{"id":397115,"date":"2026-01-07T08:46:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/397115\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T08:46:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T08:46:08","slug":"ai-isnt-the-real-crisis-facing-advertising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/397115\/","title":{"rendered":"AI isn’t the real crisis facing advertising"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a lot of talk about AI and how it is going to affect the future of advertising. I find the debates strangely reassuring \u2013 reassuring in the sense that people believe that advertising has a future. There is a far bigger crisis facing us, and it\u2019s not one that people seem to be talking about.<\/p>\n

I have a seventeen year old daughter who only watches free to air TV when she is at her granny\u2019s house. She has the premium versions of Spotify and Youtube, so there\u2019s no interruptions from marketers there. She flies over most of the ads she sees on Tiktok and Instagram.<\/p>\n

I asked her about outdoor advertising and she looked at me blankly. Why would she read the back of a bus or a billboard when she has her Airpods on and is looking at a screen? Yet at some point, she will need to buy toilet cleaner, choose a car and insure a house.<\/p>\n

I seem to work exclusively on projects that assume their market is still watching and engaging with TV ads. And while I get that a decent enough film transcends the commercial airspace it is created to fill and becomes, for want of a better word, viral, most major clients baulk at creating anything that might be actually sharable.<\/p>\n

ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n

I recently pitched for a Tiktok campaign for burger chain, Five Guys. I love the brand and created an idea I felt would harvest \u2018likes\u2019 like a John Deer X-Series (which for the non-agriculturally minded is a massive combine harvester). We not only failed to win the pitch, the brand ran with employees filming themselves while they cooked burgers. Yay!<\/p>\n

Happily, Five Guys have built such loyalty that some fans will \u2018like\u2019 everything they do, even if it\u2019s a joyless video of someone testing the crispness of a chip. Maybe I\u2019m bitter, but the best Tiktok creators are some of the most imaginative and entertaining people on the planet, so if your posts aren\u2019t as compelling as anything on the channel, why bother?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Five Guys employees filmed on a smartphone making burgers<\/p>\n

Mumbrella\u2019s editor Hal Crawford recently attended the Tiktok awards in Sydney<\/a> and as far as I can see, all those creators who excelled at the intersection of marketing and Tiktok had fun products to spruik. How will HSBC talk to Gen Z? It looks like they\u2019re not even trying. After all, how can a brand so hamstrung by regulators and terrified of risk hand over the reins of their comms to a 23 year old micro influencer?\u00a0And if they hire an actor to pretend to be in influencer, the fakeness will be obvious.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a genuine crisis, way bigger than AI.<\/p>\n

I just asked ChatGPT how it would zhuzh up the Five Guys work, and it was a hard \u201cno\u201d from me to all of their suggestions. ChatGPT struggles with soul and sass, but Gen Z can\u2019t get enough of it. They laugh and they like. I can\u2019t help feeling that, in our eagerness to create new channels, we\u2019ve lost the ability to communicate sales messages on them.<\/p>\n

This will probably end up as a column for another day, but I wonder if we\u2019re too high on our own supply. We love awards and seem to have a show for every week of the year. We overly congratulate the mediocre, the ineffective and the fake rather than do the hard yards of mapping advertising\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Rather than competing against one another for gongs, why aren\u2019t advertising\u2019s biggest brains bashing heads as to where this ship is going?<\/p>\n

Instead, if feels like we\u2019re playing fiddle while everything burns.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s pretty significant that when I applied to the Watford College advertising course in the \u201990s, there were around 1,000 applicants for 30 places. By the mid-00s, so few people applied that the course closed. Traditional advertising had ceased to be relevant to the new generation of creators.<\/p>\n

Why would a 20 year old work in an ad agency creative department when they can be a Youtuber, a gamer, or work in-house at Louis Vuitton?<\/p>\n

My daughter thinks that advertising creatives and influencers are one and the same, and while she\u2019s right \u2014 we do aim to influence \u2014 it is the Tiktok influencer, not the airline, sportswear company, or soft drink that is the brand.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t stop the tide, nor should we. Advertising needs to move with the people. If we do that well, not even AI can stop us.<\/p>\n

It might even help us.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a lot of talk about AI and how it is going to affect the future of advertising.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397116,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,211675,7747,995,105,101],"class_list":["post-397115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-chas-bayfield","tag-gen-z","tag-influencers","tag-technology","tag-tiktok"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}