Just to be clear, this is not a post that’s just crapping on AI for the sake of it.

To all the AI fanboys: I understand that it’s great for medical stuff, summarising things and creating low-quality creativity that needs human help to be halfway decent.

Also, yes: the owners of AI make money by using a ridiculous amount of power and water to steal work from all over the internet, and has yet to convince Wall Street that it’s going to be profitable.

But let’s put all that aside. This is about AI creating ads.

The other day I was reading a LinkedIn post about the German National Tourist Board creating an ad presented by an AI ‘influencer’ that will show you some artificially images of Germany in a creepily robotic and soulless manner.

I commented that ‘if Germany can’t be bothered to make a real ad, why should I be bothered to make a real visit?’. 

I hadn’t really thought that through 100%, but as I gave it more consideration the penny dropped: AI is intrinsically about doing things faster, at lower cost and with less effort.

That all sounds great if you’re the one making the stuff. However, if you’re the one receiving it, you will be aware that someone somewhere thought you weren’t worth the time and effort to make something with craft, cost, care and consideration.

As Rory Sutherland said, ‘When Human beings process a message, we sort of process how much effort and love has gone into the creation of this message and we pay attention to to the message accordingly. It’s costly signaling of a kind’.

Imagine it’s your birthday. Would you prefer a generic store-bought cake, or one that someone had taken the time to make properly, with the exact ingredients that you like, and your own name piped on the top instead of a perfect, machine-lettered, one-size-fits-all ‘Happy Birthday’?

And what would you think about someone who dashed into M&S on the way to your house to buy a Colin The Caterpillar, versus someone who planned your perfect cake three weeks earlier?

If you have something important to say (which is how most clients think of their communications), then saying it cheaply and quickly seems a bit odd, as if you don’t value it after all. 

Whereas the use of craft, time, effort, thought, consideration and expense intrinsically implies that the message really matters.

It’s a little like digital vs traditional media. A little box on Facebook feels ephemeral and valueless; here today, gone later today. But a billboard or a TV ad feels more like somebody, somewhere gave a proper shit about what they wanted to say, suggesting that you should give a similar shit in return.

The whole point of AI is to crank out quantity as cheaply as possibly. Yes, eventually the quality will improve, but as long as we know that what we are being served is AI-generated, we will know that the people responsible just didn’t care that much about what they were saying.

Messages come to us in two ways: style and content. Even if the latter is brilliant, the former can always drag it down. 

Convenience and cheapness have their place, but the value people will take from our work will only be equal to the value we put into it.

Sure, AI can do what it can to disguise the convenience/lack of effort, or pretend it wasn’t responsible, but if we enter a world where it has to reveal itself for copyright reasons, we’ll know, and when we know, we won’t care as much.

I just finished watching Mad Men for the third time. The first followed the initial annual-ish release of seasons, with the second and third times both inhaled all in one go, over a month or two.

Before I dive into some elements that might relate to the advertising industry in 2024, may I just make one thing clear: Mad Men is the best TV show in the history of the medium. 

Over 92 episodes it is perfectly written, constructed, paced, acted, directed, photographed, designed and hairdressed. That’s over 4000 minutes of utter brilliance, something no Hollywood director ever achieved.

Sure, some of you are shaking your heads, muttering ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Grange Hill’, but I’ve watched them all, and Mad Men is clearly the best.

(By the way, I wrote a post about the show back in May 2015. I had attended a Writer’s Guild event where the creators answered questions. It was fun.)

If you watched it when if first appeared, 10-15 years ago, you were probably struck by how little the business has fundamentally changed. Sure, we no longer drink or smoke that much, but the frustrations of client relationships, what to do when the CD presents their own work over that of their teams, and the CFO hanging himself in his office are situations we’ve all witnessed many, many times.

On this occasion I was struck by some of the ways in which it relates to today’s industry.

Towards the end of the show there’s a plotline about installing a computer in order to for the agency to appear more modern. The creatives are suspicious while others are concerned that it will take people’s jobs away. When it was written, around 2013, the current form of AI was a mere pipe dream, but now it’s been installed in every agency, making creatives suspicious and making others concerned that it will take people’s jobs away.

There’s also an interesting story where Peggy organises a stunt whereby two women are paid to pretend to fight over who gets to buy the last ham in the store. Look! It’s a preview of the experiential/stunt advertising which is now so prevalent. Don was not happy with this turn of events, as he felt it made the agency look cheap and sensationalist. He was right. In many instances he would also be right today.

Did they cover ‘purpose’? Kind of. Mad Men was set at a time when casual racism and sexism was not only a regular occurrence, it was also celebrated. Giving a crap about coral reefs or unrealistic body images was not on the cards. That said, when his agency lost Lucky Strike, Don wrote an open letter, published in the New York Times, setting out his new policy of declining tobacco accounts. It then bites him on the arse as other potential clients fear suffering the same treatment (a fate which did not befall AMV BBDO when it made an identical declaration). So perhaps Mad Men predicted the drive to purpose, and what seems to be the backlash that has followed. In the end, money always talks. Purpose was all well and good when it was the shortest path to an award, but juries now seem to be suffering from a degree of Mother Theresa fatigue.

One more big difference between then and now is the admission of fallibility. There are several moments where Don reminds clients that, when it comes to his work, there are no guarantees of success. That kind of self-aware ‘we’ll do our best’ is in stark contrast to the data-driven dross of today. Click-through rates, likes, followers and other meaningless KPIs now rule the industry, as if guarantees can be guaranteed. A return to the explicit admission that we are all taking a chance might not be a bad thing.

So I’ll repeat: it’s brilliant. Watch it again. There’s much to learn and much to entertain, and if it encourages you to keep a bottle of Smirnoff in the office, that’s fine by me.

For decades advertising had a very clear brass ring. Despite the prestige afforded press, posters and radio, TV was the real toppermost of the poppermost.

(There’s a reason why some teams suffered the withering insult ‘Yeah, but they can’t do TV’, yet no one ever insulted a great TV creative by saying, ‘Yeah, but they can’t do press/posters/radio.)

It was the most famous, the most expensive and the coolest medium. If you told someone you worked in advertising they might ask if they’d seen anything you’d done. What they meant was anything you’d done on TV.

Of course we cared about the best work in the other media, but the public thought that TV ads mattered about a thousand times more than anything else we did. 

It was almost like telling your mum you were on TV. If you were watching your favourite show, your ad might appear right in the middle of it, giving your work a kind of adjacent version of fame. When you made a TV commercial you hired a real director, cast real actors and closed down real streets. That was usually more fun than picking a font or making sure the headline of your DPS didn’t disappear down the gutter.

So yeah, it was the best part of the job.

In many ways it still is, but that superiority has been severely diluted in recent years.

First off, we now make lots of filmed entertainment that most people don’t see. There’s no point telling your mum you did that TikTok aimed at people who groom their dogs in West Lancashire, or that Instagram influencer campaign for cheese-lovers in Gravesend.

But second, and more problematically, the award medium of the moment probably isn’t TV.

It might be long-form online advertising, like one of the Dove experiments or Like a Girl. It might be a statue, like Fearless Girl or Project 84. There’s a good chance it’s some kind of stunt, like Lost Class or Whopper Freakout. And finally it might well be something ‘experiential’, like Burger King x Stevenage or Long Live The Prince.

So the classic, unchallenged brass ring is now a bunch of vaguer, more disparate rings, made out of a wide variety of semi-precious metals and questionable alloys.

So what? Well, awards are still the most direct route to raises and promotions, so creative people like to win them. In addition, agencies like to boast about them, so CEOs and chairpeople also like to win them. Furthermore, if Cannes is anything to go by, they’re becoming increasingly important to clients, so they also like to win them.

For better or worse, awards matter, and when a bunch of clever people want to win metal animal heads and stubby bits of wood, they find all sorts of new and unusual ways to make that happen.

First we had Pre-Scam (1960s-90s), the name I’m giving to the era before proper scam. In those charmingly innocent days you might enter a 2-minute version of your TV ad by running it once at 3am in an obscure fleapit, or trim the phone number off the entry proof to make it look better. Cheating, but not to the extent that anyone was that bothered.

Then we had Proper Fucking Scam (2000s), where people literally made ads up that had never even run, and sometimes even made up the client, and sometimes even pretended Nike was their client (true story. Quick aside: I just tried to find a record of that story online because I know it happened, but I can’t find any evidence of it. I think it was DDB Dubai, and Chat GPT has confirmed that, but then Chat GPT does lie occasionally. If you remember it happening and have a link, please pass it on). Fun times, but they had to end. Creatives were given an inch, but they took a mile, and things got too ridiculous to sustain (that said, it’s still kind of happening now).

Then the 2010s brought The Eventy Thing That Needs A 2-Minute Explanation. Crazy. Now everything needs a 2-minute explanation, even posters, and that explanation better have stats, TikTok clips of people very genuinely talking about the campaign totally unprompted, and a flurry of possibly-genuine tweets covering the whole screen. 

I get it. Digital advertising needs context, and indeed explanation. But when the digital people got to essentially write an ad for their ad, the whole industry wanted in, and the Case Study became its own art form. 

So how did that lead to TV being dethroned? 

Well, a weird digital thing which requires an explanation will be judged almost entirely on that explanation. The jury will have to take your word for those ‘3.2 billion media impressions’ or ‘+673% spontaneous recall’. TV, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide. Sure, it still (insanely) gets to add an explanation, but the jury will also watch and judge the actual ad, so it had better be good.

In addition, most TV advertising is still more expensive than, say, a statue, so if you want to win a Cannes Grand Prix (or six), it makes more sense to take the experiential route. If you tell people you won eight Cannes Golds, those people tend not to ask if any were for Creative Use of Data, Audience Under 25,000. The congrats will be the same is if they were all for Something Normal People Can Understand.

Lastly, The Titanium Lion, probably the most prestigious award in advertising, was designed to be about ‘shaking the whole thing up and doing something so completely unprecedented and unexpected that it would startle people’ That is much easier to do when you are using an entirely new medium or area, which makes it tricky for a straight-down-the-line 2024 TV ad to conquer. Human beings tend to prefer taking the path of least resistance, so if you want to win the biggest prize in the industry, it probably makes more sense to do a Roblox takeover or paint Nelson’s Column pink (for some reason that will make sense in the case study: Barbie, feminism, phalluses etc).

TV has also lost prestige because production has become cheaper. Not that producing things costs less than it used to; the ‘cheaper’ comes from the fact that much filmed advertising now takes the form of social ads with a budget of a few thousand Dollars/Euros/Pounds. Quicker, smaller, lower quality, seen by fewer people. That’s now most of the audio/visual in the world. It’s less respectable, so we respect it less. 

And TV has been callously dismissed for over a decade now. It’s ‘old hat’, ‘a dying medium’, ‘shite’ etc. The neophilia of the ad industry means that the new media options are always considered to be better than the older ones, so now we all need portfolios with 360 campaigns lest we be thought of as out-of-touch dinosaurs. That vibe has of course translated to how the medium is viewed in award judging.

There’s a still a big place at the table for TV commercials – even if they’re just silly old 30-second things that entertain millions of people and get them to buy lots of stuff – but they are no longer at the top of the tree. 

I think that matters because TV (along with press, posters and radio) is now tainted with a vibe of being obsolete, unless of course it involves some sort of extension of the medium.

But all the traditional media channels are still capable of greatness. They just have a harder job convincing the industry that they still matter as much as the shinier, newer options.

And if that isn’t a very long metaphor for the over-40s who are still in the industry, then I don’t know what is (winky emoji).