I’m an Executive Creative Lead @ Google Creative Works Northern Europe, but I come from an unusual background: I started my career in advertising as a coder, a Creative Technologist. Now, summing ~20 years of grind on exploring, experimenting and prototyping with emerging technologies to answer a question: 

What stories and experiences does a given technology enables me to create? Or, to create cheaper, faster and more effective…

I can say for sure: AI is worth its hype. But like every hype, there’s a lot of noise: excitement and fear, moon shots and practical use cases, dreams, desires and current state of art. Which for me is what really matters: what is ready, reliable and available in the present. 

Gartner have yearly publishing tracking the Hype Cycle of every tech, as you can see around AI:

Tech will come and go, it’s up to each of you to read and be on top of the state of art, as a curious person that you probably are.

GenAI: a Creative Big Bang

Starting my Creative career as a creative outsider made me realize the impact people with great ideas can have through technology without knowing the core craft skills or the means to make my ideas come to life. 

AI will is enabling: 

• non-game designers to create a full game out of a prompt with Google Genie 2: https://youtu.be/dk-mD5djViI
• non-film directors to create a full video Ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqLWWYfCEbI
• non-comic illustrator to create an entire comic out of their ideas

Think of the video phenomenon that happened after people got cameras into their pockets (yes, the old technology called smartphones). Imagine the next influx as to create videos you won’t need a camera at all.

But be aware, marketeers: average is gonna come for free.

Creativity! = Creative Asset

Creativity is about thinking, a “creative” (asset) is the outcome of the process transforming a thinking into a materialized expression in a given medium: being that a video, an image, an audio, a game, an interactive experience, a sofa, you name it. 

A Creative is an experienced seasoned and trained professional to exercise creativity for business outcomes in a given vertical of knowledge. (Ad creativity, architecture, furniture design, etc).

Producing a video might get cheaper, easier and faster. Nonetheless, AI remains a tool. A tool to be used by Creatives to materialize their ideas faster, cheaper and more efficiently. 

AI should not be your final goal, rather, the most powerful shortcut you’ll ever have.

Ideas first, tech second.

Coca-Cola shook the advertising world being one of the first worldly recognized brands to adopt Gen AI in its brand videos:

No right or wrong. But, as someone who always worked in innovation, tech should serve an idea not the other way around.

Letting AI do your dishes

Inspired by lady Joanna Maciejewska whose wise message travelled the whole internet, summarized really well the meaning of dishes: we want AI to do the boring, repetitive and laboural stuff for us, or the things we don’t know how to do, or don’t have the famous 10.000 hours of experience in doing it. And, for the things that we know and want to keep doing, how AI can at least make us do better, faster and cheaper. 

The same way a lot of people appreciate doing dishes (like I do when listening to a nice podcast), the meaning of dishes might be very different to you and to your company, based on strengths and weaknesses, capabilities and gaps. 

As a creative director, I know what my dishes are. They might not be the same for you, but hopefully my list – and AI based tools – might inspire you somehow.  

Dish 1: Deeply research my audience

NotebookLM is one of the most fascinating tools recently launched. You can feed the tool with tons of information, and make it an expert into any subject. You’re allowed to ask questions, assess information and even, hear a podcast summary of all that content. 

Example: Making NotebookLM a professional foodie

After feeding it with documents, YouTube videos, websites etc, you can prompt and narrow your questions. As a storyteller, if I want to connect and be relevant for a regional Gamer audience of 18-25 in the Netherlands, for example , I wanna know what resonates with them: visual signs, top trends, slang, jokes, creators they watch, everything. It’s culture, after all. 

You can also utilize Google Gemini to surface audience insights, see how it was done by one of ours partners in Northern Europe PepsiCo.

>> Back to all dishes

Dish 2: Illustrate ideas faster and fill the gaps in my craft

Remember how life at agencies was before Photoshop? AI is going to disrupt how you illustrate and prototype your ideas even further, and that’s a great thing. 

“AI is going to change the nature of creative work, and empower a lot of creative people to make their ideas become real much more quickly”

Mark Read, Global CEO, WPP

If you ever worked with Branding and Creativity, you might have an idea of how much time, energy and resources are “wasted” on illustrating ideas to be pitched, and it’s necessary.

Given that just a small percentage of ideas pitched are going to be approved, you want to prototype as fast as possible, as visual as possible. 

With Google AI you can prompt to create Images (Imagen3), Videos (Veo 2), Code and even Games. For playing creative, I highly recommend paying a visit to Labs.Google where you can boost your copywriting skills, create images, videos and even entire songs with AI. 

Pretty much all creative formats and outputs can be done with AI, making a creative easily switch across mediums and fill the gaps in their craft, like AIRRACK have done to create an anime without knowing how to illustrate.

Google – Veo2 

Veo2 is Google state of art video creation and, when compared to other GenAI for video, what really stands out for me is its physics, motion capabilities and human interactions, making scene transitions much smoother than the others. Recently, a full Porsche Video Ad has been created and published by a creative called Laszlo Gaal. It’s really mindblowing to think that no camera was opened and that even a fictional making off is in place. Even Porsche commented: “This is mind-blowing!”.

Prompting is quickly becoming the new creative directing. This Gemini Prompt Guide is the perfect thought starter for your entire creative process.

>> Back to all dishes

Dish 3: Multiply my creativity

Did you know that in 2023, Brands wasted $73 billion on “digitally unsuitable” Ads?

If you create assets for digital, you know the pain. You need to adapt your videos for multiple formats, durations and screen versions. And that just sums up your production costs.

ViGenAIR

ViGenAIr is an open source tool (yes, you can get the code and install at your company) that uses Generative AI to turn a long-form creative into several different variations of length, format and creative structure, with YouTube Best Practices (ABCDs) in consideration. All done with the click of a button and prompt-based fine tuning. 

Personalization at Scale 

GenAI is also enabling a long dream of every marketeer, personalizing images and videos at scale and on demand, creating never seen before relatable Ads crafted to every audience’s signals. 

>> See how Google Pixel have done recently <<

>> Back to all dishes

Dish 4: Predict and optimize before going live

You don’t need only focus groups anymore to have a guess on how your Ad might land, and you can have a pretty good clue of how your video ad is going to perform and optimize before putting your money behind it.

There are AI tools that are already predicting the success of your Ad based on benchmark and studies of attention across different platforms. The one I’ve been utilizing the most is Junbi.ai, created with YouTube in mind, Junbi offers a pre-test environment for ads using predictive AI against a proven methodology and a benchmark with over 20.000 YouTube ads to ensure your ad is effective, and it has Google Gemini integrated so you can ideate about your Ad.

End-to-end Creative Automation 

Finally, there’s even agencies now automating the entire process, end to end, doing all dishes at once, like Monks.

While it might not work – yet – for big branding ideas, it might work for a lot of advertisers that would benefit from having a strong video presence. 

There’s also the Agentic AI coming in, but that I’ll leave to another article:

>> Back to all dishes

This article will be obsolete in a few months…

but what I want to stick with you is:

1) AI remains a tool, the most disruptive one we’ve ever seen though. Use it in your favor, not for the sake of it (unless you’re playing to learn).

2) Your curiosity and playfulness will make you find the right tools for the dishes in your own process. Understand what to expect from each tool, so you know which dishes of yours it can clean.

3) It’s ever changing and very far from reaching its plateau, you need to stay on top of it. I highly recommend you to follow a talented friend and colleague of mine: Matthieu Lorrain, Creative Lead at Google DeepMind.

And most importantly, trust yourself, trust the process, and embrace change. Because this is going to be a big one.