cullmanndesign blog

The convergence is here and the evil robot overlords will be taking over shortly. Am I exaggerating? Probably, for effect, but a recent demonstration by BETC, a subsidiary or Euro RSCG shows that a computer program, a script, can generate the same mediocre concepts produced by a creative team.

The project, under the direction of Stéphane Xiberras, the President and Executive Creative Director of BETC, is titled CAI. The title, an acronym for Creative Artificial Intelligence is an experiment designed to test the principles of formulaic ad generation.

The program can create upwards of 200 concepts based on several parameters including product category, target demographic and expected benefit. From these criteria, concept designs are created and can be applied to traditional online and offline media.

Although I think that there is a place for CAI in an agency, it’s true place is in eliminating the bad creative that is making its way into the market due to time constraints, low budgets and lazy creative teams. Having a tool like this to compete with will challenge agencies and also create a baseline standard for those producing ideas and campaigns.

As a creative person, I find the idea of a creative-producing program offensive, but one can make the argument that the standard filters and default brushes found in popular software packages find themselves into projects is no different. CAI is the same principle brought to an extreme. If you look at ad concepts and designs that are popular at the moment, you can certainly see patterns of design, “safe” concepting and repeated messaging between brands, categories and aesthetics.

What a solution like Comp-U-Creative, CAI, will bring for both the agency and their clients is a challenge to meet the expectation that is set in most agency’s charters: Provide the best solutions for your clients. This can mean many things–Being a taste-maker, being the most engaging, knowing the audience, predicting market trends and changes–but it does not mean producing predictable, scriptable solutions and wasting time, money and effort in their delivery.

Of course not all agencies fit into the category of “replaceable” entities that can be replaced by a well fueled server. Computers are not very adept at predicting those things that will capture human imagination or trends that appear. In fact, it is the advertising industry that has been the spark-point of many cultural trends. Those ideas, those bright-spots in the creative process are examples of what makes us human. Although I think that saying that great ideas are the sole of humanity is dramatic, it is certainly evidence that the sole exists.

Artist David Kassan is shown leveraging Apple’s iPad as both palette and medium. Kassan, who works in both traditional and digital mediums, is using Brushes, a digital painting application, for the iOS platform.

I like to learn something everyday. It needn’t be an epiphany or the secret to life, but I really like the idea that every evening comes to an end with some fact or bit of knowledge that I hadn’t had that morning. I have to admit that I get a tremendous amount of these daily facts or learning from the internet. Never has such a wide variety of subjects or shear amount of information been so easily accessible to so many and so easily.

Why Do I Love iTunes U?

There are a lot of educational resources available on the internet. Many universities and colleges, including my own, have offered classes and courses via video or audio files and virtually. What iTunes offers—and Apple excels at—is the ability to market good ideas and make them great. Great, in this case, making them appealing to a mass market. Apple has put a veneer on eLearning and attracted schools of all calibers and with a massive catalogue or cumulative offerings. NYU, Standford, MIT, Harvard-all offering a curriculum for anyone to download—and for FREE.

The available resources range from the typical academic pursuits to the practical. Some are a great place to start if you want to extend your career or even create a new one. My recent syllabus includes learning to develop iPhone applications (courtesy of Standford) and some tips from NYU on psychology. If you’re just getting your start on web design and development, take a look Julia Turner’s Design for the Web or Motion Design using Flash.