Fish Food: Episode 613

AI in creative thinking, technology acceptance, TikTok search, Twitter/X decline, Netflix viewing data and the deck of brilliance

Sep 27, 2024

Another provocation around GenAI this week (I make no apologies because the whole area is just so interesting right now but I will write about something else in the next episode I promise). So this week I met with a couple of founders who have built two of the most interesting GenAI tools in the advertising space.

Piotr Bombol is an ex-DDB strategist who has built an ad research tool called Adaily which is designed to help anyone that is looking to access marketing and advertising knowledge, case studies and examples quickly. It’s trained on thousands of campaign examples and is very impressive at calling up relevant and inspiring case studies (and answers to more knowledge-based queries) in response to prompts (as in the screenshot above). I found it an easy-to-use but nicely different approach to finding sources of advertising and marketing inspiration. Piotr has kindly provided Fish Food subscribers with a special link where you can try the tool out for free so do check it out.

I also finally got round to meeting Pip Bingemann, Co-founder of Springboards.ai, the amazing creative strategy tool that’s already being used by 100 agencies around the world. Pip gave me a demo, but he also talked about the philosophy behind what they were doing. He talked about how their mission was to keep creative people in the creative process and to create a tool that could help advertising strategists (and others involved with brand strategy and creative) get to a place that they couldn’t get to alone.

The tool is pretty incredible but you can absolutely see how this philosophy flows through what they have created. As an example there’s a ‘Riffbot’ that enables you to riff back-and-forth to develop ideas, and a slider that enables you to dial-up on randomness to ‘LSD’ levels to really open up your thinking. Pip made the point that many existing GenAI tools are designed to try and give you the answer whereas theirs is about helping YOU to get to the best answer by inspiring different thinking, sparking new creative conversations between humans, and exploring unexplored options. There’s clearly a role for both approaches depending on context, but I love their approach.

Both of these examples left me thinking that we need more AI tools that facilitate creativity in strategy, but also fun in the creative thinking process. It’s one thing asking a GPT to answer a straightforward question but the opportunity to ‘riff’ with a chatbot or easily access inspirational but relevant examples or see radical interpretations that might spark an entirely new direction, is something else entirely.

All the surveys suggest that GenAI tools are currently being used in pretty executional ways to optimise existing tasks and deliver greater efficiences, and there’s a ton of value in that. But as we become more sophisticated in our interactions with AI tools, and as the tools themselves develop, there is a different opportunity for AI to challenge our thinking, to help us to take creative leaps forwards, or to reframe something in a totally different way. As Pip at Springboard put it, to get to a place that we couldn’t get to alone. We’ve only just begun to explore the future of AI in the creative thinking process but it feels as though it could be a really exciting one.

Let me leave you with this quote from Antony Mayfield, CEO of Brilliant Noise (who are running a ‘How to start your team’s AI revolution’ online session this coming Wednesday):

‘AI isn't just another tool; it develops a layer of thinking that can challenge and even reshape how we process information. This challenges the very structure of how we communicate and process ideas’.

If you do one thing this week…

I firmly believe that since technology is becoming so elemental not just to marketing but to every function in the business, and when it is changing so fast and AI threatening to upend workflows and processes, it becomes way more important to understand why people adopt new technology and why they don't.

So this was my motivation behind wanting to understand technology acceptance and adoption more than I did. I did a bunch of digging and wrote up some thoughts on three common technology acceptance models that have each built on each other over the years. They frame a useful way of appreciating how to catalyse adoption and overcome resistance to change.

Links of the week

According to this study (PDF) shared by Ethan Mollick, Gen AI adoption is not only considerably faster than the internet or computers, but usage is broad and 25% of people use it on work days at least 60 minutes a day
A number of studies have shown the growth of search behaviour on Instagram and TikTok, particularly amongst younger audiences (people turning to these platforms for recommendations and answers). And now TikTok are launching a search ads platform
The FT had a chart in this piece showing a pretty precipitous decline in daily active users on Twitter/X over the past year, and that the biggest decline has been from progressive rather than conservative (or right wing) users. FWIW I stopped posting on Twitter/X in August, leaving behind 12,000 followers and 16 years of connections, but it has become an increasingly toxic mess. I now share stuff on Threads and LinkedIn if you want to follow me there.
This week I also wrote about Moravec’s paradox (a fundamental way of thinking about AI capability), and I also had a mini rant about the application of agile to marketing
Lots of fascinating data here from Netflix on the most popular shows by streams and time spent for the first half of the year - it shows a rich range of genres and formats but also how much viewing happens shortly after release (HT Dan Calladine)
I liked this powerful Asics work (from Golin I believe) on getting away from your desk more. I needed a bit more of that this week :-)

Quote of the week

‘The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large audience. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.’

Arthur Schopenhauer on reading well (HT Amol Rajan).

And finally…

Piotr Bombol (who I mentioned above) told me about deck of brilliance which I’d completely forgotten about but which is also an amazing resource for strategists, planners and creatives looking to be inspired. It gives you a whole range of angles for solving a creative problem (‘dramatize the problem’, ‘Find an analogy for the problem’) and then gives you video case studies and examples that relate to each approach. Wonderful.

Weeknotes

This week I’ve been interviewing CMOs for the research/report I’m doing on marketing operating models (still fascinating) and prepping for a busy few weeks of travel, speaking and workshopping coming up over October. Next week I’ll be in London working with leaders from an organisation that helps entrepreneurs, and then the week after I’ll be in Dublin running a 3 day session on Digital Transformation with 70 senior Diageo leaders from across Europe. I’m working alongside Trinity College Business School ( we’ve co-designed it) for the first time so looking forward to that. Unexpected fact about Dublin: the name comes from the Old Irish Celtic term ‘dubh Linn’, which refers to the deep, dirty pool where the Poddle stream and the River Liffey met.

Thanks for subscribing to 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. If you liked this episode do share and pass it on, and 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’.