Building Arks in the Great Content Flood
What clients will value when everyone has the same tools
Last year, Coca-Cola used artificial intelligence to recreate its iconic ‘holidays are coming’ Christmas advert.
The technical achievement was lauded (by them) as impressive. A process that hithertofore required large creative teams, lengthy production schedules and significant budgets was completed in just two weeks - a fraction of the time.
The reaction was less enthusiastic.
Viewers described the advert as strange, hollow, emotionally flat: the AI had reproduced the appearance of a Coca-Cola campaign without capturing what made the original memorable. Without that hard-to-define ‘holiday magic’.
It was certainly not - as the fizzy drink colossus’ jingle famously promises - “Always the real thing”.
And, here in the real world, the consequences of the choice to use AI go beyond questions of comparative creative quality.
Recent analysis from The Guardian has found that most - MOST - planned AI datacenters in the United States are being built in areas experiencing drought conditions.
About two-thirds of upcoming datacenters will be in places that have been among the driest in the country over the past year.
These facilities require vast amounts of electricity and significant quantities of water for cooling: some consuming daily the equivalent of a small town's water usage.
The irony is we’re investing enormous real-world resources into making a deluge of content, yet are suffering a drought of meaning within it.
As the flood rises, but our time remains finite, the scarcest resources in the system will become human ones. Attention will become increasingly arid; there will be a desertification of trust.
The assumption underpinning much of the AI conversation (in marketing at least) is that content output was the difficult part. Production costs acted as a constraint. Publishing required time and budget.
But those constraints were never really the things preventing creation - the difficult work has always happened earlier, in the thinking and the decisions that come before production begins:
What matters to an audience? Which problems deserve attention? What should a company be known for?
These questions have become more important, not less.
Because, as access to the same tools becomes universal, competitive advantage will come from the quality of judgement applied to them.
AI does not remove the need for discernment - if anything, it makes it more valuable.
In the Great Content Flood, discerning audiences will become increasingly conscious of - and selective about - whose ark they choose to step aboard.
And they won’t judge it by how quickly it was assembled, but by the confidence it inspires: the expertise behind it, the experience embedded within it… a reason to believe the person at the helm understands the waters ahead.
The challenge for businesses is not then how to create more. It’s how to decide what is worth creating in the first place, and how that creation is deserving of someone’s time, and trust.
This critical decision-making remains a profoundly human endeavour: lived-experience, accountability, conviction… skin in the game.
People are not looking for the fastest shipbuilders, but for trustworthy captains.
In other words: the real thing.
