Tim Collier.
Tim Collier, National head of strategy, cummins&partners
Despite what it might look like to any of my colleagues, I really love this job. What may appear as some underlying rage issues, is for me passion.
A passion for understanding client’s businesses, finding ways to grow their business, to connect with people and to be inventive, original and lateral in how we solve these problems. Which when I see this work taken for granted or compromised, might sometimes spark some more abrasive responses, on occasion.
And that feeling was again sparked recently, during what I hoped would be the very entertaining role of judging round one the Cannes Young Lion competition in the digital category.
With each entry I reviewed, and with few exceptions, my blood pressure grew and grew.
And with it came a fear that the job I have so much passion for was being threatened by the lack of value others give to its most important parts. What I saw was complete indistinction.
As I completed the scoring of eighteen entries, I felt dumbfounded. I sat there puzzled as I reflected on suspiciously similar ideas. Four nearly identical responses which did not even answer the brief. I spoke to other judges, only to hear they had several versions of the same ideas in their respective categories. Was it mental association? Time pressure giving in to cliché?
I was curious, and I didn’t think the reason could be that simple. So, I did what my suspicions made think the entrants had done, and I hopped on ChatGPT.
I uploaded the pdf of the brief and prompted; ‘Give me some ideas that will win Cannes Young Lions digital by answering this brief’. Using only the free version of Open.AI’s insipid, servile, white chat box, four prompts, ten minutes and zero critical thinking, I had reproduced the core parts of most of the entrants I had reviewed.
This gave me no sense of awe.
I wasn’t inspired or amazed at how quickly I was able to find ideas or create mimicries of award winning work from the past. I was bored. I had a pile of mediocrity that would never survive internal reviews if the brief was a pitch.
The rage gave way quickly to another feeling. I was not angry at the entrants, they are just young people doing their best to stand out. And I wasn’t fearful of the power of language models, nothing made me feel these responses were going to replace me.
No, as I thought about the situation, I became oddly sad. Maybe it is one of my more nihilistic tendencies, but I suddenly had the sense that there is no future industry for advertising, not because we are replaced, but because we don’t know how to stand firm on our value.
What was bothering me the most was the responsibilities entrants gave the tech and what responsibilities were retained by the human. To my mind, and from what I could see in ChatGPT, it appeared that minutes were spent on problem solving, on being creative.
If this is what young people think the process should be (or worse, what they are seeing inside their agencies), that doesn’t bode well for an industry that frequently gets called “the colouring in department.”
Entrants outsourced the best part of working in this industry to a piece of software that isn’t even that good at marketing and chose to instead focus on design and polish. That priority setting is the complete death of value; a gross misunderstanding of what our job is, why we get to charge clients what we charge, and why our jobs are interesting.
This choice sacrifices the imagining, the thinking. Being original.
I am in no way admonishing the use of AI. I’ve been an outspoken supporter of some great innovation in the space. But we must be conscious of what these models are when we used them in our jobs.
There is a major difference between taking an idea from an LLM and really addressing the brief. Fundamentally, the scariest, most dangerous behaviour I observed among entries was simply not answering the brief. An LLM is not concerned about effective results, particularly if you don’t ask it to. An LLM is also not designed to be original. It is a complex prediction machine, looking for the most probabilistic response to the prompt. It’s designed to reduce originality and divergence.
Young Lions isn’t just a hypothetical brief, it’s practice without consequence. An opportunity to swing for the fences, to make an idea that is wildly off the wall, to dare the judges to buy the idea. But if you are not fundamentally addressing the need of the brief, nothing about your idea is worth the water used to cool the computer that made it.
Entry to Young Lions isn’t compulsory. The people who enter it (and win it) are the most ambitious, driven creative minds, the people who will make up the future of leaders of the industry.
Thankfully, some of the entries showed that deft ability to fuse great thinking to execution and made me remember the feeling of being struck by the simplicity and ingenuity of an original idea. Sadly, that feeling sat in conflict with the shadow of entries that had lost any insight or humanity.
But all this ranting isn’t really about AI or the young people who did enter Young Lions. It’s about our whole industry and how we approach our work. It’s about where we put our focus, our energy and what we think our value is. How we protect that value.
If we want to have a future as an industry, we must see this behaviour as a warning signal.
We must cleave ourselves to the valuable, fun, human parts of our job; the parts that make us passionate, the hard parts, the parts that no amount of synthesised computation could ever approach. And we have to make it clear that prediction machines cannot replace that.
We are a business that trades in understanding people. Our job is to empathise with people, to entertain those people, to notice the little things people do and to sell to those people. Please don’t let a silicon Gollum fool you into thinking that figuring that out isn’t the most important part.