At first, I thought maybe it was just me maybe paying a little too much attention during my ‘billboard surfing’ sessions recently when I started noticing that a good number of billboards in Nairobi are using AI generated creative instead of more traditional photography and graphic design creative.

Frankly, I don’t see anything wrong with it, as such, but it seems to me that the more and more this happens we could see consumers paying less attention to such billboards if they ‘don’t feel real enough’ to have the right impactful as far as brand marketing is concerned.

Indeed, it was around 2 years ago that we saw Kenya’s creative community up in arms when leading brands started using AI generated creative for their marketing campaigns as this naturally meant professional photographers, videographers, models, and actors started losing what used to be guaranteed business.

The primary motivations for using AI generated creative assets in marketing are that:

1. It’s much less expensive compared to traditional approaches.
2. Brands can explore practically infinite creative iterations prior to utilization.
3. It takes much less time to generate creative assets.

So, in a nutshell, cost, variety, and speed are the key drivers for the adoption of AI generated creative assets.

However, as much as I am personally all for leveraging AI to deliver more creative and impactful marketing outcomes, the reality is that there are instances where using more traditional approaches will probably still yield far more authentic and engaging marketing campaigns for brands — at least until we get to the point where we are unable to distinguish between ‘real’ and AI generated creative.