Artificial intelligence won’t be taking jobs from the ad industry — at least not yet

Just yesterday, the huge potential of AI was once again on display when Google’s DeepMind played the champion chess programme Stockfish 8 in 100 games. It went undefeated.

One of the industries that seems most enthusiastic about artificial intelligence is the digital advertising industry.

The excitement

Most people in the digital ad scene are excited about AI’s emergence, thinking it might be the single most important innovation changing the future of the industry.

One simple and practical use of AI on digital ads is detecting fraudulent ad clicks and removing ads conveying sexual or violent message based on the click patterns. In more advanced cases, AI can even turn real-time feedback into actionable campaign adjustments to help advertisers avoid unnecessary displays.

At first glance, the AI applications for digital ad are everywhere. For example, there are creative development, data management, dynamic personalisation, performance measurement and optimisation.

But, there are also limitations to the use of AI.

The myth

While it is undeniable that the massive adoption of AI may bring the entire industry to a higher level, the opinion that it may take jobs away is widespread as it becomes increasingly popular.

Nevertheless, this assumption may be only be partially correct.

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It is commonly believed that AI is capable of automating previously manual and time-consuming tasks, such as media buying and audience targeting. However, what it cannot replace is the emotional intelligence and strategic reasoning of human beings, which is the difficult task.

Campaign planning, creative designing, and copy producing are all the jobs that require advanced and complex thinking and involve an emotional element that is critical in stimulating desired actions. Even in applying today’s best technology, AI is still unable to produce a perfect and acceptable copy, not to mention a well-organized ad campaign.

Therefore, it’s a false myth and unnecessary overreaction to boycott AI.

The fact

Nowadays, there is more smoke than fire in the application of AI in the digital ad industry. It is often an empty catchphrase used to capture attention, or, cynically, it is a public relations stunt meant emphasise a company’s abilities in what amounts to a propaganda campaign.

Those cases oftentimes occur when third-party AI vendors claim they can completely solve a client’s problems in an effort to stifle the competition. The truth is, however, for AI products to work, they need to be tailored to the client’s specific use.

Simply put, the application of AI is the result of a program that receives the massive and intensive training through the use of machine learning.

There is no one-size-fits-all AI solution.

On the other hand, the term AI and machine learning are often misunderstood and are not interchangeable.

To be more clear, AI is the broad concept that feeds machines with correct data and develops abilities to finish tasks more efficiently. Machine learning is the training technique for AI that uses algorithms to process a great amount of data to make predictions.

The lesson

Despite the fact that AI is overly advertised for its outstanding competence, the current developments, while still helpful, are still limited in its ability to boost productivity.

For instance, ad performance calculation and multi-platform data integration still take a tremendous amount of time and effort to understand. Sure, those scenes that marketers spend entire days on spreadsheets and manually type calculation formulas may become a thing of past, but they aren’t yet.

Once work efficiency greatly increases, marketers will be able to better allocate their time for something more important and complicated, such as online-to-offline campaign integration. These usually require meticulous analysis and constant brainstorming.

Another unavoidable challenge, when embracing the power of AI, is the need for human supervision. One notable example is Tay, an AI chatbot released by Microsoft via Twitter.

Originally, Tay was designed to hold normal conversations with online users and further train its communication intelligence through the interaction with human users. However, some users tried to guide Tay by intentionally starting to tweet politically incorrect phrases or racist messages. Before long, Tay began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets.

Consequently, Microsoft learned this cruel lesson the hard way and suspended Tay only 16 hours after its launch.

Another hurdle is the premise is built on the correctness of the data imported. Any biased data, no matter how serious the extent is, would have huge influences on the results AI deduces.

The future

Over the short-term, AI won’t be taking away jobs. In addition, we can be certain that many intelligent tools will be built on AI and can expect them to gel with creative teams to produce more desirable results.

However, at some point in the future, complete automation powered by AI may be possible and the execution can be 100 percent robotic. Even in that future, there still exists the need for people to come up with strategies and supervise the AI’s work. Humans still play a paramount role in decision-making.

An AI can’t think humanly and no AI, even with the best algorithm in machine learning, will ever match the intuition of a human’s thought.

There is still a long way to go when it comes to AI’s complete displacement of human jobs.

The conclusion

Based on the thesis surveyed and experts interviewed, the impact of AI may remain limited at this moment. But, under no circumstance does it mean digital ad agencies can neglect the trend.

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What agencies should do instead is to boldly embrace AI and contemplate any other fields AI can be applied to. AI’s full potential will never be fully realised until agencies take more risks to experiment with technologies more aggressively.

For now, it is unnecessary to think that your job may be replaced with the emergence of AI. Improving yourself by continuously learning new skills that AI is incapable of replacing is more solid and practical.

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