Alan Schulman's recent "Algorhithmic Creative — A Formula For Feeling?" article warns against the promise of algorithmically-generated ad ideas, copyrighting, and design. It makes sense for a paid "creative person" to fear a trend that may cost him his job, but I'm not sure his Skynet prognostications are a bad thing.

First off, the whole "ads are emotional, and emotions are too complex for a computer" argument is more honestly phrased as "I can't even begin to imagine how it would be done, and I'm the smartest person I know, therefore it's not possible." This attitude is great for the stage magician industry but bad bad bad for entrepreneurs and business in general. In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers cite a study where ignorant test subjects armed with a handful of common ad templates created successful ads. Sooo... pretty complex stuff, huh? It's time to face the music: when a knowledge work task can be Taylorized, it's ripe for algorithmic substitution.

Consider also Scott French's computer-written romance novel or the Turing bots that are sometimes used to advertise products on chat clients. That's pretty emotional stuff, no? The Internet only increases the potential for these projects: throw in some split testing on volume and you can refine your algorithm and isolate relevant contextual and audience variables.

What is perhaps more frightening to ad agency "creatives" is the possibility that the old ad paradigms that did so well for newspapers and television will be anachronistic in the AdSense age. Forget trying to teach a computer to envision silhouetted dancers on colorful backgrounds, perhaps the whole game is changing and million dollar superbowl spots are less valuable than a good recommendation on Amazon or a similar shopping service.

While we're killing traditional media, let's take the banners out back and shoot them too. Check out vnunet's review of Forrester's recent report on the failure of traditional ads to engage social media audiences. All media's going social so all traditional advertising needs to go.

While agencies are being squeezed from below by algorithms, Guy and Seth continue to harp on the fact that a great ad can't sell a bad product. Should a company's "creative" resources really focus on a couple of jaded Madison Ave copywriters' ability to shill the product? Isn't that energy better spent on the product itself? Years ago, during my agency days, I remember a hue and cry within the industry for advertisers to take on a more "strategic" role, but it's still a rarity, and the vnunet article (published last week) includes a statement from Blast Radius's Gurval Caer that "marketing needs to 'turn itself on its head' with a much greater focus on building relationships that will make people's lives 'easier, better and richer'." Really? So people should hire a third party agency to build relationships with their customers? Hmm...

I'm thinking about all of this after seeing Chris Fahey give a great presentation on the nature of creativity and the pseudo scientific "processes" that surround it. He has a nice quote from a Pentagram partner basically saying "I make something up out of nowhere, then try to convince you that it is the result of a process." So on the one hand there's these creatives saying that even they don't know what's in the secret sauce, but on the other hand, I've heard a philosopher's elegy for the death of his vocation, roadkill in the grille of biological innovation.

I look forward to advertising's race to the bottom. For all it's emotional paint, advertising "creative" is really just an effort to get products into the hands of consumers, in exchange for cash. Loyalty, relationships, etc., are all just fancy words for more cash, again and again, at lower cost. Traditional marketing and advertising is really just an effort to create market inefficiencies (misinformation about a product's value and availability), so audiences will be fooled into choosing a product. As the Internet strips away these inefficiencies and advertising becomes a solved problem, we can look forward to a renewed focus on real product value. When audiences can't be fooled, all that "creative" energy will have to be channeled into better products and services, and we'll all be better off.