Experts at Advertising Week rebuff notion that AI will supplant human creativity | The Drum

Each year, the event’s lineup of panels and talks serves as a kind of bellwether for the ad industry, highlighting the most salient and impactful subjects of the hour. (The metaverse, for example, was a big talking point in 2022). Predictably, AI has been a central focus this year. And, like last year, much of the conversation around the technology has focused on how it can be used to complement – rather than replace – human creativity.

Discussions around how the technology might be misused, for example, or its potential to push marketers out of the job market, were comparatively absent. This is unsurprising, considering that marketing and tech-adjacent conferences have ample reasons to embrace and highlight the positive aspects of AI (a similar effect was at play during this year’s Adobe Summit in Las Vegas).

But it’s also somewhat surprising in light of the well-documented concerns that many in the industry have about AI. A report published last month by the World Federation of Advertisers found that the vast majority of brand leaders are concerned about how their agency partners might be using generative AI on their behalf, specifically citing legal, ethical and reputational risks. And a recent survey from Gartner of more than 600 marketers found that 87% of respondents were worried that technologies such as generative AI could soon replace some jobs in their industry.

Given how pervasive AI has become in marketing, it can be easy to forget that, just a few years ago, relatively few people in the industry were discussing it as an impending paradigm shift for their industry. A degree of fear in the midst of such rapid technological change is natural, according to Dani Mariano, president of Razorfish.

“It’s early days in terms of how we’re going to use these [AI] tools in marketing, and that’s why you feel that angst,” she tells The Drum.

Debates about the future impacts of AI within marketing have been raging since the release of ChatGPT nearly two years ago. Since then, some in the industry have voiced fears that AI could soon make human creativity obsolete, but that view has tended to be drowned out by the far more numerous voices that have embraced the technology as a kind of super-smart automated assistant. There has also been a growing consensus that AI won’t necessarily replace marketers – but that marketers using AI effectively will certainly replace those who aren’t.

At the same time, the speed at which AI has evolved and become ubiquitous throughout marketing – coupled with the occasional headline about how it could lead to the downfall of civilization – has naturally produced some anxiety.

The general tenor from this year’s Advertising Week New York, however, has been: don’t worry, AI is here to help you – not push you out of a job.

The technology will “free up people’s time to be more creative, do more critical thinking, to come up with new ideas, and maybe to invest in themselves, in their career or in their work-life balance,” Don McGuire, chief marketing officer at semiconductor company Qualcomm says.

When asked if he is at all nervous about AI replacing marketers in the near future, he shot down the idea quickly. “There always has to be a human element,” he said.

Similarly, Publicis Media’s senior vice-president of creative technology, Andrew Klein, argued onstage during a panel Wednesday that fears around AI pushing marketers out of their roles are misplaced.

“I definitely don’t think [there’s] going to be this drastic AI takeover – I don’t believe in that whatsoever,” he said. “What I believe is that AI as a tool is going to amplify us and amplify our powers … [helping] us get rid of the mundane work that’s tedious and takes a long time, and get to the bigger picture [projects].”

That tactic of marketing AI as an amplifier of human creativity has also taken root within some tech companies building frontier AI models. Helen Ma, senior director of product management at Meta, tells The Drum that the company’s vision for AI is to build tools “in service of marketers, in service of people, in service of creators.” She adds: “At the end of the day, the core of the company is about human connection.”

Along with other big tech players such as Google, Adobe and Perplexity, Meta has been building new AI-powered marketing tools that it hopes will be a hit among marketing teams. In May, for example, the company introduced new text- and image-generating features for social media marketers.

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