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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS
Will human creativity still be needed
in the future?
Those who are engaged in marketing today get the im- Well, the rapid advances and technical possibilities that
pression that machines could soon take over their job, artificial intelligence (AI) will provide soon is spurring
right? But according to Ketchum Pleon’s Chief Creative not only discussions among artists but inspires and
Officer, Petra Sammer. that’s so far not quite true. boosts the advertising and communications industry,
too. For instance, Saatchi & Saatchi already presented
The expert in storytelling writes in one of her articles the first AI-video, music studios composed the sound
that the once chaotically acting creative industry is al- for commercials using algorithms, media planners al-
ready looking for the workflows of the process-optimized lowed computers to decide on the placement of ads,
IT industry, raising the provocative question when there press offices fancy answering questions automatically
will be the first robot to win a Cannes lion? via chatbot, and IBM's Watson proved during Wimble-
don 2017 that it is possible to do without a whole edito-
Well, thinking of AI, AR, VR, chatbots, programmatic rial team.
planning, etc., who knows if that will really happen
sometime soon? The fact is that ING Bank won last The advantages of the machine compared to the hu-
year several Cannes lions with a project that creatively man being are simply manifold and quite impressive: AI
staged the topos "human” vs “machine”: In order to po- programs are faster, more effective and in the long
sition itself as an innovative bank, ING had scanned in term much cheaper. It is therefore no wonder that sto-
all portraits the Baroque painter Rembrandt had ever rytellers from marketing and corporate communications
painted. With this enormous amount of data, a new por- are particularly interested in this technology. Because
trait was then produced by a 3D printer. Hence, “The the art of storytelling offers some aspects that can be
next Rembrand" was not a copy but a newly created easily automated. For example, the structure of a story
work and even sent creatives into transports of delight. (beginning, middle, and end) or e.g. the Aristotle’s sev-
The core of the discussion the project triggered was the en golden rules of storytelling, a computer can quickly
question: If you can teach a machine to create a crea- capture and an algorithm automatically create. Prefabri-
tive work, will human creativity be superfluous in the cated text modules can be put together in a smart and
future? flexible way, as we already see in robot journalism to-
day, not to mention that Netflix adapts stories constant-
4 September 2017 - Immersive & Engagement Marketing (AR / VR)