The Impact of AI on the Creative Industries

Quite simply: generative AI is going to change everything.

Lessons from the internet

I think the best way to look at how AI is going to impact the creative industries is by looking back at how the internet, and Amazon in particular, has changed the world over the last 30 years.

If, like me, you entered the workforce in the 1990s, you'll remember when you first heard about an online bookshop called Amazon. Back in 1995 when it launched, it was little more than a curiosity. But since then it has not only expanded into the behemoth it is today, it has also changed the very fabric of our society and economy.

Check out what Amazon looked like back in 1996.

And since then, Amazon has changed itself, but it's also changed us too.

It's grown from selling books into selling thousands of other products, into becoming a marketplace for third-party sellers, to becoming a cloud service provider, to becoming a TV and movie studio, and now an AI business. And then the process has become one of the largest organizations in the world.

But just as importantly, everything else has changed too. Think about the way we access Amazon.

It was in 1995 desktop computers. Then in the 2000s, it became laptops, then in the 2010s, it became smartphones. And then in the last few years, it's become smart speakers - you can just ask Alexa for what you want.

Consumer expectations have changed enormously in that time as well. We've come to expect low prices for everything. We want to be able to order something at any time of day or night, and we expect it to arrive the next day, or sometimes even the same day. And then we want to be able to use it for a month and still return it for free.

All of that stuff would have seemed crazy in 1995.

But the creative industries have adapted and changed throughout that whole period as well.

We've seen the rise of digital agencies that design and build fantastic websites and apps. We've seen companies embrace online and programmatic advertising. We've seen the rise of social media and agencies that create the assets and manage the accounts for huge companies. And we've seen agencies move into creating brand films and explainer videos as we move to online-only businesses that need to communicate with their customers.

So we've done this before. The internet changed everything. Generative AI is going to change it all again, and probably even faster.

Why this matters

More money is being spent on generative AI than any other technology ever in the history of mankind.

Publicis Group, one of the largest advertising agency groups in the world, is investing €300 million in building out their AI platform over the next few years, and they're going to be using it for everything, from insight and strategy, to media planning, to creative production.

Omnicom, another huge network of agencies, are building out their platform, Omni, to create creative briefs, ads, media plans, and more. You name it, their goal, to automate the entire advertising campaign and creative journey for their clients.

Then there is Superside, the outsourced design service. They've embraced generative AI in the way they work, and now are passing on a 60% cost reduction onto their clients, by being able to do things faster and cheaper.

How can you compete with that? Here's how.

Harnessing AI

There's a lot of doom and gloom in the creative sector about the impact of AI. And while it's not all good news, there is certainly a lot more to be excited about than many people appreciate.

Firstly, AI tools allow you to do things more quickly, which frees up time to spend on higher value or more interesting activities.

Secondly, they improve the quality of your outputs, by upskilling less experienced team members and improving our ideation and creativity.

Thirdly, they reduce the effort that you spend on mundane tasks, increasing jobs satisfaction and making people's roles more engaging.

But most importantly, they can add value to your clients by allowing you to create new AI-enabled services, such as we talked about with Amazon and the rise of the internet.

So what's going to be the impact on the creative industries?

Today, and in the pre-AI world, we have higher value work and lower value work, largely based on the level of creativity and skill required to deliver them.

But in the future, some of the things that require creativity and skill today are going to become quicker and easier through the use of AI, and we're going to see some of that high value work become low value work.

We've been here before. Think back to the last century when the newspapers were based on Fleet Street. Typesetting was a highly regarded technical skill. But the introduction of page layout programs in the 1980s allowed people to typeset digitally. In the space of a few years, laying out a newspaper page meant something completely different, and required different skills.

Did the output, the quality of the newspaper, suffer? No. We just removed one step of what I call 'cognitive manual labour'. Things that are done by humans, but don't require any particular thought or creativity - just mastering a tool or process. Newspaper typesetting was a form of cognitive manual labour.

And what will be the high value work of the future?

The bar for creativity is going to be raised. People are going to embrace AI tools and do incredible things with them. And then clients are going to begin to expect that. So there's an opportunity right now to embrace AI and move towards creating that high value, highly creative work of the future.

I think companies that don't embrace these tools are going to find themselves in that low value commoditised space and struggle to compete in a fews years time.

Here at Spark, we hear a lot of companies fear that AI is going to take away jobs and make their work boring and less creative.

But let's just step back a moment and look at the kind of work we're actually delivering for our clients.

I was in London the other day for a workshop and I took some photographs of the adverts that I saw on the tube on my journey there. Let's not pretend that any of them were particularly creative. And if that is the level of work that we're expecting to be able to deliver for clients, we're going to struggle in the future.

This is the kind of work which AI is going to make very easy and straightforward to do, and is rapidly going to get outsourced to lower value, cheaper companies and cheaper countries to deliver.

So how are we going to compete in the future? High value work in the future is going to rely on four key things.

1.Brilliant ideas

True creativity will always have a value. A lot of what we call creativity today is really just operating the tools. Figma, InDesign, Photoshop. These are just canvasses we use to bring our ideas to life. When operating the tools no longer has much value, what does? The quality of the idea that went into it.

2.Things you can only do with AI

The new AI tools allow us to do things that simply weren't possible before - either because they were too time consuming or expensive, or because the technology didn't exist.

For the latter, there are things like avatars, which I think are going to be huge. How about having Rafa Nadal help you choose your next tennis racket? Or have Elon Musk on your board of directors?

For the former, think about mass customisation and personalisation.

A great example I saw a few months ago was at a conference organised by The Economist where someone from Pernod Ricard got up to talk about a campaign that they ran at the end of last year entirely generated through AI.

Their creative team took 300 locations across America and developed a unique cocktail recipe, especially crafted for that location, and then generated an image of that cocktail to go with it.

They launched this campaign on social media and it had the second highest engagement of any campaign they've ever run.

A couple of years ago, it simply wouldn't have been cost effective to create 300 pieces of unique copy and artwork for a campaign like this.

3.Things that you can't do with AI

Think about pop-ups, live events, using real life influencers, and other forms of physical activation.

A great example of this is Xbox tying up with Tempur, the mattress makers, to create the ultimate sci-fi gaming chair, which they then toured shopping centres around the country getting people to try out the latest Xbox games.

4.Cleverly combine both AI and human creativity

Karen Cheng is a brilliant director based out of San Francisco and she created this short for Instax.

It uses traditional stop motion that is perfectly aligned with the non-digital Instax experience of creating real, original prints. But then it uses AI to cleverly animate one of the pictures to give us a moment of joy.

This also aligns with bucket 1, of course. It's simply a brilliant idea.

So where is this all going?

I think there are 3 ways this could all pan out.

First

We unleash a Cambrian explosion of AI-augmented creativity, with people pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

Second

We see a race to the bottom as agencies and clients churn out mediocre work at huge scale, as the cost of creative production drops to near zero.

Third

Human-made commands a premium.

The reality is I think we'll see all three models in the future. But as a business there is only one safe place to play. The second path leads to wafer thin margins and service commoditisation. The third may continue to command high fees, but (just as today) bespoke will only appeal to a small niche of higher end brands.

So if you want your business to thrive in the future, you need to aim for the first path. Equip your team with the skills, imagination and tools to unleash their creativity and find new ways to add value to your clients.

—Jules Love, Spark