How AI
Makes Brand Personalities Come to Life
Artificial
intelligence (AI) is reinventing the creative landscape for marketers. One big
leap: Brands are no longer merely seen as objects, but entities with
personalities that can interact dynamically with people, according to Winston
Binch, chief digital officer for Deutsch North America, the ad agency behind
Taco Bell’s award-winning taco-ordering chatbot, the Tacobot. Binch spoke to
Catharine Hays, executive director of the Wharton Future of Advertising
Program, on the Marketing Matters show, which airs on Wharton
Business Radio, SiriusXM channel 111.
An edited transcript of the conversation
follows.
Catherine Hays: You
are one of the true leaders in this space between AI and creativity. You’ve
done some iconic campaigns for Taco Bell and earned 41 Cannes Lions Awards. In
2016, you were named among the “Most Indispensible Executives in Marketing,
Media and Tech” by Adweek. Tell us about Great Machine, the AI
division you’ve created.
Winston Binch: The
first thing I’ll say is that I’m not an expert. I consider myself an explorer
of sorts. AI is one of the most exciting things to come around in a long time.
It’s just an incredible canvas for creativity and brand storytelling.
Hays: You were the chief
creative officer before becoming chief digital officer, correct?
Binch: No, I’ve actually
had this title for quite a long time. It’s funny because it’s 2017 and we still
use “digital” when everything is digital. But what it means is that I generally
focus on everything that doesn’t look like a TV ad. My role is focused on
driving innovation and invention on behalf of the agency and our brands, our
clients.
AI is still in the very early days for brands. The field of research
was started in 1956. If you look at the investments that Facebook, Amazon and
Microsoft have been making for years now, it’s not new. But we’re just at the
cusp of really interesting things starting to happen for brands. As we looked
around, we saw a lot of people in the agency space talking about the power of
AI in terms of predictive analytics or creating smarter media. Those things are
going to be really huge.
In fact, I think we’ll see AI impact media more than anything. I
think you are really seeing us now with voice from a brand perspective. There’s
over 10 million Alexas (digital assistants) out there. From a brand
perspective, we have to start thinking about brands not as these objects but
more as humans and entities that you interact with and have conversations with.
To me and to our team, that felt amazing in the sense that we can now create
content that really, truly interacts dynamically with customers.
Hays: Doesn’t that scare
people? It’s not human, it’s a machine. I think that people are a little bit
freaked out about that. Do you see that changing quickly, or do you still see
that as an issue?
Binch: It’s a great question. I
am in the [Tesla CEO] Elon Musk camp that we need ethics and rules applied to
technology and AI. We out-innovate policy, so I am concerned about those things
longer term. But in the short term, let’s be honest, people want things done
immediately. If it’s easy, if it makes their life markedly better, they seem to
be OK with these technology advances.
I believe that if you’re a great writer, there’s lots of
opportunity for you in the near future. The reality is that AI is just numbers
in code. We still need humanity applied to it to make it truly engaging. So,
the robots are coming. Maybe the future is a comedian and a robot together.
Hays: Can you give us an
example of that?
Binch: We’re trying to push it. We’ve done work with Taco
Bell. We created Tacobot that lets you order tacos,
and it was done through natural language. It was a beta release. It really had
a ton of personality to it. I think that was a good early first example. But
there are others. There’s Poncho, which is a weather bot.
One of my favorite cases of the last couple
years has been ING’s
Next Rembrandt, which is an application to create an
entirely new Rembrandt painting using AI. ING is trying to prove that they’re
innovative. It was an experiment done with Microsoft. They scanned over 360
Rembrandts and were able to create an entirely new one using machine learning.
It’s one of those things where it does unnerve you a little bit.
You start to realize the power of computing. It is what Elon Musk talks about (that
future AI robots might be capable of destroying society). In the way distant
future, we could be reduced to cats. When I think about the power of these
technologies, they can function like the best advertising, which is to
emotionally connect. But it’s not disposable. You can have long-term
conversations with your customers. You can learn more about them. This
technology gets smarter. Beyond just the engagement opportunity, you can also
drive the bottom line-sales. I think Tacobot is an example of that, where it is
engagement but also a commerce tool.
Hays: From a designer
perspective, we’ve talked for many years about how to make your interface
between people and brands seamless in whatever way they connect. It seems like
bots have the possibility of being the best customer service agents one could
hope for.
Binch: It’s really
interesting because we think about AI and robots replacing the workforce, but
if you’re a writer, it’s a great time. If you’re a user-experience designer,
this is like a renaissance because UX people have been stuck designing mobile
apps and websites since the beginning. But now, we move into this voice and
conversational space, which is completely a new frontier.
For people who are studying philosophy and ethics, there’s a
whole other new kind of movement called ethical engineering. A lot of these big
tech companies are going to need to bring in people who truly understand ethics
and policy and humanity. I think there are going to be some new jobs that
emerge.
For creative agencies, it’s an awesome time to innovate your
creative product.… We did what I called crude versions of AI back with Burger
King. There was an advertising program called Subservient Chicken where you
could type in commands [to be carried out by a person dressed as a chicken],
but it took a long time to build. Now, you can get a bot up in a couple of
weeks. You can really innovate quickly.
Hays: Can you tell us the
different ways that AI is coming to life? It seems you have a good ecosystem
for thinking about this within Great Machine.
Binch: Most people are
working on bots right now. Bots are conversational interfaces, but the Internet
of Things area around voice is where we’re seeing an explosion of new ideas.
What I recommend is look up the “best of Alexa skills” online and you’ll see
that there’s a ton. There is “This Day in History” from the History Channel;
there’s “Bedtime Stories You Have Read.”
With the launch of Amazon’s Echo Show (an audio and video device controlled by
Alexa) where it’s going to be voice with a visual interface, it’s a really
amazing time. I feel like voice is the new frontier. We are going to be much
less reliant on laptops and keyboards for search. Now is the time for brands to
really start experimenting because this is going to move fast.
Hays: There’s a lot that
we can learn through voice. For brands that really want to tailor what they’re
doing and contextualize it to the individual, voice tells us a lot. Can you
expand on that?
Binch: Well, it definitely
does. I was at the ANA Digital and Social Media Conference, and Lucas Watson, a
colleague of mine who is the CMO at Intuit, did an amazing talk on AI and how
it’s going to impact their business. What I was really taken by was that he was
talking about brand strategy and introduced this new concept of brand humanity.
He brought up the Myers-Briggs [personality] test and that we have to start
applying that logic to the brands themselves.
If you put your own brand through the test, what kind of
personality would it have? [For] most of the bots that exist out there and in
AI, it’s very command based. They don’t engage in true conversations. To
generate real, collaborative discussions and conversations with customers, we
have to have a personality. We have to stand for something. You have to be a
cool, interesting and useful friend, basically.… The old rules of storytelling
in creativity still apply: Do something that gets my attention. Be super-useful
or entertaining or both. Those are the same lessons and principles we need to
apply in this new AI economy.
Hays: How does purpose
come into play … when humanizing AI and brands?
Binch: I am a huge
believer in strategy. You’ve got to start with purpose. Why your brand? Why
this product? I think that what we are starting to do with some of our clients
is really ask these questions. How do we translate purpose to a brand
personality that is going to manifest itself through an experience? We’re working
on a couple of projects now with brands, and I don’t have the answer yet, to be
honest. This is all a work-in-progress.
What we learned through Tacobot was really interesting. Tacobot
is such a defined personality already. [Taco Bell is] about igniting the
unexpected. They’re surprising, fun, really social. So, it was somewhat easy
for us in Taco Bell to write that character. The bigger challenge is when we
work with brands that still maybe don’t know who they are. It goes back to the
fundamentals. You’re not going to get to personality without the purpose.
Hays: What advice do you
have for marketers in terms of considering AI and working with agencies in this
space?
Binch: [With our clients,]
we start with a workshop. We start with the fundamentals. AI is so vast.
Machine learning is looking at the landscape and getting a sense of that, then
it’s unpacking the business problems and working with the brand of a client to
understand whether there is a problem that potentially AI can solve. The good
thing … is you can learn fast. Throw a business problem out there, get to a
stack of ideas really quickly … and start experimenting. It’s really that
simple.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ai-and-consumers/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-09-07
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