Posts

Alexander Turtschan

DLD MUNICH 2023

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DLD 2023 – Looking ‘Beyond Now’: Implications for the advertising industry

DLD can certainly make your head spin. There are only few conferences out there that manage to pack as many high-class speakers and experts from very diverse fields into a tight schedule of 20 to 30 minute sessions and make it work. Somehow. Covering topics from robotics and the industrial metaverse to the latest developments in neuroscience to the opportunities of generative AI for businesses in an hour is a bold move.

Recalling DLD organizer Steffi Czerny’s opening remarks, it all made sense in the end: We live in a time of global poly-crisis. Old rules often don’t apply anymore, but pessimism is not an option. We must look ‘beyond now’, the conference’s motto, to develop a narrative of progress to discover new opportunities for the future. Innovation in the fields of technology, science, communication, art and design, business and industry can provide us with the tools to take back control and tackle the most pressing issues of our time.

AI as the technology of the year, if not the decade

Generative AI has been one of the major topics in the tech world for quite a while. With the recent release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, the excitement in almost every industry has reached new peaks.

In his tech industry predictions for 2023, Scott Galloway pointed out that unlike other recent technology hypes (namely Metaverse and Crypto), Artificial Intelligence was backed by years of academic research like other key technologies like mobile communication. According to Galloway, AI will do for information workers what robotics did for manufacturing: It will fundamentally reshape entire industries.

New challengers for Google Search

The opportunities of challenging Google’s quasi-monopoly by utilizing AI for search was one major talking point at DLD 2023. Startups such as You.com and Neeva have already integrated AI technology into their search engines. Also, Microsoft’s recent announcement of investing an additional $10bn into OpenAI and their plans to integrate AI into all their products (most importantly into the Bing search engine), could lead to new competitive innovation in the market. However, several speakers, such as Neeva’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and Scott Galloway, pointed out that building an AI powered search competitor is not an easy task due to the increased operational costs and computing power needed. Furthermore, Google employs some of the world’s leading AI engineers and the company has years of experience in the field. So, it is by no means certain that Google will not be able to maintain its dominance.

Alex Turtschan and Simone Jocham, Mediaplus International, at DLD 2023 in our Munich House of Communication

AI as a fluid computer interface

AI might not only change the way we search, but it might also change the way we interact with computers. Today’s interfaces are mostly based around the concepts of apps, often with highly specific use cases, yet lacking a universal, user-centric approach and context sensitivity – as often demonstrated by the lackluster usefulness of many “smart” assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Hey Google. But what if the user could just tell the AI what they wanted to do instead of opening a specific app to solve a problem or complete a task? What if the AI was the smartphone operating system, evoking apps on the go and being highly aware of the context of the problem to be solved?

AI for more fluid and relevant advertising and commerce

As Serviceplan Group CEO Florian Haller pointed out in his session “Beyond Advertising”, many people are annoyed by advertising. Ads often lack relevance and are not relatable. Marketing must become much more immersive to stay relevant. AI can be a part of this by generating relevant product shots and visuals on the go that are tailored exactly to the users’ current expectations and desires – and which might be unique in this form. The same rings true for e-commerce: imagine an online store that doesn’t just show clothes or shoes worn by the brand’s models one doesn’t necessarily relate to, but also provides AI generated shots that match one’s own body type, size, and age?

The future of media and publishing

An inspiring session by Brian Morrissey dealt with the future of publishing. The current media and publishing landscape is quite volatile, and we are facing several bubbles. The streaming market as a direct-to-consumer business is overcrowded with too many players competing for the consumers’ time, attention and share of wallet. We might experience a backswing towards more bundling of content into packages – a landscape, streaming providers initially challenged with their then new business models. Subscriptions have become ubiquitous and have at least partially replaced advertising-based business models in several sectors. With big players like Netflix and Amazon now exploring ad-based tiers for their streaming offerings, we might see a growth of the overall advertising spaces in the video streaming industry.

The big shifts ahead in media and publishing are quite versatile, but come down to human connection, individual relatability, and emotion, not unlike the outlook on the future of advertising drafted by Florian Haller. Individual creators can turn into established brands, a development we have already been seeing in the gaming industry, in live-streaming, and podcasting in recent years. Reaching the biggest audiences no longer is a sustainable future business model, as demonstrated by the disappointing IPO of Buzzfeed and the decline of similar mass-market-mass-appeal-low-effort publications. But most importantly, for Morrissey the future of publishing is about the human connection and emotional bond to the audience, especially in an age of AI-generated, synthetic content.

DLD ventured a wide view into the digital future and the industries affected by it – let’s see where all of this takes us.

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Klaus Schwab

Painting by numbers: Why AI can do creative too

There’s no longer any doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) can be creative. The question now is exactly what role AI is capable of playing in the creative process. Will this role be limited to that of any other tool, like a paintbrush or a camera? Or could AI become the muse, or even the independent originator of new creations? Could it even be responsible for the extinction of artistic directors as a species? If so, when?

For the time being at least, I can reassure my colleagues that their jobs are safe. Nonetheless, it might be wise for them to start getting on the right side of this new co-worker. Even though the beginnings of AI development go all the way back to the 1950s, it’s only today that exponential development of the three “ABC factors” is enabling it to really gather pace (for the uninitiated: A is for algorithms, B is for big data, and C is for computer chips). That’s why the time has now come for every sector and every company to ask itself how artificial intelligence should be transposed and integrated into its everyday activities.

Within marketing, applications for AI have so far been concentrated primarily in the areas of predictive analytics (for example, for providing recommendations in online shops), personalisation (for example, for individually-tailored newsletters), linguistic assistance, and automation (for example, in media planning). Another important area of marketing, which has so far been almost entirely ignored, is creativity. This is often entrusted only to human hands, and portrayed as an unassailable fortress. With sophisticated puns, poetry, sentimental melodies, magnificent graphics, and everything else that stirs our emotions, there’s surely no way that the processors of a cold machine could ever dream up creative content – is there?

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so sure. For there are already numerous examples today of how artificial intelligence can support, expand, or even imitate human creativity – and the numbers keep growing.

AI can write

How many journalists relish the prospect of laboriously scrolling through the same stock market updates, sporting results, and weather forecasts every day? No problem: the responsibility for texts like these that follow a fixed format can now be shouldered by AI – and without the reader being able to tell the difference. Who knows when robo-journalism will lead to the first advertising texts written by machines, or copy-CADs, as they’ve already been dubbed?

AI can speak

Adobe hasn’t only created the world’s most important program for image editing in the form of Photoshop, but has been hard at work on human speech as well: Adobe VoCo is Photoshop for voice files. After only 20 minutes of listening to a person talk, the program’s AI is capable of fully imitating their voice. VoCo doesn’t simply stitch together snippets of words already spoken by its human subject either, but is instead capable of pronouncing entirely new words as they are typed in.

KI can compose

A team from the University of Toronto has succeeded in programming AI to be able to compose and write catchy and memorable songs. The program, Neural Karaoke, was fed on more than 100 hours of music, based on which it produced an entire Christmas song complete with lyrics and cover graphics.

KI can construct images and grafics

So-called generative adversarial networks are capable of producing astonishingly realistic images from descriptions written by people. Simply put, they function by using a “generator” to randomly create pictures which are then evaluated by a “discriminator” that has learned to recognise objects with the help of real images. This process can turn the words “a small bird with a short, pointy, orange beak” into a photorealistic image.

KI can paint

AI program Vincent from product design specialists Cambridge Consultants, which is also based on generative adversarial networks, has extensively studied the style of the most important painters of the 19th and 20th centuries, and can now make any sketch drawn on a tablet resemble the work of a specific Renaissance artist.

KI can do product design

Intelligent CAD system Dreamcatcher from Autodesk can generate thousands of design options for metal, plastic, and other components, all of which provide the same specified functionality. The designs also have an astonishingly organic look which couldn’t be described as “mechanical” or “logical” at all.

KI can produce videos

Working together with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Canadian company Nvidia has developed a technology that can synthetically produce entire high-resolution video sequences. The videos, which have a 2K resolution, are up to 30 seconds long and can be made to include complete street scenes with cars, houses, trees, and other features.

KI as the Art Director

Advertising agency McCann Japan has already been “employing” AI in the role of Creative Director for some time. AI-CD ß has been fed a diet of award-winning advertising for the last 10 years, and has already produced its own TV ad based on these data.

Big changes begin with small steps

What does all of this mean for us? Although we may still chuckle at the shortcomings of such AI applications today, development is now moving at an exponential rate – and the progress being made is impressive. This is why now is the time to start getting over the prejudices and fears, and to give proper thought to how we will construct creative processes in the future, together with the role that we want artificial intelligence to play in them. Big changes can’t be made at a single stroke, and are instead better implemented in many small steps. Barriers are best removed by being prepared to play around with new technologies in order to test them out and gather experience. True, doing this takes up a certain amount of a company’s time and resources. But those of us who begin with a small project and then slowly feel our way forward have much higher chances of achieving long-term success, and maybe even of helping to shape a new development in the AI world.

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