AI-dvertising

Nearly every day, someone posts something somewhere about the purported prowess of AI and the efficiency and efficacy of using the technology to advance the advertising business.

This is another case--another of the trillion cases--where we as a society are using the wrong measures and measuring the wrong things.

About a decade ago, I noticed that movie reviews on the radio news show I used to listen to talked more about the success of a movie at the box office than its success as entertainment or as art. 

Wrong.

In what used to be amerika, we have a rapist running for president who seems to equate leadership with crowd-sizes.

Wrong.

When I worked for Hewlett-Packard and they sold a lot of printers, the standard measure for printer speed was pages-per-minute. Pages per minute doesn't matter. 99% of the time, you're printing one page or two. Not 19. The measure of printing speed should be "first page out."

We make the same sort of error when we measure the acceleration of cars. We use 0-60. A much more meaningful measure is 40-70. That calculus more accurately depicts the reality of merging onto a superhighway from an on ramp. You rarely have to go up to 60 from a dead stop.

The new calculus of AIdvertising seems to be speed.

Why?

Did Pope Julius II say to Michelangelo about the Sistine Chapel, "Hey, I need this done in a week?"

I'd be fine, really, with AIdvertising if the people who run what used to be the advertising industry were only honest about it.

If only they said, AIdvertising is no longer about reaching people with simple, timeless human truths. AIdvertising is about the constant drip drip drip (or torrent torrent torrent) of always on messaging that we'll besiege you with until we wear you down. 

AIdvertising isn't about reaching it's about retching.

One half-hour of election week TV viewing will make the preceding sentence abundantly clear.

Stay with me a minute longer and consider a word I chose to use an inch or two from here: Besiege.

AIdvertising is not a creative industry, it's a besiege industry. 

A siege--a real siege--whether during the Crusades or the Nazi siege of Leningrad looked like a modern AIdvertising campaign. 

Huge masses of people were employed to break down resistance. Giant siege engines we're constructed to apply pressure to the victims (we call them marketing engines today.) And the latest technologies were applied to breakdown a city's walls. We do the same to break down a person's diffidence.

You can read a good description of a Medieval siege here. It compares nicely to a 168-page PowerPoint.

If you're a masochist like I am, or if you like educating yourself, you can read Harrison Salisbury's classic book on the Siege of Leningrad. You might not find a better book on modern marketing techniques and approaches. Plus, no 360-reviews.

I suppose all of this is an appeal to humanity.

If you're a client, you can decide how you want to how you treat people. You can decide to reach them. Or you can assault them.

It's you're choice.

AIdvertising or Advertising.