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Ads written by machines will still need a human touch to stand out. Photograph: Blend Images/Alamy
Ads written by machines will still need a human touch to stand out. Photograph: Blend Images/Alamy

The beginnings of advertising created by artificial intelligence

This article is more than 8 years old

By giving computers the ability to create, learn and evolve we will free our minds to discover what is possible in advertising and beyond

This Bach piece isn’t Bach. It was generated from an algorithm, in about a second. You could have a 1,000 more if you wanted. Likewise, the Associated Press (AP) releases about 3,000 articles a quarter generated by algorithm – rather than by journalists. And in web design, multivariate testing – trying out various layouts to see what works best by looking at usage data – is common practice. You can even do this automatically, to an extent. If automated, optimising design like this is a basic kind of learning. You could say your site is learning to work better.

The fear may be that this kind of thing will take away human jobs. It will, but not for a long time. The machine-written articles tend to be about recording factual events that follow a system such as financial or sports stories. Journalists actually report that they like working with them because they take the boring jobs on for them, ie the jobs that aren’t actually that creative or challenging. By taking these more menial tasks from us humans, we’re actually being liberated by computers to become more creative – to use our brains.

Advertising will undoubtedly be impacted by automation technology. In fact, the smartest ad agencies will be at the forefront of automation research, design and implementation. Automation is something that creative agencies should seriously considering investing in, or at least factoring it into their five year plans.

In advertising we can offer a hundred different variants of a banner ad and target them in a granular way. Or we might as well make one single banner and let it choose one of 100 states. The outcome is the same, but it starts to sound a bit like artificial intelligence. Then if you give the system a bit more power to choose combinations of elements, even a language engine to create its own copy, and give it feedback to learn from, maybe by measuring interaction, you have the beginnings of artificially created ads.

There have already been some stunning examples of advertisers and brands using automation – at times even bordering on artificial intelligence. From the way in which Groupon intelligently designs itself using perpetual multivariate testing to work out what works and what doesn’t (like many large e-commerce sites), to the Volkswagen car that composes bespoke Underworld music, depending on the way it is driven, via an app created by Tribal Worldwide in London. Even the less sexy-sounding practice of programmatic buying, now fundamental to how media agencies operate, is a form of automated creativity that has profound implications on the future of advertising and media – freeing people to focus on other elements of media placement that demand human intelligence, rather than something that can be achieved by a machine.

There are examples of automation springing up throughout the creative world –from the e-David robot, which has been programmed to paint pictures while making its own decisions on brush strokes and shading, to Electric Sheep, a programme created by developer Scott Draves, which has computers create art that users can then vote on, allowing the system to learn what is “good” and influence the next stage of evolution. By giving computers the ability to not only create, but also to learn and evolve, we will ultimately free up our minds to discover what else might be possible in advertising and beyond.

Conversely, when ads are written by machines, the way to cut through the noise will actually be with a bit of authentic humanity. We will have gone full circle.

David Cox is the chief innovation officer at M&C Saatchi

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