Robots vs. Artists: AI, Creative, and the Bottom Line

In a creative agency, much of profitability comes down to the efficient use of a team's time, as payroll is the largest single expense. In other words, profit is a measure of the value a team can create in the time they spend working.

A common challenge is that in an agency, a significant driver of that value is creativity - unique ideas/approaches/strategies developed to achieve the client's goals. So, how long does it take to create an original idea? How long does it take to figure out exactly why certain messaging doesn't resonate? How long does it take to improve brand recognition?

This is a significant challenge to operators of any agency: the business model is inherently tied to the efficient utilization of creative capacity, but over-emphasizing efficiency can have a devastating effect on creativity. 

I won't dive down this topic any further in this article, but suffice it to say that creativity and efficiency are inherently at odds. 

>> To read more about this, I recommend reading Blair Enns article “The Innoficiency Problem” which dives into this relationship. He compares innovation rather than creativity to efficiency, but the relationship is the same.

There are a lot of ways to approach this problem: building a tight process to guide the creative process, breaking down that process into small parts that can be more accurately estimated, etc. This is a topic for another day. 

All this to be said, the balance between efficiency and creativity is a perennial problem agency operators are always looking to resolve. 

Enter AI. 

Whether they know it or not, most agencies have been using some form of AI for some time now to predict behavior, deliver dynamic messaging, etc. Many of the most popular tools marketers use leverage AI - tools like Google Ads, Salesforce, etc.

All that has been welcomed by marketers. AI is “staying in its place.” 

We look at enough spreadsheets already and are happy to let machines handle that stuff. We love the efficiency that it brings to our businesses.

Then, tools like Jasper.ai and DALL·E 2 started popping up, promising to develop creative 10x faster. Now, we start feeling a bit defensive. 

Creatives feel threatened. 

Discussions quickly turn philosophical. 

“What is creativity, anyway?”... “AI can’t truly create anything truly original, it just recycles”.... etc.

Some creatives, however, have jumped on board and are creating some amazing things in a fraction of the time. 

It's how painters must have felt when the camera came into vogue. 

The Role of AI Creative

Just like painters facing the camera, AI will certainly impact our industry. Probably slower than we all think, but it’s coming. 

The question is what the impact looks like and what we should do about it. 

I don’t know exactly what the impact will look like. I am not a fortune teller. 

I do know that we as agency operators have a decision: we can embrace AI and learn how to can leverage it or push it off as another fleeting marketing trend, hoping that it will fizzle out.

It’s very unlikely that AI won’t have an impact on our businesses in the years to come. So, operational leaders in the creative industry need to be doing research and figuring out how to use this technology.

If used correctly, one of the core roles of AI can be to lift creatives out of the monotonous aspects of their roles and scale their efforts like never before.

This will allow creatives to work on higher-level, more strategic work, thereby increasing the value they drive for the agency (read: more profitability).

Scaling like this comes with a danger, however. Just as outstanding creative can be scaled, so can garbage 'creative'.

• Regurgitated LinkedIn posts could get worse.
• Blogs that simply repeat what already exists at the top of search results will be spun out in minutes. Just like what happens now, but with 100x the volume and probably even longer, more drawn-out versions.
• Pretty much everything gets.... vanilla. Like, real vanilla.

AI will not replace professional creatives any more than Canva did.

Not everyone agrees will agree with this, but top-notch designers, copywriters, etc. are still needed for that initial spark - the unique approach to an industry problem, the application of a principle from one practice area into another, the new way of looking at things.

Where the impact will likely be great is the lower echelons of creative work. At least, at first.

Back to profitability

AI may be an opportunity to resolve some of that tension between efficiency and creativity. 

• Use AI to remove some bottlenecks early in the design process to spark new ideas that creatives can run with.
• Use AI to take deeply expert content with a unique perspective and extrapolate on that idea at a scale not previously possible.

Some agencies may even leverage these technologies to the extent that it's a significant differentiator for them.

The better we can integrate the strengths of AI into our agencies, the better we can lift creatives up into more strategic and valuable place. The better we leverage the great value creatives drive, the more we can charge.

I have only scratched the surface on this subject, and I don’t know the depth of the impact this AI wave will have, but operational leaders in the creative industry need to be thinking about this and testing.

AI will impact many different areas of our businesses with the potential to enhance profitability, improve creative quality, and more.

What are your thoughts on how AI will impact the creative?