"The job of being a creative just got a lot more specialized." Michael Couch, RAPP

RAPP Worldwide

Serviços de marketing

New York, Estados Unidos

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Michael Couch

VP, Technology Strategy & Transformation — RAPP

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No stranger to experimentation and exploring innovative opportunities, RAPP utilizes AI tools to deliver holistic consumer experiences through cost-effective solutions. Chatting with Michael Couch, VP, Technology Strategy & Transformation at RAPP, we learn more about how the agency leverages tech and data into campaigns.

Does your agency encourage or deter the use of AI in your work? If applicable, how does your team integrate these tools into the creative process?

RAPP has a deep culture of experimentation and exploring innovative applications of technology to enable clients to deliver individualized experiences. We lead the charge for evolving towards true precision marketing, delivering holistic consumer experiences that align with human truths and individual preferences, leveraging technological advancements for cost-effective solutions. 

We have long used AI in our marketing sciences' ‘back-end’ to scale up our analytical capacity and help clients weave data-centric capabilities into tactical campaigns. Analysts have upskilled, adopted new tools, and enhanced their value propositions both at the campaign execution and enterprise level.

But marketing sciences faced less hurdles to apply AI into their work. The nature of analytics has well defined roots and language of data usage agreements, ethics, and legal perspectives, meaning our teams had clear guidelines and governance to test around - for Creative workflows, it remains ambiguous. 

Guidelines for generative AI are still fuzzy as the creative services industry comes to grips with what it means to partner with machines to convey our behavior-changing ideas that we unleash into the public.

However, our creatives are extremely curious, and we encourage their exploration. There are thousands of voices now that are discovering interesting creative work applications and FOMO is settled in many creative minds. We’ve seen a distinct shift in mindset recently and creatives are more actively tinkering, identifying where the limitations are (there are many), and developing use-cases for where it can truly augment their craft.

The wheels are in motion to optimizing ‘back-end’ creative workflows by applying AI, but surfacing generative creative to the ‘front-end’ of Brand experiences, that is an intermittent endeavor, unlocked only through collaboration between creatives and open-minded clients navigating through the zeitgeist.

How does the accessibility of these tools affect the way it is used?

Previously, these AI tools were really only either accessible to enterprise customers, developers or as experimental features in SaaS but those barriers have come right down.

This mass-access combined with a hype-cycle of opportunity has sparked a huge evolution of non-industry professionals empowered to create a lot with very little. We largely seem to still be in a phase of exploration and play, as we come to terms with its real utility, but there are fantastic resource communities popping up that are becoming seeds of professionalized use-cases. These explorers have cookbooks, and they don’t hold the same reservations for branded craft.

Adobe's Firefly for Photoshop, a recently released powerful yet subtle add-on, has become a game-changer, now accessible to all creatives' desktops. It’s no longer an existential curiosity. The professionals sitting next to you, they have it a few clicks away!

As AI advances, how is the role of the creative redefined? In what ways do you see the landscape of creation changing/shifting in response to AI?

Technology eliminates jobs, but not work. Those that apply AI have enormous opportunities to produce their work smarter and reallocate their time to devising more human and cut-through ideas and can bolster their sparks of imagination to be more convincing for client buy-in for the same effort. The job of being a creative just got a lot more specialized.

AI gives us all a moment of introspection to examine our core value props in terms of differentiation, and an opportunity to offload those tasks that are lower value and use these tools to enhance our storytelling.

Bold ideas from imaginative creatives are still the heart of the work, but we are witnessing a transformation towards the creators being greatly empowered to ideate, describe, test, validate and adapt their ideas with a lot less friction.

If AI furthers its capability to create and think, what is a responsible way to use these new technologies?

Beware – these AI models are prone to hallucinations, but unlike humans, they do not have the embedded culture and values that make agencies great brand ambassadors.

We will always need to seek the best tools available to help our clients achieve their desired outcomes and AI will certainly have a fundamental role in execution. However, the usefulness of those AI capabilities does ultimately hinge on our abilities to define Brand guidelines as fundamental guardrails that ensure the outputs and actions are not destructive and do not invite reputational or data-usage risks. We at RAPP are pursuing a model of applying generative AI alongside our core values, ensuring usage and outputs are validated by experts.

AI is not a genuine threat or replacement for talented, enthusiastic, and creative minds that intimately know the brands they work on. It is a tool and is becoming a co-pilot of ours that augments our natural ingenuity and provides our marketers with more superpowers to optimize our craft.