When Ridley Scott was awarded the UK’s highest accolade for a glittering career directing films from Alien and Blade Runner to Gladiator and The Martian, he reminded those attending the Bafta event eight years ago that making commercials had been his “film school”. The advertising industry has long been a breeding ground for British film and TV talent who have gone on to make the jump to Hollywood productions, including Guy Ritchie, who started out making music videos and commercials, and Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson, whose credits include a number of John Lewis’s famous Christmas ads. But the panicked race to introduce AI technology across the advertising industry, to cut client costs and avoid being pushed aside by big tech, has raised fears of a lost generation who may be denied the opportunity to develop into great British film and TV directors.
But what I’ve seen generally in terms of generative AI output is a very mixed bag. You can turn to it and do something and say ‘Look what I made and isn’t it edifying’. But that is very misleading and sort of introducing us to an ersatz creativity.
The creative business is something you learn by doing. It is in the doing that is most valuable. Flying a drone isn’t like flying, there isn’t that visceral feeling to it, you are not actually flying.
What do you do with that lost generation? Maybe in 20 or 30 years the whole notion of the ad industry as we work now will be an [anachronistic] joke.” Last month, the global advertising group WPP officially opened its flagship production facility in a converted warehouse in east London. It was the first in an international rollout spearheading its £600m WPP Production business, as it aims to bring “world-class creativity and advanced AI capabilities under one roof”.
Cindy Rose, a former Microsoft executive appointed WPP’s CEO to turn around its fortunes, said that AI is ushering in a “golden age of marketing”. We no longer need to spend our clients’ budgets on expensive shoots abroad. We can do it in the studio [and] completely change the economics of our content supply chain.
We can deliver content at the speed of culture.” One industry source said that some ads can be made up to 60% cheaper, which has some clients embracing AI-led ads to “show finance directors they are making savings”, even though the output often looks “cookie cutter” and suffers a creative “erosion from the diminished role of a director”. On the topic of the automotive sector the source questioned whether, in an increasingly AI-first ad industry, Top Gun would have become the quintessential 1980s blockbuster that it did. The film’s producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, chose their director, Ridley Scott’s late brother Tony, after seeing a TV ad in which he depicted a Saab car racing a fighter jet in what could pass for a trailer for the cinematic style adopted throughout the film.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
