Humans are social creatures – we do what others do.
The pattern is evolutionary – we have a rule to do what everyone else is doing for most things – both as it seems safer (like Duracell batteries); and it acts as a social signal (with memes like “he/she’s a 10 but he/she has an Android..”).
This works for products from iPhones to Louis Vuitton bags to Fortnite.
Advertising has been an important part of this process. If you see a lot of high quality advertising (in all forms from billboards to video ads) for a product – that has been a signal that that will be the product that will become the standard. Because of that, people buy that product – and then it becomes the standard.
The future – a world with AI
As AI improves, people will still need to make choices – picking which brand of batteries to buy, or which brand of luxury watch to buy is still going to be based on human choice.AI makes it easier for all brands to create high quality advertisements – look at Google’s AI film-making tool Flow. And we are still early – this will get a lot better over the next couple of years.
This removes the signalling effect of high quality advertisements – for helping work out which product will “win” and become the standard – as every brand can create high quality advertisements (for example advertising films) and more money won’t create higher quality.
So brands will find new ways of signalling that they will become the standard. This is likely to be in many forms – including higher competition for creative.
Ads that are more truly creative will stand out. Producing amazing creative is expensive – largely because there aren’t that many people in the world who are experienced at truly original creative ideation. So producing something truly original like Dove’s Real Beauty campaign or Cadbury’s Gorilla will stand out and act as a signal that people will converge on that brand becoming the “standard” – in a world where instead producing a beautiful iteration of a standard soap or chocolate ad won’t act as an effective signal anymore.
Creative in this context will be defined as things that AI can’t come up with. AI (I expect even in ten years) won’t be capable of coming up with completely new campaigns like Real Beauty and Gorillas were – as the right training data doesn’t exist for them. The training data that would be needed is a lot of data on how humans emotionally react to a large number of things – which is really complicated and complex – and there is no very complete training data for. As humans we can do a relatively good job with this because we can introspect and empathise with other people. The training data that AI needs to learn this might become available once highly advanced computer-brain interfaces are developed – but we are still in the infancy of that area so I am guessing this is at least 10 or 20 years away.