Using Artificial Intelligence creatively

Dan Oros at Creatopy argues that AI is creativity’s ally, not its adversary

Doing more with less is any business’s dream and something AI is increasingly starting to enable.

TikTok recently announced that it’s set to bring generative AI avatars to its platforms to help creators expand the reach of their commercial collaborations. TikTok creators can use these avatars to create multilingual versions of themselves, allowing them to localise content for new markets and audiences. In short, AI will enable them to expand their marketing activities at a speed that would be unachievable otherwise.

But you don’t have to be a business the size of TikTok to tap into AI’s creative potential.

Building the business case

The creative industries have a mixed relationship with AI. The sector has been quick to embrace AI, with many workers already using AI tools in their roles.

At the same time, it has had to accept that there is no return to the pre-AI reality. With the advance of technologies such as Open AI’s DALL.E 3, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini, how we approach creative tasks is undergoing a fundamental shift. 

A tool that enables you to achieve more in less time, reducing costs and increasing productivity, is one that few can afford to ignore. But for businesses to secure the buy-in for this across departments, from the ground level up, they need tangible examples of what success looks like. 

Creative automation in practice

For many businesses, localisation can be one of the costliest challenges when preparing their marketing campaigns. You’ve invested in great creative assets, but they will need to be tailored for the unique needs of each geography, which can be a time-consuming and admin-heavy job. Worse, it can tie the creative team’s time up and prevent them from moving on to more value-adding tasks.

At the same time, maintaining brand consistency across all assets is vital, and they need to adhere to tight guidelines.

This is where creative automation becomes a game-changer. 

One organisation that has experienced these benefits firsthand is the British Council. As part of its campaign to promote English courses across Europe, it faced the herculean task of localising content in seven languages, all in a tight timescale, with a total of over a thousand assets to be created.

This would’ve tied up a significant part of the creative team’s time and budget, but instead, it chose to use a creative automation platform to aid in the task. By automating the design process, it could dynamically integrate the localised messaging into the creative. This helped ensure that all assets were relevant to the local audience and executed to the highest standard while the design was adapted to incorporate the increased volume of text.

As a result, costs were reduced by 70% with a 50% faster turnaround while maintaining optimal content quality for all assets.

AI as the enabler 

As the British Council’s example shows, embracing creative automation can help set a new standard for efficiency in large, multi-region campaign launches. It also helps democratise creativity, giving businesses of all sizes access to the tools they need to create high-performing assets to launch campaigns at scale, just like the TikTok creators.

Going forward, the challenge for businesses is to review their processes, identify the areas where creative automation can add the most value, and separate them from the ones where human input is crucial.

As businesses increasingly incorporate AI into their operations, it’s crucial to ensure they deliver the best possible value to human teams. Technology is there to support people and processes to deliver their best, not the other way around, and that goes for creative tasks, too. 

But this calls for a mindset change.

A more creative future

To capitalise on AI, businesses need to develop adaptable strategies and a toolkit of technologies to support them. It’s up to all of us to ensure that AI lives up to its potential: it’s not the end of creativity; it’s the accelerator that amplifies it.

With many businesses operating in an increasingly competitive environment, creative automation can deliver the flexibility they need to develop faster responses to new opportunities. This can mean quicker turnover to tight deadlines, cutting costs, and elevating the volume of their creative output. 

When leveraged correctly, creative automation can benefit everyone, boosting productivity and freeing creatives’ time to focus on doing what they do best.

Dan Oros is CEO at Creatopy

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and demaerre