Computers Make Good Ad Execs

philg sent us linkage into a really amusing little story running over at Yahoo about computers generating advertising. Its pretty amusing since it showed that patterns could be used to generate commercials that were just as creative as ones that came from actual creative people. I worked at an ad agency for a few years, so this one made me grin.

Comments

an infinate number of monkeys.

[mcc]

give me ten of these things and let me make a beowulf cluster out of them. let me mess with them for a month. at the end of the month i will give you the complete works of hamlet, a copy of the windows 98 source code, three parodies of "the blair witch project" and several /. articles on the windows "NSAKey" thing. allowed that you generate as many random thigns as you want, and can throw away the ones that don't make sense, anything can look impressive

Computers Make Good News Program Execs

[Khel]

Computers Make Good News Program Execs:

The same could be applied to the predictability of
most network produced news programs. Instead of a product it would be a topic and instead of an image association it would be a spin factor.

2 comments

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

First, the examples given are a little misleading. What, exactly, does it mean for a computer to be "creative"? Clearly they didn't "program human psychology" into a desktop PC and have it spit back out "bullet-shaped cars suggest speed". More likely they just created a computerized version of a madlib. Get a bunch of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Pull at random. Evaluate the "idea" thus produced.

Which brings me to my second comment: This type of "creativity" is exactly analogous to biological evolution. The ideas generated by the computer map to mutations in a genome. The humans doing the actual selecting (note the word!) of good from bad map to natural selection. I suspect the hit rate of the computer is probably on the same order of magnitude of the chances of a random mutation being beneficial.

It is well-known that mutations role in evolution is not all that big--selection does all the real work while mutation just provides (some of) the raw material. Conclusions to draw are left as an exercise for the reader.
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Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein

Creative but not Innovative

[nieveh]

Computers will probably create within the bounds and rules given but it will not be innovate still. Breaking out of the box is good, but not too many suceed in doing so. I've done graphic design, ads and logos personally and I know how hard it is to try and be innovative to create something fresh and new.

But these computer generated ideas may be great for brainstorm sessions as well since you might be brain dead one day and decide to ask your computer. If you don't like to admit using the idea it gave you, you can still build on it if nothing else.

Computers, in the end, are still just tools and toys. But they are fun tools and toys. =)

Lateral Thinking?

[MattyT]

Having read some of Edward De Bono's work, this doesn't suprise me. Advertising would be a place where lateral thinking should be valued highly.

Lateral thinking can be as simple as concept juxtaposition, or in this case, replacement of a concept with something else representing it. This is a pretty simple technique, as are most lateral thinking techniques. They don't seem too hard to do on a computer given some effort.

I think it's important to note that these are just ideas that come out of a lateral thinking session, and like all ideas, they then have to be filtered through a human's logical thinking processes, just the same as these computer-generated ideas do.

Of course, it doesn't necessarily bode too well for ad brainstormers.

Poetry writing s/w "passes" Poetry Turing Test

[McFarlane]

This reminds me of an excerpt from Raymond Kurzweil's Age of Intelligent Machines (2nd book in a row for me that's out of stock at Amazon but Chapters has got it) where examples from poetry generated by a computer are compared to human poetry. Supposedly the s/w was good enough to fool a significant group of people.

Re:These are creative ads?

[Paul Johnson]

For example, "Intel Inside" was heralded as this marketing marvel, yet I see it and think: "Ok. Great. Thanks."

The reason that "Intel Inside" is a marketing marvel is not the cheesy logo and four electronic twonk noises, its the way that OEMs are pushed into including it.

Intel provide a cashback deal (essentially large discounts) to OEMs who include the Intel Inside logo in their advertising. Part of this is that Intel get to review and approve the adverts before they go out. This lets them place the logo, but it also makes sure that the voiceover says "and its got a 400MHz Intel Celeron processor" as if that were a major selling point.

Viewers think that they are being sold a computer, so they discount what they see about the computer. But the fact that the computer company seemed to think that a Celeron is a major selling point sticks in their heads, and makes them more likely to pick a Celeron-based PC no matter which brand they buy.

It also lets Intel play fast and loose with the anti-monopoly laws. If you offer AMD processors as well, you might suddenly find all your ads being rejected by Intel, and having to pay the full list price for your Intel CPUs.

Paul.

In other news...

[K.]

Researchers at the University of ______ recently pitted a Commodore 64 using a slightly modified version of the well-known Eliza program against an ad executive in the Turing Test, the canonical method of examining artificial intelligence. Details of the results have been withheld, but this reporter has learned that the aging 8-bit machine has since been granted citizenship, while the executive has been fitted to a 19-inch rack and configured to act as a firewall for a small business network.

It's like this:

[grappler]

I don't even the whole "substitution" method of making ads to begin with. Unless it's REALLY clever, they usually aren't that good.

My favorite ads are the ones that either make you laugh a LOT, or make you say "That is really clever". Substitution generally does neither. Car--Bullet? Mosque--Tennis Ball? So what?

My favorites are usually the super bowl ones, because they aren't so concerned with getting the point across that their product is "classy" or whatever as they are with making it stick in the viewer's mind. Let name recognition do the rest. I don't CARE what morphing effect you can do to make your car synonimous with a first class plane ticket or whatever. It won't make me buy the car. What just might make me buy the car is if the company has some very high name recognition (combined of course with a reputation for quality). Ads, no matter how clever, cannot create a reputation for quality, because they are coming from the company selling the product. But they can generate name recognition.

I've done it

[talysman]

hmmm... mix and match images, select only those
matches emphasizing a shared quality, and have a
human create the final product?

there's at east a dozen such programs already out there. paramind does something like this, for
example. I've gotten even better results just
using emacs and dissociated press... generated
some damned cool surreal poetry.

the important step is the *filtering* process
after the phrase generation.

also used various random midi generators as part of my experimental music compositions: create
midi streams and mix them together to "paint" an aural picture.

pretty nifty. but nothing new.

Well no wonder.

[mattdm]

The researchers found that 89 percent of award-winning ads match as few as six formulas, which they called "creativity templates"...

Could it be that the problem isn't supergood computers, it's that human designed-advertising is uncreative drivel? Kinda sounds like it.

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this has been done..

[Absynthe]

At one time i worked for a very horrible place that happens to make yearbooks for most of the elementary and middle schools in the U.S. (if you have any idea what i'm talking about it wasn't Josten's it's the other one) When I started it was an assembly line arrangement where an image aquisition team scanned and named all the pictures and a quark team filled in the blanks on a template.
Eventually that was inefficient so a plotting team took over and code warrior scripts were used to build books, place images, do everything but tweak the thing into final submission
When I left there was a project to get rid of the final human element which was designing the covers for these books. The script would match the school mascot randomly pick between fractal and other backgrounds, try and make a guess as to whether it was a religious school ie. if it saw st. anything it would drop some crosses and sacred hearts. They didn't have an astounding success rate and the amount of time you spent letting the maching do it then re-doing the job yourself 75% of the time made it unworthwhile but everything evolves..
I don't think this is the death kneel of the ad exec but i think in the near future it's gonna clear the field quite a bit..