Generative Advertising

Listening to an old-ish talk by Will Wright (Spore) and Brian Eno on generative systems - and their use for gaming and music - struck a chord (no pun intended there).

Eno describes the role of the artist to generate seeds - and rules for their growth - rather than perceiving and  composing great forests of work from the outset.

A lot of global advertising is formed from toolkits of assets. Assets are like seeds. Little building blocks of campaigns that local marketers can draw upon to put their campaigns together.

Similarly, a lot of social media campaigns are basically little bits of content being released into a system. We even talk about seeding.

The problem is that social media systems tend to be largely beyond the control of the marketer or agency. Pesky people in the real world tend to do their own thing with our little seeds.

Which is not what tends to happen with music or gaming - there are generative systems which are quite tightly controlled by the artist.

The second problem is that marketing toolkits and traditional rigid campaign design aren't generative systems. They are OK at distributing seeds but not very good at helping them grow and turn into something interesting.

So I think an emerging role for agencies (and I guess planners, from my own perspective) will be to design more controlled generative systems in the real world, to propagate their little creative seeds.

That's different from helping shape the growth of platforms organically (Russell Davies' old gardening analogy), because it requires more intent at the outset, and the creation of tight simple few rules that can govern the passage and evolution of our work in the real world.