AI is an ally, not a replacement for creators: Deloitte Digital's Kenny Gold

Rather than replacing creators, artificial intelligence (AI) should be seen as a valuable tool to expedite and enhance their creative processes, enabling them to bring their work to market more efficiently, Kenny Gold, Head of Social, Content and Influencer, Deloitte Digital, said at Cannes Lions 2023. 

During a session, named ‘Future Gazers: Brands and Creators Partnerships, The Rise of Global Communities, Sound & Music for Brand Engagement’, at Cannes Lions 2023, Gold, Maatin Adewunmi, Co-founder, Loud Parade; Jennifer DelVecchio, Senior Director, Global Content and Culture, McDonald's, and Chris Duffey, Strategic Development Director, Adobe, painted a picture of the world almost 18 months from now and emphasised on what’s a fad, what’s sticking around and what is yet to come and shake the industry.

The industry experts spoke about the trends and movements that are on the horizon. 

Commenting on how brands and content creators can work together on co-creation, Gold said, “We need to pay the creator economy well. We want to give creators the tools to have an easier time doing that creation. AI is not going to replace creators, it is only going to help them go to market quicker, better, smarter and help them manage their businesses. We as marketers, brands and agencies need to support the creator economy because they are going to support us tenfold and we need to just give them the tools to do what they need to do.” 

DelVecchio said, “At McDonald's we have the good fortune of being one of the strongest and most viable brands in the world. So, we ensure what we bring to co-creating is a strong sense of who we are, our brand voice, what matters to us and a lot of courage, a willingness to let go a little bit and identifying partners who bring something unique to the brand and we can trust to make it their own while still being ours because the McDonald's brand belongs to our fans. So, sharing it with them to create the best work is the way that we have been growing the brand in the last couple of years.”

Speaking about how Adewunmi navigates this landscape from a musical perspective, he said that when it comes to music, it's all about being creative. Content creators should be given higher parameters, which a lot of brands want to control but that is not going to get them the best work. 

Speaking about AI's role in the creative process, Duffey said that it's not going to ever take away human creativity. 

“I think we have seen it advance from being a creative assistant to a more active co-pilot to riff off the notion of co-creation but also co-piloting. It's really ushering in these new opportunities from condensing the margin between ideation and execution, which is quite interesting, and surfacing a number of opportunities in terms of the craft. Quite often, we celebrated craft and we will always celebrate craft but now there is a new trait within craft and that is prompt engineering. In many ways, Gen AI specifically is ushering this idea of the acceptable moving to the exceptional and I think we will be able to, as an industry, move there very quickly because of Gen AI,” he added. 

Gold said, "As we look towards the future, we are thinking about this in three ways. The first trend is around connectivity, second is around discoverability and the third is around co-creation. Connectivity is about building better branded communities and connecting the consumer experience across everything that a consumer would do on social media. So, brands that are highly active on social media are four and a half times more likely to connect their marketing efforts with their customer care efforts but when we talk to marketers, only 10% are piloting customer care as a part of their social activities. So, we see a trend in the next 18 months that the best marketers are going to start connecting those two things to make sure that the customer experience is as seamless as possible."

The second thing is around discoverability. Around 55% of customers are using social media for search. According to a recent article, Gen Z is more likely to go to social media to discover something than the traditional search engine, Gold said. 

He added, “This means we have to be thinking about social search engine optimisation. Culture is built from the middle out and it's no longer brands dictating culture. Culture is being born out of the communities that we are all a part of and that's important as marketers for us to strategise in that way. We should be listening to our customers, understanding what's important to them, diving into it and ensuring that our content is being built out of that momentum from the middle out. Then finally, comes co-creation. The Deloitte Digital Media Trends for 2023 showed us that 63% of Gen Z are more likely to trust a brand if a creator they trust has reviewed a product. We are officially in the era of co-creation and it is the future of what all we do is going to be bringing in. It's no longer about just telling a creator to go out there and post something on their behalf but you want to bring creators in from the beginning.”

“As they think about the future of the creator economy and how brands and marketers are going to better reach their audiences, they want to lean into co-creation because it will drive the trust that is paramount as part of the consumer experience,” Gold added. 

Adewunmi said that everyone knows how important music and sound can be. The same song can induce different emotions within different people. So, you can have one song which makes someone feel happy, someone feel sad, someone feel like they are in love. Music has such a big importance in people's life experiences but unfortunately, brands aren't giving sound and music that same level of love. 

Furthermore, he stated brands are spending millions on their visual logos, but not so much on their sonic logos. And this is despite sonic logos at times being iconic. 

“A commercial logo is good for a visual representation of the brand but for a sonic logo, it's how you build that emotional connection with that brand. Whenever you hear a familiar piece of sound, that is when dopamine is released, which is the pleasure chemical in your brain and that is how relationships are built. Now, brands are fortunately starting to realise how music has become much more important. TikTok is the fastest-growing platform currently and it holds the attention of most of Gen Z but as compared to other platforms, it is actually sound-on,” Adewunmi said. 

“As many as 88% of TikTok users say that sound is important for the over-experience and 68% of users say that they remember brands better with music. Now when it comes to musical brand engagement, there are two ways to go about it. You can use licensed tracks, which brands do quite a lot. Then you also have bespoke tracks. Now, this can be good for engagement because when you use bespoke tracks, it can be specific to that brand campaign. It's more nuanced and can fit that brand attribute. Moreover, it's cheaper. So, both bespoke tracks and licensed tracks can be good for brand engagement. It just depends on what the aim of that campaign is,” he added. 

DelVecchio said that McDonald's welcomes 65 million people into 41,000 restaurants in 117 countries around the world every single day. It is much more than a physical space, and the future is looking different but interesting for them. 

“The future of communities are being shaped by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and they are the most global generation ever. It's great to know what's happening in communities but the question is, what can brands do about it? At McDonald's we talk about three things. One is about embracing cultural convergence. Culture does not live in silos and neither should your approach to connecting with communities. In 18 months, having a gaming strategy or a music strategy or a sports strategy will be obsolete. The brands that will win with fans will be those that embrace the intersection across culture and connect directly with a consumer who is increasingly diverse in their interests and also intentionally exploratory across new things,” DelVecchio stated. 

Furthermore, she added that the second thing is meet or make moments. This is again an audience that is constantly being bombarded by new and interesting information. Meeting communities through the content they love, on the platforms where they spend their time, is a surefire way to connect with them. 

“Number three, start with ideas and not with IP. The era of associative marketing is over. We live in a creative economy where the best ideas win and increasingly those ideas are not coming from brands, they are coming from the community themselves. To be part of this creative community, we need, as marketers, to adapt a designer's mindset. Rather than come into a collaboration with creators and partners with a no-but attitude, take a yes-and attitude to really look through the mundane and the ordinary to identify big creative sparks that others might overlook and take big creative swings together,” she said. 

Duffey spoke about how Gen AI is an inescapable thing at the moment and every other conversation is all about Gen AI today. 

"At Adobe, we are quite excited to launch our new product called Firefly. It is the fastest growing tool in the history of Adobe. Within two months, we have generated over a quarter of a billion images and that is an example of just how much excitement there is around Gen AI," Duffey said. 

"I am here to build a case for how AI is not going to take away creativity. We like to think of Gen AI in three ways, specifically to Firefly. The first one is, it is ethically sourced which means it is coming from commercial grade sources within Adobe stock. The second layer down is, if Adobe is all about celebrating creativity and creators, how can we monetise the source? So, within this model, Firefly is not only pulling from source stock images but it is also monetising the creators and the contributors. The last level is more on an industry-wide consortium standpoint. We've recently launched the Content Authenticity Initiative and that is composed of about 600 industry companies, whether it be software, hardware or channels and that is not only allowing for traceability for the content but also measurability of the content," he added.