Generative AI has several capabilities that could make it an indispensable tool for marketers. But its ability to generate images and videos have some marketers worried that it might be used to make their jobs less relevant and dilute the human element of the creative process that has built the industry. I talked to John McNeil, CEO of John McNeil Studio, about where he thinks AI can help—and harm—the marketing industry.
This conversation has been edited for continuity, brevity and clarity. An excerpt appeared in Wednesday’s Forbes CMO newsletter.
Could you give me a rundown of how marketers have been using AI so far?
McNeil: In a variety of ways across all aspects of the agency business, from operations to search engine optimization, to generating all kinds of content—largely written, but certainly also being used for creative ideation in the visual space, as well as in more language-based AI, like ChatGPT and so forth. It’s been widely adopted across the spectrum of what an agency does, both for its clients and how they operate as businesses.
I think that what’s interesting is AI coming to this inflection point, in terms of people kind of waking up once generative started becoming a thing, and thus a way of thinking about AI differently from how machine learning and artificial intelligence has been deployed behind the scenes of life for the last 20, 30 years. Suddenly, generative [AI] is like, ‘Ooh, what can we do with this? This is magical.’ And so out of this magical moment, agencies in particular are frightened by what it means. It’s kind of upending a lot of the long-held tenets of late 20th, early 21st century agency thinking that ideas and the power of creativity are paramount to what agencies sell.
On the one hand, it’s this weird kind of existential crisis that agencies are in. And on the other hand, it’s an enormous opportunity to operate at the speed and scale that the digital world demands. And that’s a real Sophie’s choice when it comes to how our entire industry needs to come to think about ourselves, and what makes us special and valuable. It’s a really deep topic. I think it actually in many ways kind of begins with the way in which the best agencies think about creativity, and think about brand, and think about the power of engaging creative ideas from a strategic and a creative place, and generate more on the expensive side the things that we used to know as commercials, or the things that we used to know as ad campaigns.
John McNeil Studio CEO John McNeil.
John McNeil Studio, GettyAnd then [AI brings] the emergence of performance marketing, which is really this drive toward dynamic personalization at scale. None of what I just said—dynamic personalization at scale—has anything to do with being clever or witty or unique in terms of the previously long held belief around the power of creativity in advertising. It’s much more about the numbers. It’s much more about the backend digital side of things. It’s much more about generating content or ideas that are highly flexible and adaptable, and not necessarily unique. And it’s much more, on the performance side, about operating within best practices that are going to drive engagement. Those are all very responsible, scientific kind-of behaviors, which flies in the face of the Mad Men [and] through the ‘80s, ‘90s, early 2000s, and beyond the attitude of agency creativity.
What makes an AI-generated creative aspect well-received?
When a human made it, that’s what makes it well-received, frankly.
I think that there’s a spectrum of ways to think both ethically, and also just creatively, about how AI ought to be used in advertising. If you look at all of the complaints about the Under Armour ad, for instance. It got all this press, not because it was a good ad, but because it was an ad created by AI. As a matter of fact, it was a really kind of trite, awful ad. It was really not particularly anything. It had all of this flowery writing that was all about power and passion and drive, what it means to be an athlete, a fighter. But really, the language wasn’t particularly well-written. It wasn’t particularly memorable. It didn’t have a core idea or insight or thought in it. And then there was a whole host of AI-built special effects and footage, some of which came from previously used spots that Under Armour owned. The end result was just a mediocre ad.
There are tons of things that have been created by AI, or assisted with AI. I’ve shot commercials where we do character replacement, and we do automated masking and things like that using AI. It’s not that AI as a tool is bad. It’s this idea of relinquishing all creative standards and all craftsmanship to this novel thing that’s going to make it for you quick and fast.
I think that’s the fundamental challenge that we have. If we as makers—and also we as consumers—relinquish our standards, there’s a real problem there. It’s a real spiral that I think is going to change the way in which we view art, frankly, not just commerce. Some of it is that we’ve lost this idea of this human dialogue, this continuum, where we’re building on art history, we’re building on the definitions of what we’ve come to understand a creative idea to be, or what we’ve come to understand marketing and communication to be. And we’ve passed off a lot of the memorable aspects of that for the desire for something that could be made quickly, much cheaper, and on the fly.
It’s also fueled by the fact that we’re increasingly not gathering around a television, or gathering around anything as human beings. We’re gathering around our phones. As the world moves toward more AR [and] VR with Quest and Apple Vision and all that stuff, we’re going to be increasingly isolated and insular. The media, through which we absorb content and advertising is going to be very isolated and personal and insular, and the stuff that’s going to be put in front of us is optimized for us, whatever that means. That’s another mega-trend that is making AI that much more inevitable. I think the question that we have to ask ourselves as the makers of these things, and as marketers, is at what point does that undermine our uniqueness as a brand or uniqueness as an offering?
What kind of a statement does it make as a creator to come out and use AI? Is there any case where it is the right statement now?
As much as I’m critical of the way in which folks are starting to deploy AI, I think that the reality is that you have to use AI, and AI is actually a phenomenal tool for creative people. I came up in advertising at a time when we would turn to photo books and the work of artists and film directors and people like that to grab reference in order to sell our ideas. That was a problem 30 years ago, 20 years ago: They’d turn to the greatest photographers and filmmakers of the world and they’d steal their work.
The cliche in any kind of art making is that it’s all been done before. And frankly, what is AI if not the manifestation of it’s all been done before? It conjures up supposedly new things based on large data sets, that are things that have been done before. I think the statement that it makes for a creative person to use AI is [it] depends on how you’re using it, and if you’re going to relinquish control of your own abilities as a creator, as a thinker, as a creative person to the tool that’s helping you create. AI is the first tool where you could actually relinquish control, and that’s actually the challenge.
If you have a powerful campaign idea, a powerful positioning statement, a powerful new direction for a brand, that new direction might manifest itself in some ads. It might manifest itself in a webpage, it might manifest itself in some kind of anthem or manifesto piece. How do you scale that across the tens of thousands of touches, in terms of content that a large enterprise brand is making and has already made? How do you make modifications to their vast website so that it’s on brand, now that you’ve created some kind of transformation. How do you generate social posts and sales enablement and all those things?
You do that with AI, and we’ve taken this hierarchical approach, where there are three tiers. There’s what the GPT knows to begin with at the onset. There’s all the different references to the brand, which are controllable—for instance Gartner reports, white papers, news articles, the brand’s website. All these types of things that are kind-of like the second level of the AI’s intelligence. And then the top level of the AI’s intelligence is the work that we’ve done for them in strategy, positioning, campaign assets and so forth. It allows the more crafted, fewer but richer collection of assets—that is the work that we’ve done—and it makes that the driver. It allows you to then help scale that. Generate me a white paper, generate me a social post, generate me a webpage, generate me a sales presentation. It’s using it as a tool. It’s using it to help scale. It’s using it to help actually make better and more integrated campaigns. But it’s not using it to replace the thinking and the intuition and the wit and the surprise that humans can bring to the party.
We’re in the early days of the AI revolution. What role do you see AI playing in marketing in the next three years?
I think AI is going to be fundamentally the thing that we turn to and use every day in making the work that we make. If we don’t actually start adopting standards right now around what is good and responsible and valuable use of AI and what isn’t, it’s just going to run away from us. There was a piece in Adweek about clients wanting very strict guidelines on agency use of AI without their permission. There’s a whole host of guardrails that people are already starting to put up, and I think it’s critical.
Advertising agencies are still saying they make advertising. Advertising has changed a lot. Agencies today are spending less and less of their time making ads, and more of their time helping marketers market. If our industry can start to rethink the value of that—which operates at a higher level than making an ad or making a billboard or a radio spot or a social post or whatever—and thinking about tactical marketing, AI has enormous opportunity because it’s really the ability to ideate everything from getting better and more targeted search to being able to really understand in a richer, more nuanced way audience trends and interests. It’s about being able to envision and depict ideas in ways more rapidly than ever before. It’s going to be about changing the production model, where as we get better at writing prompts, as we get better at refining these tools, you’re really going to see this explosion of visual and video content that is AI-generated. I think that in a best case, it’s a balance between using that as a way to make human-generated work better.
In a worst [case], it’s going to really upend production companies, photography studios, illustrators, a whole host of people who have been critical to the process. And I hope against hope that that’s not going to happen.
Three years in the future, my non-apocalyptic wish is that everybody’s using AI, but that we still keep our wits about us, and we’re using AI to make better and more impactful and more powerful the work that we do as humans. I don’t know that I’m right. I think if I am right, it’s going to be for one reason and one reason only: Because our audience is going to grow tired of looking at things that weren’t created by humans. I think, actually, you maybe have a chance there in that instance.
That's why I’m so worried about this idea that we don’t gather around things anymore. That we don’t talk about, ‘Hey, did you see that ad?’ It’s not AI's fault that we're losing that. We've been losing that for a while. But still things that are remarkable, things that are surprising, things that you want to remark on, still need to be the hallmark of how brands operate in the world. Frankly, brands spend hundreds of millions of dollars on trying to be relevant. But this notion of being able to be measurable through click-through rates and so forth, has increasingly eroded that goal, that reason why you're spending that money in the first place. It’s the desire to get closer to selling, as opposed to actually understanding that a brand, if it wants to be successful in the world, it has to actually have a relevance and a point of view that actually stands out.
That fundamental need on the marketing side, and that fundamental skepticism that we have as viewers [will lead us to] argue for an integrated but blended use of AI as a tool that supplements the work that we do, and not replaces us.
If you look at some of the Sora videos and all the hype around that, people go, ‘I’m creeped out.’ I don't know if being creeped out can really be widely adopted as the order of the day that everybody expects. I don't know that that's going to happen. And so it leads me to say, how do I take the best of that? The question then becomes: What am I going to do with that? And so I think that the danger we have is that commerce is arguing to just go full bore into AI in a way that I think would be detrimental to the output and the craft and the value of what our industry is really all about.
