Good reasons why Skinny’s clone Liz needed more than AI

There is a glimmer of good news for all those bright, talented creatives in the advertising industry who think artificial intelligence is going to steal their jobs.

A study by Australia’s Monash University on behalf of the advertising agency TBWA has found that human creative concepts always outperform generative AI creations.

Does that mean that Liz from Kerikeri should not have bothered handing over her biometric data to become the cloned frontwoman of those Skinny mobile tv commercials that proudly proclaim to be made with the help of AI? No, because the irritatingly obvious creations were the brainchild of real people and the use of AI was trumpeted by Skinny and its parent company Spark as a clever marketing ploy.

The Australian study was aimed at testing whether artificial intelligence could, in fact, replace creatives in dreaming up advertising ideas and slogans. The finding: AI consistently fails at creativity.

The Monash researchers took 1000 creative advertising campaigns and fed them into large language models (LLMs) that were first asked to strip the advertising messages down to single sentences. The cunning academics then fed the single sentence into the AI machines and asked them to create advertising campaigns.

TBWA Sydney chief creative officer Matt Keon told The Australian that the LLMs had quickly removed all of the creative elements while reducing the campaigns to single sentences and then consistently failed to produce such elements in their recreations of the campaigns. Continue reading “Good reasons why Skinny’s clone Liz needed more than AI” →

Some welcome good news on newspaper front…not for all

It is too early to put money on it, but there are signs New Zealand metropolitan newspaper readership may be stabilising.

The latest Nielsen survey shows most metropolitan newspapers have held their own year-on-year and some have actually improved their numbers. The outlier is the largest of our newspapers, The New Zealand Herald, which has dropped 10,000 readers to now stand at 503,000.

The most impressive performer is The Post. The capital’s daily has increased readership by almost as much as the Herald dropped – up over nine per cent from 93,000 to 112,000. Its Stuff stablemate, the Waikato Times has been even more impressive in percentage terms. Its readership grew by more than 12 per cent to stand at 55,000. The Press in Christchurch (90,000) and the Otago Daily Times (87,000) were relatively stable year-on-year, although both experienced small declines from the previous quarter.

The weekly coverage by all metro dailies is up 36,000 to 1.55 million.

In the Sunday market, the Herald on Sunday dropped 3000 year-on-year to stand at 308,000 readers. However, Stuff will be pleased with the Sunday Star Times which upped its numbers from 178,000 to 191,000 (a 7.3 per cent rise). Overall, therefore, the Sunday readership is also improving.

Remember, these are readers of the respective newspapers and does not include the digital audience that I will come to shortly. The Nielsen figures measure the number of people who read [Newspaper] in the issue period. They show there is yet life in print editions, although we must not get carried away by the smell of newsprint and printing ink. Continue reading “Some welcome good news on newspaper front…not for all” →

BBC’s response to Trump must be ‘We fight…We fight like hell’

It was as obvious as hair dye and fake tan: Donald Trump was always going to sue the BBC, irrespective of whether the broadcaster made a grovelling apology for its astonishingly stupid video editing of a speech delivered shortly before the Capitol was stormed.

Even a plausible offer of compensation – had it been made – would have been insufficient to stay the hand of the man who has already caused immense harm to the public broadcasters of his own country and who has sued American media for billions. The opportunity to strike what he hopes is an existential blow against the progenitor of public broadcasting was irresistible.

There was, therefore, no surprise in his announcement on Saturday that he will sue the BBC for between $US1 billion and $US 5 billion over the clip in a 2024 Panorama programme. I doubt it is a coincidence that $US5 billion almost matches the income the BBC will receive this financial year from public licence fees (the bulk of its annual income) or that $1 billion is the annual corporate cost of running the public broadcaster. Continue reading “BBC’s response to Trump must be ‘We fight…We fight like hell’” →