Joy Molan and Chase Lewis from DDB Sydney explain five ways to upgrade your advertising strategies with AI.
AI has the creative industry in a frenzy of fear and fascination. Musician FKA Twigs recently created a deep-fake clone to field fan and press requests, and industry creatives are embracing generative AI to make out of this world visuals, resulting in 12% of Cannes Lions entries in 2024 featuring the use of AI. So what about us strategists? Many of us are still operating on the strategy equivalent of iOS 4. It’s time for a system upgrade.
We’ve explored the plethora of large language models (LLMs) and platforms out there, focusing on largely free options, to compile five ways that AI can supercharge our strategic process. From tackling gaming briefs to fast-tracking research on health insurance to digging into trends around Gen Z maximalism, these examples are relevant to many scenarios.
Don’t worry, AI isn’t cheating. It’s not about getting AI to give us the answers, after all, advertising is wonderfully subjective. For strategists, problem solving gives us so much enjoyment. It’s about understanding the new tools in our arsenal to get to great solutions faster and elevate our thinking. To paraphrase Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani, ‘AI will not replace you but the strategist using AI will.’
So, stop hitting “snooze” on a much-need OS upgrade. Please ensure you are fully charged, well-rested and connected to the internet for these five lessons in AI optimisation.
1. Compiling…your research timesavers
First up, getting our nerd on is perhaps one of the most enjoyable aspects of being a strategist. Going from zero knowledge about a category or product to being an expert is a satisfying journey and essential to getting under the skin of a client problem. The process can sometimes be a scrappy one and the sourcing of our inputs can be very time consuming. What if you could simplify your research discovery process and get the lay of the land faster?
First, try using Globe Explorer to get a bird’s eye view (free and premium available).
Prompt: What are the key challenges, barriers, and emotions of Australians when picking a private health insurance plan?
It’s like receiving a tailor-made Wikipedia page for a given topic. By scanning the outline of related topics, you can get a sense of the broad dynamics within your category or situation. You can even double-click into a given topic and see other related areas you might not have otherwise considered, creating a web of interesting connections and rabbit holes to explore.
Globe Explorer doesn’t provide the answers all in one place. This is where a strategist’s intuition comes into play, as it’s up to you to determine which leads seem promising.
We like to take topics surfaced by Globe Explorer and feed them into an AI-powered search engine that cites its sources, like Perplexity (free and premium available).
Some tools and sources strategists are already familiar with, like WARC and Statista, are even integrating AI into their search tools (subscriptions required). This is a game changer, making searches faster and contextually aware. Rather than simple keyword detection, the LLM’s powering these search tools better “understand” your query and can surface more relevant results. It feels like magic.
2. Installing….your parasocial planning partner
Strategists often have the reputation of being agency lone rangers. Business management have their crew. Creatives have their partners; someone to bounce ideas off and challenge their thinking. If you’ve ever been jealous of this opportunity to stress-test your strategic response, then this one’s for you.
Many of us still think AI is a cheat’s shortcut. But rather than having it do the brainstorming and idea generation for us, it can be better used to push our own thinking. It’s not about searching for perfect answers, rather for provocations. We first picked up this tip from Fantasy authors who started using ChatGPT in Voice Conversation Mode for world building. They’d pop in a pair of headphones, go for a walk, and get ChatGPT to ask them a bunch of questions about the world where their story is set.
For instance:
- What’s the dominant trade or industry in the town where this scene takes place?
- How does that influence the townspeople’s customs and traditions?
- Do they tend to dress a certain way?
It’s surprising how different it feels to interact with ChatGPT when you get outside the text box. We’ve found it to be quite good at keeping the conversation going and acting as a sparring partner for your ideas.
Here’s how it might work for a strategist:
- Download the ChatGPT app onto your smartphone
- Grab a pair of headphones and open Voice Conversation mode
- Let ChatGPT know the role you want it to play. For example:
I’m an advertising strategist and I’m working on a campaign for a budget car rental brand. I have some loose ideas for my single-minded proposition that I’ll use to brief my creative team. Can you help me sharpen up my language and consider different ways of communicating a similar idea? - Grab your trainers and go for a ‘walk and talk’ with ChatGPT
- A transcript of your conversation is available afterwards.
What we like about this is that in the end, it’s all your own inputs and thinking—it’s just providing feedback to make you react, think, and form opinions about your own work.
3. Encoding…a bad ideas bot
However, if you do want to see what ideas AI can come up with, it can be worthwhile if only to see the obvious ideas to avoid.
As the well-known strategist Zoe Scaman says: “AI is “not Nostradamus, it’s Data-stradamus.” It’s not a tool that can imaginatively ideate fresh strategies because it’s running off existing inputs and spits out expected, logical conclusions. It can come up with a different result each time as the results are not predetermined or indexed like a search engine. But it has yet to learn how to smoosh diverse inputs to create surprising strategic outputs.
DDB has even gone as far to develop a ‘Bad Ideas Bot’, where anyone can input a brief and see the well-trodden thinking and obvious answers that come back.
Prompt: How can we move mobile gamers from passive frustration about the connection speed to an active determination to switch to a better network provider?
The results here are twofold:
- First, this can serve as a basic test to see if your brief is answerable
- When entering that first creative review, you’re already primed to spot cliche and obvious thinking and push the work further.
4. Enhancing…your trend hunting
As advertising strategists, we often have our own set ways of doing things. We follow our gut, finesse and craft our own approach, and already have a toolkit of the best, go-to tools for getting to a single-minded proposition, fast. This is especially true of trend hunting.
We all have our favourite sources. Joy loves Dazed Digital. Chase loves Reddit. But often we can get stuck resorting to similar inputs. Same inputs lead to same outputs.
To burst our cultural bubbles, we recommend casting the net wide with tools that can comb through hundreds of trends reports to find surprising and unexpected insights about emergent movements that might have escaped our attention.
Again, DDB has built its own ‘Trend Fetcher’ which will crawl hundreds of annual trend reports from various sources to surface emerging patterns and trends.
5. Upgrading…a mentor at your fingertips
There are fantastic courses out there for training advertising strategists, such as the IPA Foundation or APG Essential Planning Skills. But often the nature of our industry and workload means many of us need to upskill as we go. If you’re craving a stronger grounding in the principles and frameworks of our craft, then AI can be a fantastic resource for you.
We like using Perplexity here as well, because of its ability to cite credible sources and demonstrate deep understanding of different topics.
Let’s see what it knows about a topic like connections planning:
Next, let’s ask Perplexity to put together a curriculum using “The Feynman Technique”. This popular learning framework can be used to learn just about anything by getting you to teach someone else what you’ve just learned.
While AI can be a helpful tutor and guide for learning the core skills of our discipline, it can also be immensely helpful to have a mentor you can turn to who’s seen it all before and knows how to tackle different challenges and situations.
DDB is lucky to have one of the pioneers of advertising effectiveness within its network: Les Binet. But there’s only one Les and over 10,000+ DDBers around the world. So they’ve trained a bespoke GPT model on his pioneering works in marketing sciences and effectiveness, calling it: LesGPT. At Cannes, they even pitted Les vs. Les against each other live on stage!
Do you have a question you would like to ask one of our modern effectiveness experts? Need some help with writing an effectiveness paper? How to respond to a client’s questions about campaign objectives? LesGPT’s your guy AI.
In doing so, DDB is democratising access to one of the pre-eminent thinkers in our industry, no matter the time zone, language, budget, or seniority. We’re sure any strategist would feel more reassured knowing that Les Binet has their back on a brief!
In conclusion
Strategists are naturally a curious bunch. It makes sense that many of us have been poking around with AI tools as of late, but we still might be a little apprehensive about when and how to work them into our daily practice.
Hopefully, these five approaches can help you elevate your thinking and avoid the lazy outsourcing that might seem like the only use of AI in our field. If you only rely on the same inputs as everyone else, it creates the same outputs. A monoculture. Instead, these examples show how to harness the potential of AI, to push the originality of your work.
We invite you to maintain a healthy skepticism. LLMs like ChatGPT can get things really wrong. Even simple straightforward questions. We shouldn’t rely on it for facts, but for concepts and areas of inquiry. Afterall, we are still at the foothills of the foothills of AI. There might be some troubleshooting along the way.
We hope your OS upgrade was a smooth and enjoyable experience and that you’re now comfortable riding the wave of change. As the Chief Strategy Officer of BBH, Will Lion, wrote for Creative Salon, “The creative mutants are coming, let's embrace them.”