AI Is The Average Of The Internet: WPP, Don’t Become An AI North Korea
When a struggling company announces that it’s making a huge investment in AI, you should immediately think of North Korea - a struggling country that makes huge investments in nuclear weapons. In both cases, the technological investment is an expensive and elaborate decoy that masks stagnation and decay. It’s a sign that they’ve run out of ideas to fuel prosperity and growth. The key difference is that North Korea’s nuclear program makes it uniquely unpredictable and dangerous. AI, on the other hand, is totally unremarkable for most companies - everyone else is doing the exact same thing.
AI Is The Average Of The Internet.
One year after the meteoric ascent of CHAT GPT, AI has become the average of the internet (thanks Tom Goodwin for this brilliant play on words). It creates average, unremarkable, unnecessary content at the speed of a prompt.
In the advertising industry, generative AI is a dangerous first step toward creative atrophy. Because all the magic of a great creative campaign is from analog intelligence not artificial intelligence. It comes from a human thinking of something completely out of the center of the bell curve. Great content happens because of a uniquely human ability to be dangerous, compassionate, funny, or poignant. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is a great way to auto-generate a generic pickup truck commercial in which an oversized vehicle veers off the highway into rugged terrain in the middle of the Super Bowl. Same as it ever was.
Which brings us to WPP, the biggest agency in the world. WPP announced last week that its revenue is unlikely to grow, it will cut staff, and that it will spend $320 million in AI annually.
When a company sets a spending target (vs. an outcome target) with an emerging technology, it’s a sign that they’ve run out of ideas to solve problems and grow. (In the case of WPP, I suspect their biggest problem is acquisition indigestion. The company acquired 15 companies for $1.5bn over the past three years while interest rates were near zero. Those acquisitions presumably did not achieve their goals, given that revenue is expected to remain flat, but the debt payments are still due. Another symptom of acquisition indigestion is ugly, toxic politics. Different factions fight over who ‘owns’ which client account, which products and services should be sunset, who should get fired, who’s supposed to be someone’s boss, how autonomous the acquired businesses should be, and who should be blamed for client attrition.)
AI Will Unleash Creativity In Some Industries and Suffocate It In Others
There are some industries which turn creative geniuses into automatons. Investment banking, management consulting, and corporate law recruit the smartest people in the world to work 90 hours a week, producing a model/ deck/ legal brief that could be done by a machine. AI will soon be advanced enough to perform these tasks better than people, freeing talent to think creatively about the hardest problems.
If you lose your edge, you lose your way.
AI will dull WPP’s edge. Which would be an absolute tragedy. Because what a beautiful legacy of edginess.
Consider this 2020 campaign by Ogilvy, a WPP company, which showcased the worn faces of healthcare workers on the frontlines of peak COVID in a campaign for Dove.
Or this 2020 campaign featuring a moldy burger, also by Ogilvy, announcing that Burger King no longer used preservatives in its food
There are some things that people do better than AI, such as: break rules, read emotions, provoke, and create a beautiful image of a moldy burger. The people at WPP did this better than everyone else.
AI can manage rote workflows better, faster, and smarter than people can. It is good at operational tasks that are in the middle of the bell curve.
There’s a better way to invest in AI.
There are a few questions that businesses should ask before they invest in AI:
1. What is a baseline task that can be done faster, better, and cheaper by AI?
2. How can smart people be freed to creatively solve hard problems once they’re no longer consumed by rote, tedious tasks?
3. How will AI constrain creativity rather than fuel it?
THE WHOLE THING IN ONE PARAGRAPH
WPP is part of a global pandemic of AI Utopianism among business leaders. It’s one of a tidal wave of companies kissing the AI frog, expecting a prince of turn-around success to emerge. As with any business making a large investment in AI, WPP will be tempted to use the technology for things that people do best: empathizing, provoking, and taking risks. When businesses invest in AI as a panacea, rather than as a tool, they accrue cultural and financial debt that explodes when it finally comes due.
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