Hearts & crafts: A review on holiday advertising in the age of AI
How this year's holiday campaigns prove the importance of human-led storytelling.
I started teaching as an adjunct professor four years ago when I moved back to Massachusetts from California. Teaching is a really useful way not just to help support the next generation of industry leaders, but a way to organize your thoughts. Teaching mode helps me observe my industry slightly differently: what are the lessons or key insights or trends shaping our future and how can I bring them into the classroom?
Of course, as tends to happen for any teacher, working with great students also helps me learn (perhaps more than they learn from me). Especially in the technological revolution we’re in today, emerging creative and marketing leaders are at the precipice of the future. They are native users of social platforms, some are even professional creators participating in the creator economy while studying for their degrees. They are also implementing artificial intelligence into their workflow, and while that presents challenges academically in some cases (how do you evaluate competence on a topic - the traditional methods are trickier in an AI world), my class acts as a pseudo focus group - as we cover modern marketing and creative work, they are uniquely equipped to sort out what works and what is “sus” (one of the words I learned from them!).
Teaching during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday craziness is particularly fun, as we can evaluate advertising content and campaigns in real-time as part of our curriculum. This past week, I pulled a handful of ads that have been circulating this holiday season within the industry, gaining attention though their efficacy is yet to be determined.
One set of ads that I shared with students was Coca-Cola’s new work, which plays on the familiar “Polar Express” vignette but with a new twist, all of the ads in this year’s campaign are fully-generated by AI. Here is an example.
Student feedback was consistent with mine:
The ad is fairly well done. It works. It conveys the message and doesn’t deviate from what is expected from the brand.
Still, it is clearly either AI or an animation. They could tell primarily from the faces of the people - “they look too perfect.”
It helps fill the need for ad inventory but doesn’t blow anyone away.
Next, I shared Apple’s new campaign “Heartstrings,” as well as Disney’s short, “The Boy and the Octopus” (directed by Taika Waititi), both shared below:
Perhaps you can guess what the response was. Tears were shed, I’ll put it that way. And one student aptly changed his opinion, sharing “I thought the Coke ad was cool, but after seeing these two right after it, it is so clear how much less effective it is.”
It is a perfect encapsulation of how we should be thinking about incorporating AI into our work. In academia and in the workplace, I think often about the difference between craft and production. Sometimes, you will need to create 1,000 variations of an ad, or social copy, or pieces of printed collateral. It is just the way of the work. Creativity often comes with an enormous administrative burden, and in those cases artificial intelligence can reduce the toil and deliver work that is good enough for its use case.
Still, when we want to truly impact hearts and minds, when we want to engage audiences (as brands or entertainers) in compelling ways that drive real emotion, only human beings have that storytelling capacity. In our modern world, there is more than enough room for both, and I don’t subscribe to the notion we should be all in or all out on AI. It is a tool after all, and tools throughout history have always helped humans become more efficient and productive.
Legendary designer Paula Scher and her agency partners at Pentagram found themselves in hot water recently after using Midjourney to design a government website project. She responded in defense of the work saying, “My argument about this, and where the differential is, is that the definition of design in the dictionary is ‘a plan’. We created a plan, and it was based around the fact that this would be self-sustaining, and therefore was not a job for an illustrator. We will use the best tools available to us to accomplish the ideas we have.”
I’m inclined to agree with her. As we all consider how we lever AI tools into our work streams, we’d do well to remember that we’ve always needed to separate the kind of work that simply needs to get done from the kind of work that inspires our audiences.
My students provided a helpful reminder to me last week in their reaction to this year’s holiday campaigns. And they’re perhaps the best sounding board. At the end of the day, no one will care if something is created with AI or not. They will care if it works. And the kind of media that really works can only be done with human leadership.
What do you think? How are you saving space for world-class storytelling in an AI future?