Comment by bko 2 days ago
I don't know, I feel like it will help smaller businesses without a budget for a designer or even design taste compete with larger companies.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
Not just labor and resources, but attention and time as well. It's literally burning up the brains of our youth. Of course, so is the "content" between the ads but you can make an argument that without the ad incentive these things wouldn't have gotten so bad in the first place
There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.
Giant companies don't use do ad campaigns anyway. They hire ad agencies, which themselves may hire smaller ad agencies or consultants, and those are more than happy to innovate and improvise using whatever trick can come across.
Note, I said companies, because brands at this point are merely labels, most of them throwaway; big companies use them the same way small companies do, including to run fly-by-night scams on burner brands. They're more than happy to delegate it to smaller agencies, too.
Point being: there's not much correlation between branding, ownership structure, and what advertising techniques can be applied by what organizations.
That’s where I stay to see some benefits. Will AI ads (or media) be better than an expert human made ad campaign? Not at the moment.
But can a small business use AI tools to make a better ad for their smaller budget? Probably.
I was thinking about this in the context of some videos posted here a few weeks back. They were AI generated video shorts. They weren’t fabulous, but they were funny and entertaining. There was a small writing team behind it that was able to produce solid video content that would have been way out of their budget just a few years ago. But with AI tools they were able to get their ideas made and content available.
That’s where I start to struggle… I’m not a fan of pure AI content, but if it helps smaller teams on smaller budgets compete a little more, or helps individual creators get to tell their story when they otherwise couldn’t, is AI content completely wrong?
I tried this out, and the stuff it produces is just simple text overlaid nicely on images you supply. If you have a designer, it'd take 60 seconds to knock one of these out, plus you'd already have a style guide that this app wouldn't follow closely enough to use. This is definitely for small businesses.
Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
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[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.