Creative Trends Series - Part 1:
The Rise of the… Humans.
Why human interaction is becoming a premium feature

This week, I was invited to speak to marketing specialists at the University of Leeds, about ‘Creative Trends in Marketing’.As I sat down to prepare a talk, I realised I was very much in danger of adding to the AI noise and catastrophising. I really didn’t want a talk about how

• “AI will change everything.”
• “Here are 17 tools you need to master immediately.”
• “Prompt engineering is the new literacy.”
• “We’re all doomed… but also strangely excited about our imminent obsolescence.”

I wanted to take a slightly different tack (without ignoring the fact that AI is of course a huge disruptor to the sector right now).

Now, I don’t put much stock in what self-styled futurologists say – I tend to think you may as well read tea leaves, judging by most of their track records, but there’s a principle referred to by many of them that I do like – that there’s no such thing as trends. Only vectors.

Meaning that for every ‘trend’ moving in one direction, something equally interesting is usually happening in the opposite direction.

For example, remote and hybrid work was a trend, post Covid. But some really interesting thinking and innovation happened around a counter-trend: re-thinking what physical presence is actually for, and how we can collaborate better when we are face-to-face.

And so it will be with AI. Of course it’s changing what marketers can do, and what people in other fields can do to contribute to marketing – drastically lowering the barrier to entry in many areas. But a counter trend we can already see is that it’s changing what audiences value.

When anything that becomes cheap and abundant, the opposite tends to become rare and valuable.

Think of another shift that’s happened in a similar timeframe for example.

Pre-Covid, Zoom and Teams were not used that heavily at all. Adoption skyrocketed during lockdown due to necessity and is now the total norm. Now, I’m not saying that pre-Covid, clients didn’t value me getting on a plane and travelling long distance to see them face-to-face, but in the Zoom / Teams era, it’s now even more rare, appreciated and valuable.

I think there’s a direct parallel with AI (and the outputs it enables). It makes certain kinds of marketing, advertising and content the norm: widely available and abundant (arguably too abundant).

With Teams, the quantity of unnecessary meetings has gone up, and the quality of many of them has noticeably diminished – because people put much more effort into preparing if they’ve travelled for a day and spent a grand on a plane ticket.

And so it is with AI: the quality of many ads and content has gone down, because it’s just too easy to churn them out without much thought.

So when something comes along with a demonstrable human touch or interaction – just like with the meeting example – it confers greater value on it.

The human interaction premium

So many of our first interactions with brands are now mediated by AI and / or automation. We’re served tons of synthetically-derived content, we receive automated emails and we talk to chatbots.We’re herded through “personalised journeys” that were supposed to make marketing feel more personal and human, yet somehow feels like we’re being stalked around cyberspace by some kind of sentient spreadsheet.

We’re at a very strange moment in marketing history in which simply being made of meat can be a competitive advantage.Because in a world where everything is automated, the rarer thing becomes genuine warmth, presence, spontaneity, conversation and care.

And if this all sounds a little sentimental for you, there’s a strategic point to be made too. If your competitors’ marketing is driven by an efficiency strategy, a strategy driven by human empathy, understanding and connection becomes differentiated and stand-out.

The Creative Challenge Ahead

Despite the fact that – used without care – AI tools can sap the humanity from a brands marketing, they undoubtedly offer enormous value in efficiency and timesaving across a wide range of tasks.

As with every sector impacted in similar ways, this presents a dilemma: how are those time savings put to best use by creative people?(Because without a good answer, the answer is undoubtedly redundancies in larger organisations).

For those organisations for whom marketing has become hyper-focused on highly measurable promotional activity, the answer lies largely in broadening our gaze. We shouldn’t be focusing our creative energies solely on finding opportunities to use technology to automate the funnel. We should be looking creatively at ways to design moments of genuine human contact into the journey.

That might mean figuring out where more real, live conversations might make a real difference. Or ways to surface more real customer voices.It could be building in more unexpected personal touches and fewer automated nudges. And it might mean more focus on real-world presence, rather than digital-only interactions

Because the more artificial the world, advertising and customer experience becomes, the more valuable ‘real’ will feel. Perhaps that’s why statement activations like Nike’s ACG ‘All Conditions Express’ train at the Winter Olympics this week, feel so timely and relevant.

Image: boarding Nike’s All Condition’s Express. Credit: HypeBae

Next instalment: why craft and effort are becoming more significant status signals and drivers of value.