EN 
NL 
ChatGPT astonished the world in 2023 with the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Since then, the creative industry seems more than ever aware that AI will play an increasingly significant role in their craft.
Artificial intelligence is emerging – and will increasingly take over tasks – in every aspect of advertising: creation, personalisation, and effectiveness research. In this blog, we explain per subfield how AI will reshape the playing field.
AI in the Creation of Advertising
For a long time, the human ingenuity in the creative process of advertising seemed irreplaceable. Copywriters, designers, and videomakers initially considered themselves invulnerable to the automation wave that AI inevitably brings. And although ChatGPT does not yet conjure up a ready-made advertising campaign, this idea suddenly seems much less distant.
Many individual creative aspects of advertising and marketing can now already be accomplished by AI tools. Text models like ChatGPT are capable of crafting convincing copy. Numerous visual AI tools help you design a desired visual with the right inputs – from icons to lifelike AI-generated photography.
Does this make humans negligible? No, but the role of humans is shifting. The focus will first and foremost be more on a strategic level: what goal should the campaign serve, and which creative means should be combined for this purpose? It is precisely this step, which was often hastily overlooked in the past, that is more important than ever in the AI era.
Additionally, the role of humans shifts to the correct use of AI as a tool. AI is like a hammer: in skilled hands, it can build a house. When you swing it around thoughtlessly, nothing impressive emerges.
The most important question for the future is: what prompts should you feed an AI to achieve the desired result? Courses on how to interact with prompts for AI systems have been springing up like mushrooms since the launch of ChatGPT for a reason.
The value of humans thus lies less in possessing the executing knowledge and skills, but more in being able to ask the right questions.
AI in Personalisation, Planning, and Media Strategy of Advertising
AI will also significantly shake up the media side. And frankly, AI has already left its mark in this area the most so far. Previously, media strategies were composed based on human knowledge and expertise about who, when is most receptive to which advertisement.
However, self-learning AI models prove to be significantly more effective in presenting the right advertisement to the right person at the right time. In online advertising, this is nothing new anymore: the ads we encounter on social media and display networks have been served to us by artificial intelligence for years.
Where we particularly expect development is at the intersection between media on one hand and creation on the other. In other words: personalisation. By allowing AI to adjust creative elements such as headline, visuals, and call to action of an advertisement in real-time, you increase the chance of breaking through the human attention barrier.
AI in Advertising Research and Optimisation
Finally, market and advertising research will also not be able to avoid the influence of artificial intelligence. Traditionally, an advertisement was presented to a sample of people to determine if it meets the campaign's objectives. Traditionally, this was done with questionnaires, and in the last ten years often with biometric methods that measure unconscious and emotional responses, such as Eye Tracking and EEG.
Is research still necessary?
AI will shake up the research sector in two ways. Firstly, it will make (human) research redundant in some situations. By teaching an AI system how the human brain reacts to, for example, a large dataset of advertisements, it will automatically learn patterns. It will learn that shots of delicious food attract the brain, but that zooming out camera movements repel (to name just two patterns). Subsequently, the model can test new advertisements on their likely neural response through a simulated brain.
It will take some time before this AI model predicts every aspect of an advertisement accurately. Only a small number of advertising elements are consistently positive or negative. For the vast majority of elements, however, the context determines in which emotional direction the coin falls. For example: a smile is positive in many cases, but not when it comes across as fake, the timing is off (laughing at someone after they trip), or when we already disliked the character. The AI model will need to be trained on an immensely large dataset before it accurately reflects the true brain response in all its contextual nuance.
AI-driven Research
In the short term, it is more likely that AI will play a processing role in the step from raw data to meaningful marketing insights. In fact, developments in this area have already accelerated in the past decade, especially in neuroscientific research.
Traditionally, neuro-research was fairly crude and straightforward: the activation of a specific brain area was linked to a specific cognitive or emotional response. Nothing more, nothing less. However, reality is multidimensional: an emotion is not associated with a single brain area, but arises from a complex interplay of networks and time-specific patterns of brain activity. These complex interactions cannot be distilled from the data with human calculations, but can be with machine learning algorithms that notice complex interactions between multiple variables.
AI is thus able to trace subtle patterns in raw brain data to the sought-after outcome variables. An AI model is pre-trained on this by feeding it datasets of different neural states (e.g., high attention and low attention), and then recognising the distinguishing brain activity in new datasets. Thanks to AI, we can unravel new metrics and insights with existing hardware and data.
We Are Heading Towards a Bright Future
In this blog, we see that AI will take an increasingly larger place in every facet of the advertising world. Humans – the creative, media strategist, and researcher – are not displaced, but above all supported to work more effectively.
Or, in the words of ChatGPT: “Ultimately, the relationship between AI and humans in the advertising industry is likely to be a synergistic one, where AI is used to improve efficiency and enhance the quality of advertisers' work, while human creativity and perspective will still be vital for creating effective advertisements.”
