Fish Food: Episode 605

AI transforming advertising, new cultural codes, intellectual loneliness, marketing plan on a page, Roger Federer's wisdom and nature outperforming AI

Jun 28, 2024

A couple of weeks ago Scott Gallagher wrote an insightful piece about tech bubbles and the whether we’re in the middle of an AI bubble (TL:DR he believes we are). Notwithstanding the inevitable AI ‘winter’ or ‘trough of disillusionment’, there are some really interesting propositions emerging (sidenote: the antidote to successfully navigating the trends hype cycle is what Scott Brinker calls staying in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ - not too much, not too little).

A client told me this week about Pencil.ai, a Brandtech AI business which seems to have the potential to totally upend advertising processes. Their ambition, they say, is to ‘become the default way ads get made’, and they claim that AI ads are 2 x faster and cheaper to make, and 2 x better performing than making ads without AI (based on $1Bn of ad spend). Interesting times.

Meanwhile, this ad from Chivas Regal is an excellent example of how AI is being increasingly used to augment creative processes.

Links of the week

Last week was the Cannes Festival of Creativity of-course. If you’re short on inspiration this site has every Cannes winner from 2000 to this year’s festival. Tom Darlington and Matt Prentis had a good round up of the best of this year’s Lions including some of my favourites such as the Pop Tarts Edible Mascot, and the Doordash ‘All the Ads’ superbowl promo.
I liked Zoe Scaman’s definition of the ‘new cultural codes’, for a new brand operating system. She breaks it down into Cultural Spheres (where can we play?), Cultural Frequencies (what pace can we set?), Cultural Conduits (how do we tap into the tastemakers?)
And this marketing-plan-on-one-page from Colin Lewis is pretty good
This week I wrote about an amazing example of creative innovation partnerships - when the toy company Tomy partnered with the Japanese Space Agency to design their new lunar rover.
Meanwhile over on Google Firestarters (Spotify, Apple) we're releasing a series of 'Firestarters Takeouts' in amongst the regular scheduling. These are fast-paced, all-you-need-to-know, podcast snippets of less than 10 minutes that capture some of the highlights from our popular episodes. Already out - highlights from Michael Lee on what makes a good planner (Spotify, Apple) , and Alison Coward on workshop and team culture (Spotify, Apple)
Thoughtful read of the week went to Emily Kuret on ‘The Case for Intellectual Loneliness’, which takes Vivek Murthy’s idea of the three types of loneliness -intimate (being known), communal (being surrounded), relational (being connected) - and introduces a fourth, intellectual loneliness (being understood, challenged). It reinforced to me some of the benefits of travel, connection to culture and interesting ideas, and the piece also contains a number of links to thought-provoking ideas that I want to follow up on (HT James Caig)
A lovely thought from Roger Federer’s commencement speech at Dartmouth about not dwelling on setbacks, and keeping going: "In tennis, perfection is impossible. In the 1,526 signals matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches. Now, I have a question for you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%. In other words, even top ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play…When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot”.

Quote of the week

“You’re going to realize it one day - that happiness was never about your job or your degree or being in a relationship. One day you will understand that happiness was always about learning how to live with yourself, that your happiness was never in the hands of others. It was always about you”. Wise words from Bianca Sparacino

And finally…

“I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives”. Sign of the times - photographer Miles Astray gets disqualified from an AI image contest after winning with a real photo.

Weeknotes

Last week I was cycling around the (non) hills of Norfolk with a bunch of MAMIL friends (it’s a sign of my advancing years that a decade ago our annual trip was to the French Alps and now we go to Norfolk) so hence no episode last Friday. Interesting fact about Norfolk - it’s one of the few counties that doesn’t contain any stretches of motorway and it has over 650 Medieval churches.

This week has been mostly been about prep and proposal writing, although I did do a workshop for NHS leaders and a webinar for my Lloyds client. Next week I’ll be headed out to the Middle East again to begin a project working for an organisation that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners out there.

Thanks for subscribing and reading Only Dead Fish. It means a lot. If you’d like more from me my blog is over here and my personal site is here. Do get in touch if you’d like me to give a talk to your team or talk about working together.

My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.