A new era for creative effectiveness

Goode: When we encounter something, we create a visual trace of it, and it’s almost infinite in terms of how much of that you can store in the mind. It’s a very low-level kind of visual representation so that when you encounter it again, you process it more fluently.

There’s a guy called Robert Zajonc – he did a lot of work on the Mere Exposure Effect, where you present things for a hundredth of a second, and yet he could show this effect of exposure. So clearly that happens immediately. 

Goode: AI has a lot of practical applications in the creative process, and absolutely, it can create a whole bunch of ideas and executions. Some of them will be brilliant, but AI won’t know that. That’s the difference.

AI can do all these interesting, creative and wonderful things, but will it be able to identify that there is something that will truly appeal to an audience? Probably not yet.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth is probably one of the leading experts in consciousness in the world. His view is that AI is going to get way more intelligent, but don’t assume that all the human qualities are going to follow automatically – things like consciousness.

It’s about giving marketers the ability to put themselves in the minds of the consumer, understand the world from the consumer’s perspective, and then work out what they need to say, what products will satisfy those needs. Getting AI to try to simulate that – I don’t think that is what it’s best at doing. 

Goode: Stop using recall – it’s a terrible measure. It doesn’t tell you that much about emotion. It doesn’t tell you much – it’s just the icing on the cake of the creative you’re measuring.

If you have an AI system and you feed a whole load of assets into it, like adverts, you’re going to come out with scores that the AI is going to learn.

What it’s not going to do is be diagnostic as to why that’s happened, and it won’t be able to tell you why something is good or bad. It will average everything out.

AI is not very good at being human – it really can’t do that yet, and it may struggle to do that ever. I think we’ll still always need people to have that creative edge, to have that kind of insight into human understanding.