AI gummi bears versus bulls

AI-built creative divides opinion. But a brand built from scratch in 24 hours by an AI SaaS platform owned by the $4bn Brandtech Group just scored in the top 10 per cent of campaign creative within System1’s vast testing trove.

For context, a cow chewing cud for 30-seconds ranks in the top 50 per cent of ads tested by System1. But that bovine revelation arguably holes the notion that AI-generated creative is any worse than the bulk of human built ads – something holdco seniors have privately told Mi3 no longer holds. Per one: “We tested our best ECDs against the machine … the results were somewhat humbling.”

Tom Roach, VP Brand Strategy at Brandtech-owned Jellyfish, showed one of the firm’s one-day wonders at Cannes at the tail-end of a presentation positing that old ad effectiveness rules around attention and ad wear-out have been broken by platforms like Meta, which instead algorithmically penalise brands running the same creative with higher prices and crimped reach.

Roach suggests marketers must therefore deliver much greater volumes of creative specific to those platforms to avoid higher costs and fewer eyeballs. He cited Meta data which claims brands using 20-plus creatives across a single campaign achieve circa 30 per cent lower cost per acquisition and 9 per cent reach gains.

Fault lines deepen

Roach's argument runs counter to practitioners and academics telling marketers to stay consistent and keep running good quality ads for years to get maximum brand and commercial returns. Virtual professor Mark Ritson and P&G CMO Marc Pritchard both robustly made that case at Cannes, with Pritchard scathing of the "hamster wheel of content" and suggesting “building memory requires attention for 10-30 seconds or more to encode important information about the brand". 

Roach and Analytic Partners' Dr Grace Kite argued otherwise – at least when it comes to advertising via platforms.

Across a 20-year career at top London creative agencies, Roach worked alongside ad effectiveness supremo Les Binet at Adam&Eve DDB. He said brands must stay consistent and do the basics on branding and distinctive assets, but via “imaginative repetition” rather than running the same ads, while delivering quantity as well as quantity to maximise ROI via platforms.

Now at The Brandtech Group, an “end-to-end” digital marketing holdco founded by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, Roach urged marketers and the agency supply chain to grasp the nettle.

Brandtech acquired Pencil two years ago, just after acquiring performance specialist Jellyfish, which had a close relationship with Google. It’s being used by major brands, and after inking a deal with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in May, claimed to have recently created 235,000 assets for “three of the world’s top 10 advertisers” that cut production time by more than half, costs by roughly two thirds and delivered 40 per cent performance gains.

“Regardless of what your thoughts are about AI … it’s absolutely here to stay in terms of being able to deliver speed, scale and brand consistency,” said Roach.

“This is just a small example of something we created two weeks ago: We made a brand and all the assets it would need to launch in 24-hours. A lovely brand name; AI generated. A lovely tagline: ‘chew your mood’, for a mood-enhancing gummies brand; all the principles that System1 would tell you to deliver for the brand and advertising were all delivered in super quick time,” per Roach.

“We made a 30-second video that was well above the top 10 per cent of ads that System1 has ever tested. So it is perfectly possible to be creative with these tools. You can just do it much, much quicker these days.”

Now to pair the firm with Evidenza.AI, founded by ex-LinkedIn execs Pete Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, to build the synthetic customer research and marketing plans to go with it. Unless BCG has already staked out that turf.