘traditional’ tools or generative AI. Our latest guidance paper, the 4A's AI Perspective on AI, offers a strategic approach summarised by the acronym PICA: Participate, Incubate/Investigate, Collaborate and Accelerate.

Rebecca Dykema

SVP, partnerships and creative transformation at CreativeX

AI was the unavoidable topic of adland in 2023, and for good reason. The potential is massive - the general availability of (generative) AI has meant that barriers to content development that existed before have crumbled. AI allows us to digest ad content, and convert it into data in ways never before imagined, and at a level of speed and scale never seen before.

AI-based technologies aren’t really new, but what’s different this year is an entirely new sense of urgency around them. For anyone who went to Cannes or Adweek, it’s clear that businesses (advertisers and agencies alike) are feeling acute pressure to showcase to their clients and investors how they can deploy AI to drive efficiency and impact. As a result, we’re seeing all sorts of demonstrations of the power of AI across the industry.

But how many of these are merely a showcase? A flash in the pan? The winner of the AI arms race won’t be the first or flashiest out of the gate, but rather those businesses that put AI to work systematically and sustainably. The C-suite of both Nestlé and Diageo announced in 2023 investor calls that they are using AI technology to systematically drive creative excellence across their entire business, impacting key media metrics at scale. That’s not a campaign-level flash in the pan, that’s systemic change.

Companies that create lasting strategic differentiation won’t be those that launch the snazziest AI-generated campaign. Or those that leverage AI to optimise a single campaign. The next generation of leaders will be those who capitalise on the power of AI by investing the time and strategic thinking to create new systems with people and AI together at their core, to ensure ongoing and continuous, increasing levels of impact. 

Pat Murphy

Founder, CEO at Murphy Cobb & Associates

The only thing that sticks out in my mind from 2023 is that the rapidity of change is speeding up. We came out of a pandemic a couple of years ago and it feels like we are in a race to make up time. It was during the pandemic that technology and innovation sped up the way we created advertising. It made us all approach things in a different way - and that's a good thing. In the nearly two years we were involved in production during the pandemic, virtually all the projects we were involved in were done remotely, and none of them messed up. Amazing, yet some clients and creative partners have reverted back to the old way of doing things again.

I believe technology and innovation will help solve a huge number of challenges, not least sustainability, which was a big topic last year. Our virtual production initiative for Reckitt helped to reduce the carbon footprint on productions by up to 75% - using the Adgreen calculator to measure the before and after was a realisation that production tech innovation can really tick so many boxes. Now bringing the power of AI into the mix, 2024 will be another big year for innovation in advertising production.

Everyone was talking about AI in 2023, it was so prevalent in Cannes, and it has been a major topic of conversation on my MCA prodcasts. In my conversation with Rishad Tobaccowala, he rightly says that there are no experts in AI - they don't exist because AI has only been part of our discussions for a year, and it's moving so fast. What still worries me, as someone who is incredibly optimistic about the way we can use AI, is that there is no consistency on dealing with intellectual property. The Beijing Internet Court in China ruled, in an intellectual property dispute, that an AI-generated image was an artwork protected by copyright laws, which is the opposite of what the US and European position has been because the source material has been created by someone else. So getting to some international agreement on managing IP and the ethical use of AI still needs some work.

Bottomline, the thing that really has changed is that the old triangle adage of good-fast-cheap. Picking only two is firmly a thing of the past, and has been for a while now. Clients can have their cake and eat it. It's possible to really design a production ecosystem that delivers outstanding creativity and value at the speed of light - and l’ll throw the last word in there: sustainably. I am excited about the next year. 

Simon McLain

US chief strategy and AI officer at Deloitte Digital

The potential promised by these new AI tools is provocative, to say the least: hours saved, quality improved, creativity amplified, experiences transformed. There's also a big difference between playing with these tools as an individual consumer and implementing something that truly generates value, is reliable, trustworthy and can function at enterprise scale.

The real thing that changed in 2023 was that companies started looking into the foundational capabilities they will need to extract real value from generative AI, and discovered that they had their work cut out for them: getting their data, their customer strategy, their creative workflows, their tech stack and - just as importantly - their people and policies ready to meet the challenge of enterprise AI implementation. Will that investment pay off? Absolutely - if they build the right foundation for it to succeed. This will take cross-functional collaboration between every part of the business, from IT to finance to marketing and HR, so that their organisation's grand AI ambitions don't end up as clever experiments that can't succeed outside the lab.

Deloitte Digital's most forward-thinking clients are investing now in building the right foundation to support their AI ambitions. To do this, they first have to craft a shared vision of how value will be created for all of their stakeholders – from board leadership to frontline workers and valued customers – and a roadmap that clearly articulates the journey to get there. The businesses which get that right will reap the benefits for years to come.