I remember when I got asked to make this presentation for my school, and was at a loss for the story I was going to tell. And then I remembered this Nolan movie for some reason. Reaching into my bag of tricks, I found my story. I found a way to make the most pretentious talk ever –– speaking about AI in advertising through the lens of a Christopher Nolan movie.

Anyways,

Are you watching closely?

I want to talk about the thing everyone is talking about right now. I want to talk about magic. But if we’re going to talk about magic, we have to understand the mechanics of the trick first. Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first is,

The Pledge: I show you something ordinary.

The second is The Turn: I take that ordinary thing and make it do something extraordinary. But making something disappear isn't enough. You have to bring it back. 

That’s the third act. The hardest part. The part we call The Prestige.

And if you aren't watching closely, you’ll miss everything.

The Pledge

Let's start with The Pledge. Let’s look at something ordinary. Like, young me. 

For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be an artist. Not a doctor, not a corporate ladder-climber, but a comic book artist. I grew up on Dragon Ball Z and the like. Back then, "creative" was still an adjective—it was something you were, not something you did for a paycheck.

But somewhere between middle school and high school, being an artist stopped being "cool." Doctors were cool. Athletes were cool. People who made money were cool. So, at the ripe age of fourteen, I decided I was going to be a "man of business." I buried the art.

Then came the high school graduation requirements. You can’t graduate without an art credit. Goodbye AP Human Geography, hello studio art. I sat down and drew for an hour a day, five days a week, and realized something: I still had it. When you put a pencil in my hand, it was magic. It made the ordinary version of me feel extraordinary.

My art teacher saw it too. She gifted me a school iPad over spring break to loan. Then COVID hit, and that 2 weeks turned into a year of isolation. I became a hermit, drawing every day, learning color, learning motion. By the time I got to UNC, I was obsessed with the intersection of art, business, and technology.

So, I leaned into it, learned more about these three passions of mine. And on that journey, my friends and I started a brand in college. We did shirts, festivals, and parties. It was a real venture, a mix of charisma, science, and a lot of luck. It was also a massive headache. But it was also a great deal of fun.

Then, came my junior year, and a professor showed me GPT-3 and DALL-E. And just like that iPad had years before, I had a new toy. One that I really, really liked.

By the end of the year, I even got my first few clients using it. I could write, but it could write too. I knew things, but it knew more things. See, as a creative, technology has always been my edge. My unfair advantage. 

But, the funny thing about unfair advantages, and secret skills. Is that often times, the secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything. That’s the magic.

The Turn

We enter the second act here. The Turn. Where ordinary, changes. 

As a creative at one of the world’s most storied advertising agencies, a part of soon to be the largest advertising media group in the world, I — we, have a special responsibility for what work looks like. We have a special responsibility in how we use these tools.  

We are currently living in the future. Adoption is happening three times faster than the smartphone and twice as fast as the internet. But if we don't define what "better" means, we’re going to wake up in a world we didn't choose. We’re going to cast a real bad spell. And people like to say, "This is the worst this technology will ever be." The AI you see today, the stuff that already feels overwhelming—is the floor. Tomorrow it’s better, or worse. Next year, it’s unrecognizable.

I go through some points in my talk. I speak to slop. To creator rights. To education. To slippery slopes. To deepfakes and so on. I speak to how some in the industry are currently obsessed with the shortcut. They want the machine to do the magic for them. But making the labor of creatives "disappear" isn't the trick. Anyone can do that now.

The Prestige

The hard part is The Prestige. Bringing back the human, front and center, reimagined. The Prestige is showing that Human and AI creativity can do things neither could do alone. It’s about setting the bar higher. And truly, I think some of the good stuff is here right now.

One of the projects I speak of is the "Adoptable" project for Pedigree. We didn't just use AI to make "cool images." The team at BBDO scanned real dogs in shelters, turned them into 3D models, and used AI to place those specific dogs into digital ads. When a dog got adopted, the AI took them out of the rotation. The AI wasn't the trick, getting dogs into homes was the trick.

Or look at Nike’s "Air Imagination." They gave fans the tools to co-create, using Nike’s own design language. Then, they took the best fan designs and actually made em real. They brought the creativity back from the machine and put it into the physical world. We saw something similar with LIDL’s prompt challenge, that saw the real creation of a fan’s prompt. 

There are countless projects in and outside of the agency that I’ve worked on with AI. But you would never know, because that was never the point. This is The Prestige. This is the magic. When the trick is the work. It was never about the Artificial Intelligence. In most cases, you should never make it so.

I believe hybrid solutions are often the most effective with the technology. And, speaking chiefly to creatives, I find this technology’s use most effective when it is slight, intentional, and occasionally necessary. 

Influencer social copy, perhaps. A background expansion. A mockup here and there. The quantity of work sometimes, and a nickel of the quality work. Maybe on the edge of innovation for unique solutions. Careful here, though. There are great gains to be made in these stages, I believe. And also losses. You have to preform to know the difference. And in your performance, you will see what the crowd cheers for. What they boo. You will feel which tricks are true and clever. You will feel which aren’t. You may have tomatoes thrown at you, or flowers. Hopefully, the latter. With this technology, you will have a bit of fun. And you will learn much. You might even win some. You might even find some real magic. But that was never the point. Anyone saying the opposite is either ignorant or lying. I think. 

That monologue above was not in my talk. But I did end it with some advice for the young creatives.

First: Suck as much as you can, as fast as you can. I did not realize how this came out until I saw my friend in the crowd snickering. Anyways. This is how you build your craft. Being ass. And then not too shabby. And then decent. And then, good. Maybe. This is life.

Second: The Hunt. You have to hunt for ideas in the ether. This is the magic. The real magic. The fun of it all. If you outsource your initial thinking to a machine, you’ll never be able to refine it into something great. This is arguably the most important skill.

And finally: Have fun. You chose this path because you love it. If you’re having fun, you’re competitive. You’re hard to beat. 

You can watch the whole hour-long video if you want to now. I have a few funny slides.

Let me get the story straight, hold up.