Advertising and PR employ millions of people globally. It is an industry that has traditionally combined manual skills, creativity, linguistic talent and PR hunch. But they are now becoming unnecessary, we are told. And it is not the first time.
When Macintosh, Mac, or officially Apple, entered, advertising agencies were able to boost their profitability. Printed materials, with all their shape and size and language versions, were made fast and delivered electronically. Couriers speeded discs and proofs around town – until email took over their work. The last drawing artists packed up their crayons around the same time and retired.
But as it always happens with technological upheavals, soon the same tools were also available to everybody. Suddenly everybody could be creative, or at least productive. Everything that could be digitized was digitized. Well, design cannot be digitized, ad people thought.
Soon brand managers shifted marketing money from ads to social media and realised that now marketing could be done without the agencies. Well, maybe we buy some strategic sparring but the rest of the work done in-house.
Soon even that was over.
When AI showed up, also the brand managers’ jobs were suddenly in the spotlight. People began to wonder what artificial intelligence could do and what would happen. Many execs began to get a nasty feeling in their stomachs. At seminars and conferences, however, they sighed with relief when experts told them that artificial intelligence cannot control emotions or creativity – it just can’t do those things.
Bullshit. Yes, it can.
Next, everything will be automated, if Marc Zuckerberg’s vision is true https://www.theverge.com/meta/659506/mark-zuckerberg-ai-facebook-ads. With the huge social media revenues they will reportedly do faster and better everything that previously required planners, project managers, art directors, copywriters and all those people the customer never saw but paid for anyway.
The drama series that began as Facebook has only lasted about twenty years, but it intends to change the advertising industry and communications more than any of the previous revolutions.