EMBRACE = The catalyst for us embracing AI within Amigo.
“Today, we find ourselves at the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution, where AI and ChatGPT technology are positioned as the driving forces.” (Forbes, 2023)
We have always been an agency that has embraced technology. Over the course of our 12-year history, we have always looked to find ways to improve our work and make our teams’ lives easier by looking to the cutting edge. But this quote that I heard at the University of Oxford (Said Business School) doing the GS10KSB course, was the spark that ignited our drive to something more advanced, more exciting and more game-changing for our business, our people and our clients.
Consider our attention grabbed. We realised we needed to stop anecdotally talking about AI and purposefully evolve our business by incorporating it within both our operations and service delivery processes.
History tells us that industrial revolutions have a profound effect on business, organisational operations, and labour markets. We had three options.
- Ignore
- Wait and see
- Embrace
Option 3 is the only option.
There is very little question that AI has changed the game within the creative industry. So, to ensure we are on the curve, as a progressive and relevant marketing services creative agency, we are embracing AI to work in harmony with our people.
We are not a technology or AI business. We never will be. Amigo is a people-first integrated creative agency. Our people and our ways of working are what set us apart from our competitors. That’s what makes us who we are.
AI alone cannot deliver creativity that can meaningfully and emotionally connect brands with their audiences. This is the preserve of the human – the specialist practitioner who imbues curiosity, empathy, imagination, intuition, and an innate understanding of cultural nuance. Humans get human emotions, pressures, motivations, needs and aspirations.
AI is also inherently biased and as a subject matter, it stimulates confusion and concern in terms of how it works and the jobs it could potentially replace. These observations are true. But our view is AI offers huge possibilities to add value to the creative process with human oversight, involvement and intervention.
The future will be a choreographed combination of the best that AI can offer and the best human intelligence can offer.
ENABLE = How we’ve integrated AI to supercharge our operating systems and service delivery processes to deliver faster and better results.
So, what have we done? We have developed a tech stack of AI tools to perform tasks at each stage of the creative delivery process – daisy-chaining AI throughout the strategy, creative development, implementation and measurement phases. This is an ever-evolving suite of AI applications fused with data and insight tools, combining to accelerate the creative process and deliver greater impact. We call this tech-stack AMI (Advanced Marketing Intelligence).
Let’s think about the Strategy function. Their role is to interrogate client briefs and challenges and develop a strategic approach to meet their objectives. To do their job well, they need to harness an array of data sources, insights tools and references to be able to conduct competitor benchmarking, develop audience personas and consider wider environmental change and influence factors that will impact the relationship between the client business/brand (product or service) and its target audiences. Strategy informs the creative development (ideation) phase by identifying key audience insights (attitudes, needs, values, motivators and behaviours) and connecting them with brand truths and messages (USP’s/RTB’s). It results in creative ideas that meaningfully and emotionally resonate with the target audiences, nudging them through the decision-making process.
To super-charge this, we have tuned up a series of AI tools to perform the tasks and processes within our Evidence-based Creativity framework in a fraction of the time. We now call this process Augmented Creativity™. It’s bigger, better and more powerful than before. The result is our Strategy team now produces the right information, in a fraction of the time, presented in our customised data visualisation format. This gives them more time to focus on the bigger prize. AI gives them more time and headspace to deliver real value-add and add further depth to the strategy process. It helps them find ideas and concepts that before would be buried or hidden.
Let’s think about the client briefing process.
Here is a startling fact. According to Marketing Week, Better Briefs and the IPA, “26% of budgets are wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work”.
Here AI can play a pivotal role in reducing waste. Just over a quarter of your budget back just by briefing better. AI can help our clients through the briefing process, informing what the brief should include based on the objectives and audiences concerned. AI will have a levelling-up effect. Less capable or inexperienced brand marketeers will now have the same output as their more proficient colleagues. Briefs will be of the highest quality, and it doesn’t matter if it’s internal briefs or external creative partners – briefs from your business will be of the highest quality. There’s an old saying when it comes to briefs – “sh!t in, sh!t out.” Say goodbye to that.
From a creative development perspective, we are harnessing AI to deliver rapid (AI-driven) creative benchmarking, mood boarding, storyboarding, concept prototyping, creative effectiveness testing and messaging/trademark checks.
Joining up these two critical phases of the creative development process, super-charged by AI, provides significant speed, efficiency and effectiveness benefits as well as improving the overall quality of the creative output (performance/results/ROI).
ELEVATE = Imagination Acceleration™.
Our people are the essential ingredient in the creative delivery process and will not be replaced by AI. Capability, craft, and experience is vital. However, AI offers significant opportunities to speed up, deliver efficiencies and produce deeper and richer levels of materials that can make creative (delivery process + impact) more effective. This elevates and accelerates the creative process and passes on significant value to clients.
From an industry or agency perspective, AI won’t take our jobs. It will just change them. New jobs will emerge. It’s already happening. AI smart people are harnessing all the benefits that AI brings – speed, smarts, efficiencies, and performance.
This belief was the catalyst in our change of approach. We are now an integrated creative agency operating within the sweet spot between human and artificial intelligence. We now deliver speed to market, competitor advantage and creative performance to outpace the competition. As we like to say, HI (human intelligence, our specialists) x AI (the enabler) = Intelligent Progress™.
On an operational and service delivery level, we’ve achieved this by analysing all the tasks and procedures that are manual and formulaic through all areas of the business. We have integrated AI within our systems and processes to automate these tasks.
Here AI is an enabler offering speed and efficiency benefits to our foundational business operations across Client Service, Project Management, Finance and Commercial. The result is less arduous, time-consuming tasks for our people. They get time back and have the headspace to focus on being more value-additive to our clients.
On a strategy and creative level, AI has had an even more profound impact by enabling better thinking and human decision-making. We can accelerate how strategy informs the creative ideation process.
But let me be absolutely clear. This is not an industrialised, factory-type creative production play. This is about elevating and accelerating every step of the creative process to deliver deeper, smarter, stronger, and faster creativity.
ABOUT US = Intelligent Progress™.
Our AI journey has led to a pivot of the business and an evolution of our creative service delivery where we combine the best of creative talent (Human Intelligence) with machine learning (AI) to deliver speed to market, competitor advantage and creative performance to outpace the competition.
We do this using our proprietary Augmented Creativity™ model which enables human and artificial intelligence to work together in carefully choreographed (creative) partnership to elevate and accelerate your path to Intelligent Progress™.
Intelligent = The carefully choreographed combination of human and artificial intelligence that elevates every step of our creative process. AKA Augmented Creativity™.
Progress = The deeper, smarter, stronger and faster commercial impact that we unlock and deliver for our clients.
Our service offering spans Brand, Strategy, Creative and Delivery.
We are always excited to partner with people and clients who are looking to harness AI. If you want to see how AI could be used to supercharge your creative campaigns with efficiencies and effectiveness, we can help. Or if you’re looking for consultation on how to incorporate AI across your internal and creative operations, we help with that too. Get in touch.