Businesses have long understood the power of creative tools, and those at the forefront of the technology wave have already begun to utilize these tools to grow and innovate, giving them an edge in the competitive marketplace. Now, the emergence of creative artificial intelligence for enterprises to bring a new tool, but has not yet been widely recognized. AI has long been viewed as a black box associated with efficiency and insightful analytics, used to extract patterns or regularities from large datasets that are not readily apparent to humans.
However, in the coming years, AI will move from behind the scenes to the front of the stage, becoming more and more widely used in people's daily lives. Rather than replacing human jobs, the emergence of AI will change the way people work to a great extent, especially for industries such as marketing, advertising, arts and communications. If AI is used as a creative partner, it will help people broaden the boundaries of creative expression and make more imagination come true.
Devi Parikh, Director of Research for Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research Team, said, “Creative expression can't be achieved without creative tools, such as chisels, brushes, and pianos. Similarly, everyone can use these new AI tools to tell their stories in a vivid visual way, visualizing their imaginations, even without an artistic background or relevant training experience.”
According to a McKinsey study, 77 percent of senior leaders surveyed believe that creativity is a key driver of business growth.2 With the help of new AI tools, organizations will be able to meet the need to let their imaginations run wild and explore more possibilities by broadening the boundaries of their thinking, shortening the cycle of developing creative ideas, and articulating their concepts in a more diverse, yet results-oriented, way.
Nowadays, innovative companies are investing in AI products, aiming to lead a new creative revolution. Marketing departments or agencies often combine personal, social and cultural experiences to create many different versions of digital ads, each with slight tweaks to the imagery, copy and call to action. They then run A/B tests to find the version that performs best. However, companies like Pencil, with the help of AI algorithms, can generate dozens of iterative versions of said creative in just a few minutes.
Marketers have begun to see the advantages of using AI tools to collaboratively produce creative. A recent study showed that companies using AI creative tools to create video ads averaged twice the return on ad spend (ROAS) compared to companies that did not use such tools, with some ads in the study reaching up to seven times higher.3 This may be especially appealing to small- and medium-sized businesses, which are typically small and do not have dedicated advertising departments. do not have dedicated advertising departments. The creative boom that artificial intelligence has created and the many benefits it has brought are available to all businesses equally.
Similarly, while synthetic media (content generated or modified by AI) has been used by some with ulterior motives to create deeply fake videos, it is helping to give rise to a whole new way of delivering personalized information. For example, in the same way that green screens revolutionized the art of filmmaking, British startup Synthesia has invented tools that synthesize video clips and broadcast them with avatar stand-ins created by AI software, bringing a whole new way of communicating information to businesses.
The characters in the videos are actually computer-generated and are not attempting to “fake it” and deceive viewers. Synthesia's compositing technology was used to create a promotional video for the recent “End Malaria Worldwide” campaign. In the video, a retired British soccer star became the “voice” of a malaria survivor, introducing malaria prevention and treatment knowledge in nine languages. The video was reportedly viewed more than 700 million times throughout the campaign.
