When will we get a decent ad for an AI product?
When will we get a decent ad for an AI product?
Welcome to a Thursday update from Unmade. Today: Why do the AI product ads all feel so inhuman?; And an improvement on the Unmade Index.
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Unlock announced
We’ve just announced our next event. Unlock - Brands x 24 Hr Economy takes place in Sydney on October 31.
Taking place under the auspices of the NSW Government’s Neon Forum, Unlock is for anybody in the business of talking to consumers in the nighttime economy.
Earlybird tickets, with a saving of $148, are on sale until October 4. To find out more, or contribute to the program, go to the Unlock website.
Why is adland failing to rise to the AI marketing challenge?
This week, some of the greatest minds in advertising creativity took another swing and miss at selling the befits of AI to a consumer audience.
Apple, celebrated for the last 40 years as a wonderful custodian of its own brand, has released an absolute stinker of a campaign to promote the benefits of Apple Intelligence.
The campaign features Bella Ramsey using the AI features of the new iPhone to avoid awkward situations. Yes, that hacky old trope.
Ramsey meets with her agent and uses her phone to (unconvincingly) pretend she’s read a script…
… and to hide the fact that she doesn’t remember somebody’s name (after first being seen weirdly ducking behind a wall to talk to Siri)…
… and to fake some emotional words at the funeral of a family pet…
In other words, to get away with behaving unprofessionally and inauthentically.
Strategically, it’s a dead ringer for Google’s emotionally empty ad from July, in which a dad used its AI product Gemini to write a letter to an athlete purporting to be from his daughter.
Again, the message was that the use case for AI is as an engine of faking it.
An inherent challenge for any piece of advertising is that as soon as you dive into product features, you may be trying to interest the consumer in an iterative improvement which is in truth simply not that interesting.
But can that possibly be the case with AI? For all the technology masquerading as magic developments in generative AI, is it possible that there are simply no genuinely interesting and helpful use cases? Of course not.
In the case of both of these campaigns, they show the hallmarks of marketing by a risk averse committee, nervous of the backlash if they showed some of the truly powerful things generative AI is capable of.
That makes no sense, when these brands have chosen to enter this AI battleground because they recognise its significance.
So far, the scripts could have been written by ChatGPT-3.5. That’s intended as an insult, by the way. There’s yet to be a great, or even half decent, AI use case ad.
It’s possible to make a wonderful AI product ad, but the creatives will need to be allowed to unleash their humanity to do so.
Green lights on the Unmade Index
It was a much better day on the Unmade Index on Wednesday with most ASX listed media and marketing stocks heading upwards.
Amongst the broadcast stocks, ARN Media had the best of it, gaining 1.6%. Nine gained 1.2% and SEN Radio’s owner Sports Entertainment Group gained 7.1%
The Unmade Index picked up 0.95% , moving to 443.1 points.
Time to leave you to your Thursday.
I’ll be back with more tomorrow. In theory, I’ll be covering the Digital Publishers Alliance’s Independents Day upfronts event in Sydney this afternoon. I say in theory because I’m currently in Melbourne, and Virgin Airlines have just messaged to say “adverse weather” may intervene. So we shall see.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
