UK ad agencies undergo their biggest exodus of staff as AI threatens industry

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• blueamigafan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I don’t want to go into massive detail but my partner works in the creative industry, they have had the threat of AI replacing them for a few years, management is obsessed with it, to the point they have invested a ridiculous amount of money into AI but it simply can’t do what they want it to. So now they are threatening redundancies not because AI is going to replace them but because they have lost so much money the only option is to get rid of people.

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  ad agencies

  I don’t know specifically what positions are being cut, and the article doesn’t say, but I remember reading an earlier article saying that copywriters had been particularly impacted, and this article references “junior” and “creative” positions.

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting

  Copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. Copywriting is aimed at selling products or services.[1] The product, called copy or sales copy, is written content that aims to increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade a person or group to take a particular action.[2]

  Copywriters help to create billboards, brochures, catalogs, jingle lyrics, magazine and newspaper advertisements, sales letters and other direct mail, scripts for television or radio commercials, taglines, white papers, website and social media posts, pay-per-click, and other marketing communications. Copywriters aim to cater to the target audience’s expectations while keeping the content and copy fresh, relevant, and effective.[3]

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If I had to make a guess, one reason that this particular area might be particularly impacted might be because Internet-based ads have been eating the ad market for years.

    My understanding is that part of the shift to online advertising has been to shift to more-targeted advertising than was possible in the past. Like, you can get finer-grained profiles on ad viewers. That’s basically what, say, Google enables — it has a profile of users based on information harvested, and it can show different ads tailored to different user demographics. Traditional media — say, print magazines, say — allows for only a limited degree of targeting, like you can put your “teen girl ad” in a magazine that is mostly read by teen girls. But you can only go so fine-grained with that.

    And I’d bet that generative AI is an close match to that. Like, I’d guess that one probably typically has copywriters that deal with a particular demographic. Like, say you want ads that target, oh, middle-aged white men, or lesbians, or whatever. I’d bet that the norm with human writers is to have someone familiar with what appeals to a particular demographic.

    But then if you’re an ad agency, if you want to let your customers target N different demographics with an ad campaign, you need N copywriters familiar with a given demographic.

    And if the ad delivery platforms permit for N to be a lot bigger than it was, say, 30 years back, than you really want to be able to generate copy for all of those N demographics to be competitive in your ads. And that’s going to increase copywriting labor costs. And generative AI is going to lower copywriting labor costs and avoid the “expert per demographic” constraint.

    I’d also bet that a lot of ads use pretty similar tactics to appeal to a demographic. Like, this is relatively-repetitive content similar to existing material that just needs to merge aspects of two different things — (1) a product type with (2) ad techniques that target a given demographic group. That is something that LLMs are fairly good at doing a reasonable job of.

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    • Pratai@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Cringe AI.

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• kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Classic example of what Cal Newport calls “vibes reporting”.

  No quotes from agencies saying “we fired people because of AI”, but if you put “people got fired” and “AI threatens jobs” next to each other, you can get the reader to assume a more salacious story without technically lying.

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