How AI is changing our agency

It feels as if we’re standing on the beach right before a tsunami hits. The sea has receded and people are wandering the shore in awe. But those who recognize the signs, brace themselves for what is coming.

I notice consumers are already struggling with a content overload. AI is making content creation increasingly accessible. When AI and SEO algorithms eventually start to cancel each other out, search results will become flooded with content. If everyone ranks first, no one does. That’s where human creativity can make the difference.

The tidal wave of AI generated content is inevitable

Of course I know SEO is more than ranking content: loading speed, smartphone friendliness, backlinks, etcetera… they all play a role. Search engines also indicate that they prefer ‘helpful’ and ‘original’ content. But what makes AI so unique, is that it can learn and adapt.

Take Bing, for example.

In the months leading up to February, the once-popular search engine had faded into obscurity. However, with the recent integration of AI-driven chatbots into Bing, millions are now experiencing revolutionary ways to discover, retrieve, and even engage with information.

Tools like D-ID and Eleven Labs have shown us a glimpse of what it looks like to add a face and voice to a chatbot, but soon enough, every interface will have its own unique personality.

But that's not all—Microsoft, Google, Adobe and nVidia have slowly but surely started to integrate A.I. into every aspect of their products and services. Once all that is in place, the dawn of a new age will be truly upon us.

Embrace curiosity and creativity to ride the wave successfully

As an agency, we have always been careful with hyping up new technologies. But I can asure you AI will disrupt everything we know about content (creation).

That’s why we’re re-evaluating all our processes with AI in mind. Not to replace people, but to turn this disruptive technology into calculators for the creative mind. In less than a year we’ve gone from “Look at this cat image generated by DALL-E” to tailoring AI models and tools like Stable Diffusion and Luma Labs to our needs.

Even though it’s still early days, it’s truly empowering to see how, for example, the creative vision of our art directors is coalescing with the prompt poetry of our copywriters; resulting not only in elevated Midjourney visuals but also new creative processes.

We’re re-evaluating all our processes with AI in mind. Not to replace people, but to turn this disruptive technology into calculators for the creative mind.

In the live and animation departments, AI has already permanently changed the way we create rudimentary scenes. Instead of spending countless hours searching for the perfect sample video, we quickly shoot a few rudimentary scenes and use Gen-2 to apply the relevant style of the AI-generated mood board. Same goes for our sound designers who are discovering truly novel ways of creating new sounds for our clients.

And recently, I also caught our copywriter playing D&D with ChatGPT—which just goes to show how deeply AI has become integrated in our company culture. I just love to see it.

Amidst this maelstrom of technological innovation, it’s easy to lose sight of the human aspect which has been the core of StoryMe ever since its inception.

But what if I told you that AI has made me even more confident in the future of human creativity? In fact, the richer one’s creative soul, the better one can navigate through the algorithms and create truly next-level things.

Creativity in the Age of AI *

Moreover, the stronger one’s creative vision, the better one is equipped to help brands make the right choices. Before AI, a client only had to choose between a handful of scripts, video concepts or branding directions. Now, there are infinite possibilities.

The richer one’s creative soul, the better one can navigate through the algorithms and create truly next-level things.

AI will help brands create whatever they want, but it doesn't hold the key to making crucial choices. An algorithm can detect hidden patterns and help us create truly novels forms of content, but it's ultimately the human touch of account managers, project managers, copywriters, art directors, and video editors that truly captures the essence of a brand.

Put differently, we’re more convinced that ever that the human component remains crucial. For a strong output, the quality of the input - or the the prompt for instance- is most important. Generating strong content requires strong curators. And that requires human creativity.

An earlier version of this opinion first appeared in Media Marketing‍

* To see how generative AI fits into the evolution of creative technologies, make sure to check out 'CHECKPOINT - Creativity in the Age of AI'. This impressive video made by Áron Filkey and Joss Fong for SPACE10 won Gold at the first AI Film Festival in New York and gives an historic overview of the growing role and the evolution of AI in creative processes : how we got here and where we are headed. All images that are used in this article, are copyrighted by Joss Fong and Áron Filkey, Creativity in the Age of AI.

‍