AI tools are – for better or worse – infiltrating every step of the advertising journey, from creative and planning to execution and measurement.
At the same time, some consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical as they question the authenticity and human touch of the content they encounter.
“There is a lot of negative backlash against AI-generated content – and for good reason,” said Tammy Nam, CEO of AI-powered marketing platform The Brief, which rebranded from Creatopy last month.
“I was testing the Sora app the other day and after 15 minutes of scrolling through all these AI-generated videos, I felt like I wanted to take a shower,” Nam said. “It was just very obvious to me that there was no human element, no human context or taste that was integrated into it.”
By the same token, a tool is only as powerful as the person who wields it.
“To me, AI really is the great equalizer of our generation for many reasons,” Nam said. “One of those reasons is that it gives people the ability to really showcase their true ideas and taste.”
Nam spoke with AdExchanger about the recent rebrand and what AI’s accelerating influence means for the future of advertising.
AdExchanger: Why change your name from Creatopy to The Brief?
TAMMY NAM: “The Brief” represents something foundational about marketing itself: Every campaign starts with a brief.
The old name alludes to ad automation, which fits the history of the company. When I took over earlier this year as CEO, I took a step back to think about the challenges we’re really trying to solve.
Aside from the name change, what’s new now that you’ve become The Brief?
We built a new product – also called The Brief – that integrates AI agents throughout the entire experience and workflow. Within the product, we have four agents: Discover, Create, Launch and Optimize.
It mimics the roles that you would typically see in an agency, like the creative strategist, the campaign strategist, the designer, the media planner and the analyst.
The Discover agent allows people to do competitive research, including on ads that other brands are running, and get insights into creatives and performance.
With the Create agent, you can upload or generate an asset, and the AI helps you automate hundreds of variants.
Launch is coming out very soon. When it does, it will handle all back-end formatting and make recommendations about things like media strategy and allocation.
And the Optimize agent is like an analyst. You connect it to all of your ad exchanges and you can see how your ads are performing in real time.
A lot of consumers turn up their nose at the idea of AI-generated ads and commercials. How do you feel about that perspective?
I don’t disagree with them.
But if you have really creative ideas that you can translate using AI, you don’t have to have a background in the industry. You don’t need to have the skill set of an editor or even the budget to generate all of this content.
If you have the core foundation of what makes a human exceptional in this AI age, you can get to the end product very fast, even if you’re not a big company with a huge production budget. That’s what’s really great about it.
We’re in the very early stages, so there’s a lot of experimentation. The content that is really standing out has human elements and art built into it – and you can tell the difference.
But how do you reconcile those concerns with the way The Brief uses AI to generate creative?
We feed in so much information that’s relevant to a specific brand, like the logo and colors and tone, but also entire digital assets to create content that is very particular to the brand. On top of that, clients can edit specific things and fine-tune the output.
Let’s say your brand uses an illustration, like a cartoon. You can upload, say, 10 examples for reference and then generate new variations in various scenarios. It’s a really great example of how humans were responsible for the original idea and creating the brand concept, but the machine does the automation.
It’s an extraordinary time, and everything is changing. AI is accelerating the speed of business.
Fifty years ago, the life cycle of a business on the S&P 500 was 60 years. Today, it’s less than 20 years. My prediction is that within the next 10 years, it will be less than 10 years.
When people ask what keeps me up at night, it’s not competition; it’s the speed of business.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
