This essay as told is based on a conversation with Leslie Walsh, head of strategy and product development at New York-based advertising agency Episode Four. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The main advantage of creativity is that the ideas must be original and unique. I think everyone in the creative industry fears that if we all use ChatGPT we’ll have the same ideas – that we’ll end up in a sea of sameness. It’s a race to the bottom.
Many people have creative ideas in different ways. We like to say that we approach this by asking, “Where do my customers really want to engage?” »
We needed something to base our ideas on, so customers wouldn’t just say, “Where did that come from?” Is it just something in your crazy brain? Is this something that will actually help me grow my business?
RYA is our creative AI tool. We position it as: radical ideas that are palatable to your audience because they are all data-driven.
We conducted a weekly survey that asks Americans: If you had more time or money in your day, how would you spend it?
We have 180 genres and 20 different actions, things like “I want to go on a trip” or “I want to go out to eat.” And then gender adds a little nuance: “You said you like to go out to eat. What kind of food do you like? You’d like to go on a trip. What kind of traveler are you?” This is where we can really identify passion points.
With this dataset, we then figured out how to train large language models to be creative and come up with ideas as if our teams were coming up with ideas themselves, but at a fast pace. We’ve found that Anthropic’s Claude is best at generating creative ideas, but we use different ones for different things.
Typically in an agency project process you work with the clients and then you work on the brief. You go back and forth, back and forth. You brief your teams, then it takes a few weeks to develop these ideas, shape them and get them to the right place. Then you present to the client, go back, revise and come back. This can usually take six to eight weeks.
We have reduced this process to a few days. We like to say that we can do it all in a day and, if our clients have the time, do it in minutes. It just depends on how much you want to shape and shape the idea.
This really helps us get a good starting point and allows us to see the bigger picture. It’s less of that execution layer that I know a lot of creative tools are on the market right now.
RYA will not help you create a banner ad. RYA is not going to help you publish a social media post. RYA will help you come up with a great idea that could then turn into a banner ad or social post.
Relying on “bizarre” and “absurd” AI results
We really like to look at the weird combinations, the absurd places, the less obvious places where you might want to start your thinking, because we think that leads to better work.
How you make the AI a little more absurd is in your incentive strategy and how you adjust the temperature settings. There are ways to give him guardrails to try to make sure that he won’t hallucinate in a way that gets you in trouble, but that he will hallucinate in a good way. You really need strong input. As they say, trash in, trash out.
For a financial services client, we turned financial education into a celebrity chef cooking series. And at a recent financial industry event, we transformed product sales materials into custom-pressed EDM vinyls.
For a travel and leisure client, we launched a cruise ship with a global digital scavenger hunt that hid Google Maps clues across the web, turning a product demo into a game.
For a car loan company, we created a dating show connecting singles with a car and a partner.
Everyone offers different AI tools for different purposes, different verticals, and domain expertise. I’m not an engineer, but I have a lot of expertise in the field in terms of thinking about the best way to brief creatives, work with clients, write a very difficult brief, conduct research and get interesting insights.
Then, with my creative partners, who have much better domain expertise for generating ideas, we put all of this information into a large language model so that it could replicate our thinking.
This is where we are heading. That’s what’s going to be exciting about this industry. There are opinions on whether AI can actually be creative. We think it’s possible.
