It has been a long while since I wrote something for mass consumption. In fact, it was early days of the pandemic, early March 2020. Before that, I was suggesting in other posts, to prepare for an economic downturn that we had been delaying artificially or otherwise (luck). I really did not see the four years we would all need to manage, with the horrible global impacts to everything from isolation, food shortages, lack of community, and overall fear. Surprisingly, the net results were nowhere near as horrible as I had thought possible! However, it is hard to avoid thinking about the resulting trauma as something we all will need to manage for at least a few more quarters. So, I took myself out of the update/opinion on the creative industry for that period as I did not want to dump on something that was already overwrought with doom.
So, now, four years since my last missive, I have some positive thoughts about what happens next, I know, I am equally surprised!! But let us get into it:
I believe the creative field is due for a renaissance.
Yes, AI is here and will be evolving as the models and the computing power improve. The legal aspects may be yet to appear, but don’t they always come into the game at some point? I imagine licensing of ancestral creative by the models will offer some protection to the brands and agencies so that this new tool will be able to exist, but it is still early days and totally unresolved. Others have opined enough on the LLM, creative scraping, and authorship abuse so I will not drone on further, but this is where I get optimistic…
If the creative viability of AI is still unresolved, this offers smaller, but intensely creative teams to rechart campaigns, ideas, and overall creative visions for brands, because they will create their clients’ marketing needs from scratch, able to secure that illusive legal cover that most serious brands will require to not have to spend so much time in court moving forward. Let’s be clear, AI has been moving way too fast for the legal impacts to be understood, but if there are fees to be generated, legal entanglements will always present themselves for opposing sides to litigate, it is just a matter of time.
What could this mean? We go back to the early 2000s when creative teams could document, have rounds of creative that the clients approve that move the creative along, leaving an audit trail, font, and image licensing in files that document the way the creative solutions were developed, independent of any of the new AI risk prone sources.
The positioning will be easy to differentiate from someone good at using prompts, and putting a deck together, and presenting that to a client that is inexperienced in valuing creative therefore creating legal minefields moving forward for the brands. I believe smaller creative teams have the advantage in the current climate because of their ability to move quickly, adapt to clients’ needs quickly, and overcome the doubts created by lazy quick brand shots into the void. Small teams will remember what campaigns, consistency, and relevance means to brand building and can avoid dealing with the ancillary elements of the campaign like the media buys, optimization, which can be truly systematized by more tech driven partners. Creative will be able to stand alone again, and that is where the renaissance takes hold.
I am optimistic.
Peralta Consultants 