Finally, something about AI
New work from Coke and O2.
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Sorry. This is not a Christmas ads edition of the Breakdown. We know that it is the expectation of every marketer to have seen every single Christmas ad and have a rounded opinion on what worked and what didn’t this year. So here. Have it. (Nearly) every single 2024 Christmas ad, with a free opinion that you can steal or criticise in your Monday stand-up.
Anyway - in this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ AI ✨ - just the two campaigns this time. I wanted to draw a line between a really, truly terrible idea, and a really, truly great one. And how AI has both nothing and everything to do with why they’re so different.
Sorry again. This is a ranty Breakdown. But at least it’s short. Here’s the work from Coke and O2.
1. Dreaming of an uncanny Christmas
Coke are really testing one of the Oxford word of the year candidates.
Slop
(n.) Art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate.
According to System1, this is good advertising. It gets good scores. People “like” it.
And I actually don’t give a toss about what they have to say. My problem is not with AI production generally, nor the idea that AI-generated ads could be very effective. My problem is that this specific ad is a piece of absolute slop.
Sorry, Andrew Tindall from System1 - I know you think that most people wouldn’t be able to tell that this is AI. Maybe we’re still in a grace period where people haven’t been exposed to enough AI content to be able to know it when they see it. And maybe the tech will improve faster than people’s ability to detect it.
But there are hands with no fingernails. Eyes move in people’s heads (the location of the actual eye, not just irises) and people blink without fully closing their eyes.
My problem is that I’ve seen more effort and more attention to detail go into pointless memes than what seems to have gone into this ad. If the production costs are so low and timelines so short, where is the excuse for shit like this?
AI is and will be one of the most potent things ever given to millions of people simultaneously. Like the car, or the internet, or wafer-thin mobile devices with enough compute power to navigate a rocket. And its use case for one of the leaders in our industry is to create this slop?
I double dare Coke to switch over entirely to AI-generated advertising for the next 30 years, and see what kind of lasting effects that has. People see AI slop and immediately think of Coke, but hey, at least that’s really good brand fluency!
Of course it’s cool that you can generate stuff like this for next to nothing. Of course the tech will eventually get better and better until it’s pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing. But people are not idiots. They can see where you cut corners. They noticed when Walkers crisps pack sizes got 10% smaller. They noticed when Apple stopped including charging blocks with new phones. And they will notice when you try to advertise to them with slop.
2. O2 do some good
Compared to the Coke ad, this is pure genius.
Talk about finding a use case for AI. We all know it can make text and images and videos and voice ‘recordings’, but through sheer lack of imagination, the discussion is firmly cemented on “How do we automate away people’s work?”
O2 showed us that some novel thinking bears some really good fruit.
They set up an AI granny, designed to take calls from scammers targeting real, vulnerable people. The AI granny kept the scammers on the phone for as long as possible, sometimes for hours and hours, protecting real people from their nefarious efforts.
Don’t think I need to clarify that (1) I think this is really smart, and (2) I much prefer it to the Coke work. Why get rid of our own work, that we and others enjoy, when we could stymie the efforts that no one enjoys? It’s a brilliant activation that speaks to a commitment to keeping customers safe through innovative tech and innovating thinking - an actually important consideration for a telco brand. Quite dissimilar to the idea that a cola brand ought to be technologically innovative when it comes to media production.
Until next time,
Ewan
CSO & Co-Founder at Briefly