Sunday 16 August 2015

Ads that write themselves?

I wrote a little while back about the brilliant idea of a coffee poster that started an outbreak of yawning on the Brazilian subway. Still on the theme of coffee, and posters, comes what's being hailed as the world's first artificially intelligent poster campaign. Rather an unfortunate choice of words there - I would hope that the world has already seen many, many non-artificially intelligent poster campaigns.

Anyway, it has been created by M&C Saatchi in London for a fictional coffee brand, Bahio, and it's a poster that evolves according to how people react to it facially. This goes on for a month until the 'best' ad evolves through a kind of high-speed natural selection.

You can read more in this article but I thought I'd list some of the key principles at work here:
- Darwinian natural selection
- powered by a genetic algorithm
- analyses strength
- 1,000 images/fonts/layouts/copy
- length of engagement ... and so on and so forth.

Human creativity and judgement seem to be absent, apart from thinking up the whole thing in the first place.

Creative nightmare or the way to the future?



1 comment:

Sue Imgrund said...

I don't mind people and companies involved in marketing linking to my blog in the comments, Mahesh, but it would be polite and friendly to also add a comment about the subject in the blog post. What's your view?