This told essay is based on a conversation with Leslie Walsh, head of product strategy and development at New York-based advertising agency Episode Four. Edited for length and clarity.
The most important thing about creativity is that your idea needs to feel original and unique. I think everyone in the creative industry is concerned that if they use ChatGPT, they’re going to think the same way and end up in a sea of sameness. It’s a race to the bottom.
Many people come up with creative ideas in different ways. I like to say that we work from a place of, “Where do our customers actually want to engage with us?”
I needed something to base the idea on so the client wouldn’t say, “Where did this come from? Is this just your crazy head? Is this something that will actually help drive my business?”
RYA is our creative AI tool. We position it as follows. They are radical ideas that are accepted by the audience because they are all based on data.
Each week, we put together a survey asking Americans questions such as: “If you had extra time or money in a day, what would you do with it?”
We offer 180 genres and 20 actions, such as “I want to go on a trip” and “I want to go out to eat.” And depending on the genre, nuances such as, “You said you like to go out to eat, what kind of food do you like?You want to go on a trip, but what kind of traveler are you?” That’s where we can pinpoint our passion points.
Using that dataset, we found a way to train language models at scale to help teams come up with ideas as creatively as they would come up with them themselves, but at a fast pace. I find that Claude from Anthropic is the best at generating creative ideas, but we use different ideas for different things.
Typically, an agency’s project process involves working with the client before developing a brief. Back and forth, back and forth. It takes a few weeks to brief the team, develop those ideas, shape them, and steer them in a positive direction. Then I present to the client, go back, revise, and come back again. This typically takes 6 to 8 weeks.
We’ve streamlined the process to just a few days. We like to say it can all be done in a day, and if you have the time, it can actually be done in minutes. It all depends on how much you want to shape and shape your ideas.
It helps us a lot to get to a good starting point and helps us solve the big picture. Many creative tools on the market today are not in the execution layer.
RYA does not assist in the creation of banner ads. RYA does not intend to assist you in posting social posts. RYA helps you come up with big ideas that can lead to banner ads and social posts.
Leaning towards “weird” and “pointless” AI outputs
We really like to rely on strange combinations, nonsensical locations, and obscure locations as a starting point for ideas. Because I believe it will lead to better work.
A way to make the AI a little more no-nonsense is in how you adjust your prompting strategy and temperature settings. There are ways to put guardrails in place so that you don’t get hallucinations that bother you, and instead you get hallucinations that are positive. You need really strong input. As we say, garbage in, garbage out.
For our financial services clients, we turned financial education into a celebrity chef cooking series. We also transformed our product sales collateral into custom-pressed EDM vinyl for a recent financial industry event.
Launched a cruise ship for travel and leisure customers on a global digital treasure hunt that hides Google Maps clues across the web and turns product demos into games.
We created a dating show for a car loan company that matches singles with both cars and partners.
Everyone is devising different AI tools for different purposes, different industries, and domain expertise. I’m not an engineer, but I have a lot of expertise in how to creatively think about the best way to give a briefing, how to work with clients, how to decipher the most difficult briefings, how to conduct research, and how to come up with interesting insights.
Then, with a creative partner who had greater expertise in actually generating ideas, we fed all of that input into a large language model that allowed us to recreate the way we were thinking.
That’s where we’re headed. That’s what’s exciting about this industry. Opinions vary as to whether AI can truly be creative. We believe we can do it.
