‘Intoxification,’ control, and the future: Marketers must assert our agency

The answer connects to fundamental questions about the role humans will have in society, as well as our role as agencies.

This is neither yet another angst-ridden tale of our dystopian future, nor is it a ‘drink the cool-aid’ piece on how AI is the answer to everything. It’s a rallying cry for us agency folk to remember the agency we have.

‘Agency’ in this context means to have control over your actions and their consequences. That’s what we agencies are in danger of losing: the ownership of our own destinies and those of our clients.

Technology is a huge enabler and efficiency driver, but it’s not a solution itself. In fact, it’s because of this huge revolution that our strategic, creative, and technological critical thinking is more important than ever. Here are three reasons why.

1. Infotoxification

According to a quote sometimes attributed to Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, “too much information is no information.” We’re in the era of the soundbite and the meme; attention deficit is rife and we are able to source or create a bewildering level of information, data and insights. Technology has helped us do that and AI tools like machine learning are accelerating it. It has never been easier to generate content, but it’s becoming harder to distinguish between what’s true and what’s false, what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant.

AI can help us create insights from data too. Look at what the likes of Microsoft’s data visualization software Power BI or Polymer can produce.

In this context, our expertise in interpreting data, AI-produced insights and content become human super-skills. Our ability to assess the quality and relevance of information, identify and sift for biases, and (most importantly) add our original strategic, creative and technological thinking and ideas – that’s what makes us human.

2. Bursting the filter bubbles

As the volume of information and data available increases exponentially, so does the risk of AI technologies inadvertently perpetuating (and amplifying) biases.

And, with a tech-led approach, we run the risk of intensifying our own echo chambers and supercharging confirmation bias.

Take Google AdWords. Biases in search engine ad algorithms have been proven to reinforce job role gender bias. Independent research at Carnegie Mellon University revealed that Google’s AdWords system frequently displayed high-paying positions to males more often than to women.

This not only detrimental to attempts to break down biases and stereotyping; it can make it even more challenging to find fundamentally new or innovative solutions or more radical ideas.

That’s where we come in. Agency folk should be interrogating, questioning, and challenging AI and machine outputs, data, and insights. A great agency should have widely different perspectives to bring to bear on a brief. That’s how we unearth new ideas.

We should have the agency to challenge the status quo, to hire the unusual, to propose the alternative. This is where polymaths can add richness and a variety of views which are divergent from ‘the expert’ – whether that expert is human or machine.

3. The power of good, original creative ideas

Creativity is a unique human trait. It cannot be fully replaced by AI or other technologies. So far, AI-generated literature or art is not exactly thought-provoking or inspiring. It’s bland, formulaic, and predictable. The machines will get better of course, but they won’t replace us (suspending the wider existential threat for the moment).

AI can do some of the heavy lifting: visualizing ideas, early prototyping, large-volume asset production, rendering, and copy variants. Midjourney and many other generative AI platforms are doing that and more without breaking sweat. But good ideas are worth their weight in gold, and require a unique combination of critical thinking, problem-solving, insight, leftfield thinking, and braveness – all with a sprinkling of magic over the top. It’s not a science or art. It’s science AND art. And we agency folk, with brave, ambitious clients, can be the difference.

As scholar Edward De Bono said, “There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.”

Repeating the same patterns might not be the end of the world, but who wants to live in a reductive, repetitive and homogenous world, let alone work in an agency that helps build it?