[upbeat music] This episode of the Rebooting show is brought to you by KERV Interactive. KERV is an AI-powered video creative technology that creates shoppable and immersive experiences within any video content.
KERV's the only platform that uses machine learning techniques and AI to recognize depth, dimension, and objects within any video in real time, and more accurately than the human eye.
Using this technology, KERV can deliver simplified, automated consumer-first experiences that are dynamic and interactive.
Recently, KERV launched the KERV Active Attention Index, which measures the quality of deterministic user actions as they engage with KERV-powered videos.
That means you can qualify user attention based on the time spent and the quantity of interactions across a video creative.
So what this means is agencies, brands, and publishers can better inform their media buying strategies. They can have smarter in-flight creative optimization, deeper content analysis, and improved user experiences.
You can learn more about the Active Intention Index and download the free guide by visiting KERV.ai. That is K-E-R-V.ai or request more information at attention@kerv.ai.
That's actually an email address, so you would have to send an email to that. Thank you, KERV. [upbeat music] We have a play don't publish system because- Yeah...
there's too many questions around the intellectual property of those images. So- Yeah. How are you using them? I look at that as like, nobody's gonna sue me. You don't have lawyers. Nobody's gonna sue me.
[laughs] You're not working on brands. They're gonna sue someone else before they sue me.
It doesn't- [upbeat music]
Welcome to the Rebooting show, Riviera Edition. I'm Brian Morrissey. Today, we wrapped up the final day of the New Attention Economy, presented by KERV Interactive.
The mayor of Cannes did not shut us down, as it turns out. We had a great event over the last three days, and we had something like thirty speakers.
I wanna thank KERV for their support of the event, as well as this daily podcast and the companion daily newsletter that I hope you're getting and reading. I think it's enjoyable.
We also last night hosted a dinner with top executives from media companies like Bloomberg, TikTok, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Vivo, and the Financial Times.
It was a great evening at a unique restaurant in the fragrant hills above Cannes. This is a really difficult assignment I've pulled for myself, so it's really difficult to complain that much.
The conversation was all off the record, but a couple takeaways that I had was that, you know, many are taking a wait and see approach to AI's impact, and the big concern is how Google will implement what its generative search experience will be like.
ChatGPT gets all the headlines, but Google's a nerve center of publishing, and changing the main avenue for digital media is gonna be disruptive.
I mean, that is what is happening here in Cannes, where the main road along the beach where the fancy hotels are, which is called the Croisette, is under construction. So make what you want of that metaphor.
And that was the focus of this podcast, right? Because I had, you know, the final session for this was a discussion about AI and creativity.
And to do so, I had Ray Enomoto of &CO and Myron Nussbaum, chief creative officer and president of Favas. And they both, like, assess the impact that AI will have on the creative fields.
And I think what's comes through in this conversation is that both aren't quite yet-- aren't quite ready to proclaim a revolution.
And I think underlying that is the fact that when people talk about AI and creative output, what I notice is they quickly start talking about efficiency. And efficiency is always a...
it's a word used instead of cheap, okay? And AI obviously is going to create what Peter Kafka on this podcast called a tsunami of crap.
I think one of the things that I've noticed is that a few people are saying that AI at this moment is creating better content, right?
So I've used ChatGPT a lot of times, and maybe I'm overrating my abilities as a writer, but I am singularly unimpressed by the listicles that is-- that are produced by ChatGPT.
That's not to say it doesn't have use, and, you know, Ray talks about it in this podcast.
Using it in brainstorming, using it for versioning, using it for some, like, lower level stuff, I think is absolutely everyone is going to be using AI.
And if anyone wants to, quote unquote, "future-proof" themselves, I think it would be good to really understand these tools and understand how you can use them in order to scale yourself, so to speak.
But the idea that AI is going to replace humans, you know, on a large basis in many of these fields, I am still not ready to get on board with that.
I just haven't yet seen it in the output of these tools, and particularly with all of the legal challenges and the regulatory challenges to it. I've yet to see that this is going to be a replacement, okay?
And I think maybe it's just because over the years I'd heard about technologies replacing humans too many times. I mean, programmatic was supposed to replace media buyers and sellers.
And let me tell you, there are just as many, if not more, media buyers and sellers than there were before programmatic. So we'll see if this is going to be completely different this time.
But I think, like, taking that sort of wait and see approach and figuring out the tools and how you can use them yourself is probably the best approach at this point. But I know how we go to doom and gloom very often.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I hope you've enjoyed the conversations that we've been bringing you all week.
This is the first time I've been publishing so many podcasts, so hopefully it's not, like, overwhelming. But would love your feedback. My email is brian@therebooting.com. [upbeat music]Okay, this is it.
This is the final session- Okay... of the New Attention Economy- Whoop, whoop... the Curve Café. And we're gonna talk about attention and creativity. Uh, I think it's a fitting way to end this.
We're, like, across from the Palais, and I know Ray from, like, years, like, you know- Long time ago... having- Long time ago. Yeah... I, I used to see you in the Palais, like, regular.
I saw you talk there plenty of times. And, you know, this festival has changed so much, and I think I first came in two thousand and seven. Mm. And I know I'm dating myself a little bit, but I was only- Old school.
I was thirteen- [laughs]... and it was a school trip. But back then, I remember Microsoft had that, right there, that placement on the Palais, and it was, like, a little scandalous. It was like, "Oh, no.
What are these technology companies coming here?" First it was the clients- Oh, right, right, right...
and then it was the media agency people, and now it's the technology companies, and this thing has completely changed.
And so AI is a new technology change that is arriving at a strange time in that I feel like most technology paradigm shifts are greeted with unbridled enthusiasm over the years.
I mean, nobody asks hard questions about social media. They're like, "This is amazing. We're gonna connect with everyone in the world. What could go wrong?"
[laughs] That's different this time around because it's, it-- because we've been telling ourselves these stories for generations about machines replacing humans. Do you have an optimistic view of this, Mara?
That is [laughs] the hardest question to answer- We have a half hour... with brevity. Plenty of time. I mean, we could just talk about that- Yeah, that's the panel... for thirty minutes.
I think it's smart to have a mixture of optimism and skepticism and fear, potentially, because I think it, unlike... I'm glad you brought up the social media platforms.
This unbridled enthusiasm without understanding the repercussions or the threats has gotten us into a very complicated world that we're trying to detangle, and it's amazing.
Like, I never predicted that those platform founders would be in front of our, you know, legal system. [laughs] Like, so, you know, televised, like, seeing people interrogated about the integrity.
You know, maybe they should have done that to begin with- Exactly... as opposed to a year-- till after. Yeah, that's fair. Uh, by the way, I didn't introduce everyone. No, this is Mara Nussbaum- [laughs]...
with Havas, and Ray- Yes... Inamoto of-- God, I'm sorry. Good job. Good job, Ryan. I know. Well, it is my, like, fifteenth session, if I could make an excuse. [laughs] Yes. But- Forgiven... it's still not- Yes...
it's still not an excuse. It's a moderator fail. It's, like, one job to do- [laughs]... and I, I failed to do it. No. But let's just forget that ever happened. Ray, talk to me about, like, why AI isn't a threat.
Isn't a threat? Yeah. So to back up a little bit, your question, you know, am I an optimist or a pessimist- Yeah... about AI, I would say seventy-- sixty, seventy percent optimist, thirty, forty percent pessimist.
Sixty, seventy percent optimist because I think it will drastically increase efficiency. It will drastically increase the amount of output that you can create, especially as a creative.
And having played with a few different AI technologies and AI tools, just the speed and the level of output that you can produce now versus, like, literally six month ago is drastically different. But, like, how much?
Like, what, what percentage do you- Oh, I, I can give you a very specific, uh, example.
It's not me, but I was talking to a, a friend of mine who's an agency owner, and she's a creative director, and typically she and her team would take anywhere between four to six to eight weeks to go from brief to presenting to client, and she would have a, a team of designers and creatives to be working on it all the time for at least four to six weeks or so.
This case, she used, uh, Midjourney to produce comps, and it was just her, and she did it in five days. So it went from, say, five weeks to five days, and that's a real, um, example that I can cite that I think is...
Sure, I mean, some people might see it as a threat- Well-... but I see it- I know who would see it as a threat, the ten people who are involved. [laughs] You just eliminated ten people. No.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, no, they're doing- No, hear me out. Hear me out... high-level work. Okay.
[gentle music] No, no, no, because- [laughs]...
no, the other way to look at it is that those people could do a similar type of work times ten, right? So they don't have to be sitting around and waiting for somebody to tell them what to do.
They could be producing, like, ten times as much work. Okay, so- That's the way that I would look at it... let's play this out. Yes. If everyone is creating ten times as much work- Yeah...
and nobody loses their job- [laughs] You're shaking... I mean, we're-- like, that, that- No, no, no, no, I think, I think some people would do- It's a lot of clutter... lose their jobs. That's a lot of stuff.
It's a lot of clutter. No, no, I didn't say they were, they were all good stuff. [laughs] You know? It, it-- I think it will also increase the amount of just mediocre stuff. Yes. Yeah. Nick Law said that- Yeah, yeah...
in a great talk on that.I, I will say that- I, I didn't say it w-it will produce better stuff, you know?
The enthusiasm for using AI tools in creativity, I notice is mostly [chuckles] coming from people who are, like, in, like, the financial function or the business function- Yeah... and not in the creative function.
I think it's- Yeah... easy to say that it's because the, you know, the creatives are threatened or anything like this. Or an alternative explanation is the creatives know good from crap. Right. Yeah.
[chuckles] And a lot of what is being produced right now by AI is crap. Yes.
Like, I mean, I just like-- I-- When people, like, tell me, like, ChatGPT can do this or that, like, I'm sorry, objectively, as someone who writes for a living, like, [chuckles] it cannot. Yeah.
Like, it is really not that good.
But that's why I think there's optimism and there's fun, and it's like a, it's a new tool that's extremely powerful, ten times more powerful than any version of Photoshop updates we've ever gotten. Yeah.
So it's fun, and I think people that are experimenting with it and playing with it and to be more creative, there are some great people that came out of Meta that were sort of set free from Meta. [chuckles] Set free.
One by the name of Bob- Is that, is that the new euphemism? That's what I call it. Set free. Yeah. It's like- Bob-... what is it? Spending more time with my family. [chuckles] Yeah, exactly. No, but they're actually...
I mean, they are, of course, like, they have a better work-life balance, but they're really putting out there all of their fun AI and AR experiences on LinkedIn free for all of us to be inspired by.
Bob-- Shout out to Bob Biagi- [chuckles]... who is doing some of the most incredible AI and a merging of, like, kind of connecting the new technologies in really interesting ways.
So how- But I, I have a question for you. Yeah, go ahead. So as a write- as a writer, somebody who makes a living writing, are you threatened by something like ChatGPT, or are you excited by it?
Do you see the potential of using it for writing? Oh, I mean, I see the potential for efficiency for sure- Yeah... on very, like, rote work and whatnot.
Summarization, I think if anyone uses, like, an app like Artifact- Mm-hmm... which was started by the Instagram- Yeah...
founders, and it's a news app, you know, and they're basically applying AI to, like, news curation, you know- Yeah... which is a fancy word for aggregation. Yeah.
And yeah, they've got like a tell it to me like I'm five button, and I think that's incredibly useful. I mean, that's- Yeah... one of the jokey ones, but they have a summarize button.
Then you hit the summarize button, and it- Yeah... gives you the short stuff. The reality is, like, too much stuff is too long out there, and- Cliff, Cliff... even some newsletters.
Cliff from the famous CliffsNotes is approving. [chuckles] Yeah, I think exactly. Like CliffsNotes... Hey, look, Cl-CliffsNotes was also, like, a moral panic when I was in high school. [laughs] Yes. Yes.
So [chuckles] I'm well aware that these things are... But I think, to me, the biggest-- It's more opportunity than threat.
I can see it being a threat to different people at different parts o-of the ecosystem and stuff, but, like, it should enable, like, me to do more and stay smaller.
And in this industry, having a low-cost base is a big advantage- Yeah... a competitive advantage.
Whereas I think in the future, scale, at least on the publishing side, is gonna be more of an albatross than a competitive advantage because you just have so much more flexibility in your models when you are so much, you know, smaller.
It's like last night we did a dinner, like, up in, like, Gras, and it was, like, twenty-five people and stuff like this, and it, it was a really great dinner, and it was a great product, and it worked for, like, all sides, which in, like, media, you don't get a lot.
Mostly because, like, people in my space end up having the largest event, and they dilute them, and it's more sellers than buyers no matter what they say.
And the reason they have to do that is because their models require it, you know? Yeah. And so I look at that as an advantage. Like, am I a hired designer? No, I'm not.
And I'm using the tools like Midjourney because for me, they're good enough. But you know, at Havas, we have a play, don't publish system because- Yeah...
there's too many questions around the intellectual property of those images, so- Yeah. How are you using them? I look at that as like, nobody's gonna sue me. We don't have lawyers yet. [laughs] Nobody's gonna sue me.
[chuckles] We're not working on brands. They're gonna sue someone else- Nine years in... before they sue me. And look, the lawyers are going to get involved, and they already- Yes...
are involved, and they're gonna get more involved, and I think it'll work out. [upbeat music] Thanks so much for listening, and we will be back tomorrow actually with a new episode.
Thank you to Jay Sparks for producing this podcast. If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelpus and what Jay can do for you. Go to podhelp.us.
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