MarketPlace

Thinking patterns of award winning adverts revealed

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A man watches TV at home. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Those among us who use wits to move ahead have the most to lose from artificial intelligence (AI) while the less endowed see it as heaven coming down to earth.

The bright sparks are on the extreme right in this case because the status quo separates them from the masses and puts them on the proverbial pedestal of society — the corner office.

However, the natural order of things sees sluggish minds being the first to be replaced by AI as capabilities of machine learning improve.

Those at the top still have time before these digital beasts take their place at the summit of the corporate ladder; but the end is nigh.

Ad agency chiefs tell me that they are just about ready to replace their media teams with machines.

“Throw your media brief into the thing,” they say, “and it churns out very intelligent media plans; it can even do the buying and reporting. It doesn’t talk back to you, or report sick on Monday mornings, or get drunk at the Christmas party.”

Depending on the cost of the software licence, it should offer attractive savings for any bean counter and these savings are bound to grow over time, thrilling the shareholders.

As often there are personality conflicts between the creative teams and everyone else in the agency, the art directors and copywriters have been having a good laugh at the expense of their media counterparts. Until now.

Mindscapes is an organisation that is able to define the thinking patterns behind the top ads and they’ve constructed a training programme to aid the efforts of creative teams.

Some of their alumni have gone on to win Cannes Lions and the ultimate Cannes Grand Prix, which are the highest accolades that an ad could win besides long term, lucrative contracts.

The Mindscapes training programme has been brought to Kenya courtesy of the International School of Advertising (ISA) which aims to improve advertising standards in the country from the grassroots up.

By offering this programme they hope to reduce the number of trips to the kitchen during commercial breaks or the cracked tablet screens suffered from over-tapping the “skip ad” icon on YouTube.

If you are a creative and your formula for developing award winning ads is a night out binge drinking and smoking everything that lights up, save yourself the heart attack and look into this programme because it might just save your life, and your job.

The Mindscape team has cracked into the blackbox of creativity and exposed the structured thinking patterns that occur in the process of developing creative concepts and storytelling.

It also covers the opportunities that are created by new media and the other fandangled methods of marketing communications that are being conjured up everyday.

Look back 3,000 years when the first mathematical concepts were being recorded, which can now be simply solved by a basic calculator, and realise that machine learning only works once the thinking structure is dissected.

The last laugh might be reserved for those media strategists who lost their jobs and now serve kiddie meals at KFC, when their creative counterparts eventually join them behind the counter. The only advice one could offer now is for quick movements up the art department structure to buy yourself some valuable time.