Scott Belsky: Content Creators, Creativity, and Marketing in the AI Landscape (Encore)

Good. Good morning everyone.

Good to see you, Mike. Thanks for doing this.

Yeah, well, it does feel like every day you need 30 minutes just to catch up on the research from the previous day that came out. And in the space of creativity, I think one of the reasons why AI is so relevant is because in most areas of business and life, hallucination is a bug, whereas in creativity, hallucination is a feature. And when creatives go in and prompt something, they actually want things that they didn't expect as a benefit of the product. So you've seen creators kind of come in and start playing. I always feel like novelty precedes utility, so they come in thinking this is fun and then they start to discover use cases, and a lot of those use cases are mood boarding, but then it becomes, oh, actually I could use this image for some form of commercial use. I think my takeaway from the last six months or so is generally that the tensions that we're going to have to deal with for the next few years have surfaced. This question of is this technology democratizing creativity, in which case it's also maybe commoditizing it, or is it raising the ceiling for what's possible? When you talk to a creative professional and ask them how they come up with great ideas and solutions to problems, it's always a factor of time, like how much surface area of possibility can they possibly explore in a given amount of time to find the best solutions for a client or an internal customer. Of course, also it's lowering the floor in the sense that all of us, our peak creativity may have happened at like six years old when everything we did got put on a refrigerator by our parents, and then over time we started to lose our creative confidence because we were worried about what critics would say or what other skills people had that we didn't have. Now we all have the ability to prompt and generate something, whatever is in our mind's eye, and so there is that democratization. So I think there's tensions like that outcome and where that will land, or the tension between skill versus taste, you know, which is more important. There are a number of tensions I think that are now very relevant.

Well, I think my firm answer is the role of the creator will be even more important. And the reason why is because not just that I'm biased, but every brand is going to start flooding the zone. And I think that this is a term I'm hearing a lot these days when I talk to folks in journalism or companies that are competing for SEO on Google. Every brand has this opportunity to automatically generate thousands of original posts around any particular topic or objective and flood the zone literally with content. But what ends up happening when anything floods our view is we start to look for things that are unique and different, like that's just human behavior. And so when you start to see tons of generated images around you, generated by, let's face it, AI is a consensus machine, it's a product that just kind of churns out variations and derivations of a consensus amount of material, you're going to start to be more interested in things that move you. And I think that this is where creatives have an opportunity, right? They've always helped brands tell a story, they've always helped brands stand out and do something different, and that is going to be more in demand in this future of flooding the zone as opposed to less.

Yeah, I think it's the right question, Mike. And I feel like this collapse of creativity and marketing is fascinating to me. These were two independent industries for the most part, they didn't even use the same tools, they liked to throw things over the wall to one another, and now it's collapsing. And I think these social media platforms and this desire to have real-time marketing that engages people is going to be one of those instances. In terms of the flooding of the zone, I think what we're going to find is that this notion of core and periphery is going to become very important in both marketing and entertainment, where the core is going to be original content creation, humans channeling their emotions and their personal experiences and manifesting something unique and different. And then there's going to be tons of automatic variations that are made based on AI, using AI for translation purposes and acculturation and variations that are towards different segments of customers and whatever else. And I think we're going to find that in entertainment and we're also going to find that in marketing. And so what that would mean is going to TikTok having a really clever campaign that is something that is different and unique that will catch people's eyes in the era of flooding the zone, and then TikTok will automatically generate tons of variations around that to optimize the performance.

I think that's right. And the very practical example of that is literally just translation, right? Which every content creator was really limited to just their own English or whatever speaking audience, and now it's like, no, as a content creator you can have your content automatically generated for every single language within minutes. But then you can even go further, why not make the tablecloth red in China and white in Italy and green, and you can really have a lot of fun in that way as well.

100%. And I think that's within years, if not months.

Well, this is a fun thing I think about quite a bit because traditional R&D for any sort of product happens in a department within a company and it's a small handful of people whose job is to come up with the next version of the soap or the next beverage or whatever else or the next Lego set. And it's a constrained group of people that are of course sometimes geographically bound and they have been intoxicated by the brand for so long that maybe they're somewhat myopic in their imagination. And of course ideas for brands, for companies, for products have always been everywhere, it's just we've never had an effective way as consumers, as random people around the world, of expressing what those ideas might look like and then the rest of our community kind of curating based on whether they like it or not to the point where the brand even notices it and then can act upon it. Now fast forward to today in the age of generative AI, great example, the other day I saw an Instagram post of a collaboration Lego set between Lego and Hermes, and they had all these Lego sets of these Hermes bags, and of course that became viral and tons of people started to engage with it. And then before you know it, the companies are talking about, I don't know, should we do this? And that was an amazing example of open source R&D in the age of AI. Now I don't know, should Lego even have a department for partnership development if the whole community is empowered to do this and they can just look and see what gets traction, which is almost a more effective form of market validation than research groups, right? So I think that's going to start happening across every segment of product and I think companies need to adjust to accommodate that.

Yeah, well, I think there's two threads of technology that have to really exist in order for this to happen. If we look forward to 10 years from now, I think the idea that any digital experience or even physical experience in our lives treats us as a stranger will be insane to us. Like, how could Nike actually ask me to pick my gender and specify my shoe size? That's such a waste of clicks. Why can't it just welcome Scott, these are the shoes that are running size nine and a half for men? Why should I have to go through all this anonymous sort of experience? I still also think that way for restaurants too, like why shouldn't restaurants know you're a vegetarian that doesn't like mushrooms or whatever the case might be. I think we all want to be treated special, we just, the technology doesn't exist and also the ability to augment these digital experiences in real time to make us feel like a personalized experience is happening also is not widespread. So a couple things have to happen, right? Of course the stack that provides these digital experiences for all of us needs to leverage AI to be able to radically redesign it based on who we are without any sort of work happening. And then also our preferences, our own interests, also need to be stored and related to the brand somehow. Now my answer to that might be the idea of agents, and we'll get to that a little later, but this notion that if we're really well known by our devices or by some application that we use, maybe our experiences become personalized using that. Now the argument against what I just said would be that do we all want a hyper personalized experience in every part of our life? We certainly want to know how we're known, we don't want to feel like it's creepy, right? So we need to have some control and some degree of privacy around this. Most of us actually do want to be known in instances where we want to achieve something, we just want to know how we're known. And then the second point is around entertainment. I've had this debate with some people in Hollywood around personalized entertainment. Why shouldn't a TV show that you watch have a slightly different ending than what I watch based on our own situation, our own preferences? But unfortunately if it's personalized, if we all have a different version of Succession the last season, we can't connect over it. We have no shared experience, and without a shared experience we kind of miss part of the sensation of entertainment.

Well, you know, my view on ad tech generally is that it was sort of like the dinosaur era of life on Earth that just went in a completely crazy direction. Instead of always inferring what we might like and sniffing our activity and retargeting us and creating all these databases of information about us without our permission, like that was the era that went on for decades. I feel like the antithesis of that would be having our own preferences dictate our experiences. Like instead of me guessing everything about you and secretly trying to make your experience better, why don't I just ask you? And then why don't I give you the option of having maybe Michael's agent inform my experience I'm about to provide for you?