Surviving the hollowing out of the creative middle class

One of my favorite things to do with my downtime is to explore AI subreddits to keep up with what people are doing and building at the bleeding edge. The amalgamation of these forums represents a loose community of AI hobbyists, professionals, and spectators. On the video front, most of what gets posted is dopamine candy.

A seemingly endless carousel of overly stylized videos with too bright colors. Popular characters plucked out of their stories. Surreal scenes that toy with physics and our natural understanding. And lots of images and videos of women in scantily clad outfits. In a word, slop, something I touched on in my previous post. Beneath all that, I am seeing a preview of something coming at us faster than the creative community is expecting.

With all the AI content I’ve seen, what I haven’t seen is its clearly articulated value. It’s not that the current cycle of AI generated video isn’t technically impressive, it’s more so that the majority of what’s being put out is more focused on novelty rather than utility. For all the investment going into AI infrastructure buildout, there is still a lot of catching up to do before the technology becomes genuinely useful.

So far, with the exception of software development, much of the expected fallout from the technology’s impact hasn’t infiltrated what people need to do to get things done. Still, it’s obvious what is coming and it’s only a matter of time before some creatives, particularly those who work on scripted commercial video sets, will have to make some tough career decisions. A reddit post I saw last week showed that time is getting closer.

In the reddit post, EU-based AI specialist and art director, Vincent Buyssens shared two video ads he worked on for Loop Earplugs where principal photography was entirely AI generated. This was part of a campaign that also included two live-action ads.

The AI ads themselves were serviceable. If you’ve seen any generic product ad, you should not expect anything groundbreaking. What I found intriguing were the practical insights Vincent shared about how the team landed on using AI to create additional videos for the campaign.

Commercial video is distinct from other creative because the purpose is so unambiguously transactional. You are telling the viewer, “You’re seeing this so I can convince you to buy a product”. As such, it avoids some of the scrutiny around generative AI. People don’t like commercials. Whole business models are built on people paying to avoid them. So I suspect consumers are not going to care when commercials start being made with AI.

“ATL (above-the-line) is a top-of-funnel format that requires a clear arc and some humor beats, but without pretending to be an emotional short-film. ATL is important for customer acquisition, especially for ecomm brands. AI, provided it’s not slop, can help brands like us test new formats/audiences. The two AI spots were not a replacement for live-action.”, Vincent shared in his reddit post. He added, “We managed to 'nail' this format with AI because we had the same creative team (CD, AD, editor, producer, color grader, ...) working on both the live-action and AI, so same standard of quality”.

Vincent highlights two important things that every creative working in scripted commercial video should pay attention to. First, why AI is particularly valuable in this context. The speed and cost savings open up doors not always available. For example, you can imagine wanting to test messaging for a product across different demographic populations. Or you may want to do A/B testing to see what messaging works better in a particular market.

Cost of production has always been a bottleneck forcing marketers to choose from a limited slate of messaging they can communicate. The Loop Earplugs commercials show that agencies can remove that bottleneck with AI.

“There was only budget for two live-action shoots. Without AI we only would've gotten two videos. Now we have four which allows us to test more angles”, Vincent shared. This evolution means that more messages can be created to see what actually works in the market and that valuable data can then be used to inform a larger production investment like a live action video with a celebrity or an ad buy during a popular broadcast sport.

This will create a bifurcation in the commercial creative economy. When it comes to top-of-the-funnel activations like these Loop Earplugs commercials, some amount of campaign budgets will go to AI to save on costs so brands can save top dollar for high impact activations. As Vincent notes, “Live-action with real actors will always remain important, especially in an age of AI slop, but customer acquisition is expensive and AI allows us to test new formats/audiences we couldn't do before.”

This will hollow out the middle class of creatives and it’s especially going to affect talent that pay the bills and build their careers by booking these smaller scripted commercials. There was much hoopla in the entertainment news media over the past two weeks about the AI “actress”, Tilly Norwood. That was the first threatening salvo in the fight pitting real talent against generated characters.

A-list celebs were understandably concerned about what that stunt could suggest about what’s coming. What’s going to happen with scripted commercials is going to cause a far more sizable disruption. Similar to the concern that AI may be stifling the job market for new grads wanting to start their careers as junior software engineers, we may start to see in a few years new models and actors not finding lower budget commercial gigs to help them pay the bills.

The second thing to highlight from Vincent is who are needed on the team to get effective creative from generative AI out the door. Vincent shared the team composition, “2 AI specialists, 1 creative director, 1 art director, 1 producer, 1 editor, 1 color grader and 1 sound mixer.” Comparing to traditional production, it eliminates the entirety of the on-set crew. So we can expect a similar (though lesser than for talent) disruption for crew members as well.

Creatives will need to evolve past this disruption. The clue for how is revealed by Vincent’s team breakdown. We can peek into the future to see that the most valuable creatives will not be the ones with specialized production skills, but the ones who can best communicate a creative vision.

For the Loop Earplugs AI commercials, that is represented by the art director, the creative director, and the post-production team that pulled everything together. I would argue also that being particularly good at prompting will be less important as the AI models continue to evolve to understand user intent.

Generative AI ultimately compresses creative expression such that the creative voice is translated not by other people but by machines. The only way to stand out will be to craft a unique creative voice that doesn’t get lost in translation. For production work, the idea that you get gigs by who you know will die out.

Being a creative influencer will be even more important. You’ll get gigs by people noticing your work as unique and “scroll stopping”. It used to be that you had to train up your technical wizardry with creative tools before graduating to creative decision making. That has been changing for some time with YouTube and now TikTok. In this coming new world, the tools won’t be in the way anymore. The only way to survive will be to hone your creative voice.

You can check out the full reddit post, here.