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AI helps people make ads much more quickly and easily. With AI, people not only develop actual creative assets, they can workshop ideas, generate moodboards, copy ideas and replace time-intensive CGI projects. AI has also lowered the barrier to entry for many smaller brands who can suddenly make video creative and generate enough creatives to spread their campaigns across more platforms and channels.
With so many more people making so much more creative faster and more cheaply, audiences will soon experience a flood of AI generated advertising. Some may be more interesting and more relevant, but unfortunately, a lot of it won’t be. Cheap creative is threatening to reduce advertising effectiveness overall, and it’s a problem that will affect every brand. The only solution is to focus on quality.
AI Creative Out of Control
Many creative experts are cautioning our industry: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” make AI creative.
There is a down side to introducing AI generated creative in advertising. When creative is easy to make, anyone can make it, and they can make a lot of it. As it becomes easier to produce creative, brands run the risk of losing a focus on quality. They focus on quantity over quality. If a creative isn’t precious, it may be treated as a throwaway asset. This phenomenon has given rise to “AI slop” - a flood of low quality AI generated media - and it threatens to take over the internet if media companies and advertisers don’t prioritize quality.
Advertisers start with a creative brief, which leads to a huge chain of different teams from internal regional teams to creative agencies, to planning, media, audience targeting, ad-tech partners, and more. Each of these teams will have access to AI tools, allowing them to make creative from scratch, make thousands of versions, or alter creative into oblivion.
As more people in the supply chain get access to generative AI creative tools, they can decrease quality in a variety of ways:
- When something is expensive, advertisers put a lot of thought into it, like a TV commercial. Once these assets are no longer expensive, advertisers may spend less on creative expertise to craft a valuable asset, reducing the amount of work that professionals put into an ad concept.
- Partners without expertise or quality standards can easily make creative on behalf of a brand, leading to sub-par concepts being developed by non-professionals.
- Media teams could be tempted to test a wide variety of creative designs and messages without thought of how it erodes the brand and burns valuable impressions, which also cost money.
- Brand teams at HQ could allow local and regional teams to interpret creative in their own way without managing for consistency.
Creative Quality Problems Run Deep
Losing control over ad creative quality isn’t just a theoretical issue. There are measurable problems that directly affect advertisers who don’t focus on quality advertising:
High media costs - Making a lot of creative at low costs might save money up front, but running all of this creative costs money on the other side. Media isn’t free, and large numbers of ad creatives require advertisers to run on a lot of impressions. That burns budgets fast.
Low campaign performance - When creative doesn’t meet quality standards, it affects outcomes. Advertisers will see immediate campaign KPIs erode, from attention to conversions to ROAS.
Eroding brand value - Over time, low quality creative will negatively affect brand metrics like loyalty and brand affinity.
Collapse of trust - If the internet becomes full of slop, audiences will lose trust in messaging and turn elsewhere.
Advertisers who lose focus on creative quality run the risk of losing control over their brand all together. Already, many top global brands have been called out for errors in AI generated ads, AI concepts that feel inauthentic and even dynamically generated messaging that doesn’t make sense.
A Focus on Quality Ensures Success
For any brand looking to employ AI to make creative, the first step happens well before any technology is employed. Brands need to define quality for themselves. What messaging, design and rigor is needed to ensure that creative meets their brand standards. Many brands are doing the work to define their creative messaging and goals, but aren’t putting guardrails, metrics and processes in place to ensure all partners and team members adhere to them.
Brands can’t just assume that everyone who touches their campaign will respect the original creative brief. They must work actively with creative teams, agencies, ad-tech and media partners to communicate quality standards and keep KPIs in place that help maintain performance over time. AI needs to have a specific purpose that helps support these goals.
This means taking more time up front to develop relevant concepts, test, and maintain oversight. It also means being strict about measurement. Brands that look the other way to save money on cheap creative will simply end up spending more on media later, without getting the results they want. If they aren’t keeping their eye on the metrics, they will not realize this until it’s too late.
And finally, brands need to find partners that share their focus on quality. It’s critical to work with partners who consider AI to be a tool that can bring good ideas to life, rather than a way to save time and money without regard for what really matters. AI can provide a step change in performance while also delivering cost effectiveness, but only when brands and their partners are aligned on the best possible outcome.
