Nick Law of Accenture Song
Are you leading, following or getting out of the way?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 254: Nick Law
Here’s a question. Are you leading, following or getting out of the way?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I’m asked to help their leaders discover what they’re capable of, and then to maximize their impact. Helping them to unlock their own creativity, as well as the creativity of the people around them.
Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This episode is the first in a series of conversations that I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
For the next five weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re going to focus our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.
Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.
We start with a conversation with Nick Law, who is Creative Chairperson at Accenture Song.
Nick has seen the creative industries from an array of extraordinary perspectives. He was Vice Chairman, Global Chief Creative Officer at R/GA, he served as Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Groupe, and was Vice President of Marcom Integration at Apple, where he co-led the global design and marketing group.
On his Cannes speaker profile, Nick says that he believes all technology needs creativity to make it human, and all creativity needs technology to make it real.
“I think it looks like new companies emerging, new companies that are born and have built their whole premise of this technology, as opposed to trying to adapt older ways of working to a new technology.”
At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.
It promises to be an eye opening and thought provoking journey.
Thanks for joining us.
Here’s Nick Law.
Charles (02:16):
Nick, welcome back to Fearless, and welcome to our series in partnership with Lions and the Cannes Festival on the impact of AI on the creative industries. It's great to have you back.
Nick Law (02:26):
It's great to be here. And I think, I think this theme is going to be, you know, well explored in the next few months.
Charles (02:36):
Yes, I think that's right. And I think part of our curiosity and interest in putting this series together was to get the people thinking about it before Cannes started, so that we can actually fuel the fire of conversation and exploration. So let me start here. What's your relationship with AI? How do you see AI?
Nick Law (02:54):
Well, I've got a professional relationship with it and a personal relationship with it, as it happens. I, you know, I have spent my career curious about new technologies and leveraging new technologies, for creative purposes. And so in that way, my relationship with AI is as this sort of continuing love affair with technology. It's also, I think, like every technology, different, right? So there are some things, I think, that characterize my relationship. Themes that I think keep coming up. How do I create a new grammar around this? What are the opportunities and limitations of this technology? What's unique about these technologies? Where I can look at creativity differently, not just doing old things better, but thinking about, how I do new things? But then I also recognize that this is different, like every technology, but maybe the speed of this and how broadly applicable this technology is, makes this different. So as much as I'm approaching it in ways which are true to my principles as a creative person, I'm also very cognizant of the fact it's different, and trying to figure out what that means.
Charles (04:09):
I know in our last conversation you talked about technology through the lens of, I don't think you used the word necessarily, but it felt to me like you were describing tools that you could use as a creative person. Do you see AI as a tool, or is it different than that?
Nick Law (04:23):
It is, it's a tool. It has different qualities. I mean, I just, I always go back to the sort of first principle of creativity, which is, you can't actually be creative, which is meaning, create things out in the world, without technology. It's impossible. And whether you look at technology as something as sort of fundamental as language, language is a technology. It's a translating device. It's a sort of interface between your thinking and the world. That's true for the alphabet, it's true for broadcast, it's true for print, it's true for the internet, it’s now true for this. So, the sort of moral panic that happens whenever a new technology comes along is mostly because we've become so used to the technologies we grew up and mastered that we somehow forget that they're technologies.
And it's interesting, we use the word “technology” generally to mean the new thing, not the old thing. When I speak to people who have been in the industry for a while, they never say, “You know what, I'm really excited about broadcast as a technology.” You know, or “—editing as a sort of technology,” you know, all of these things are artifacts that are being created by humans to help express ourselves. So in this way, generative AI is another one of them. It's going to help me take something out of my head and put out in the world. It can do it quicker, it can do it at a higher resolution, it can do all sorts of things that previous technologies could do. But that was also true when I first started to use Photoshop. It was transformational because the things that I were cobbling together with rubdowns and color tint overlay and sending out the type, disappeared into this interface. And it was sort of, it was as magical to me then as this feels to me now. But again, as I said, this is moving a lot quicker and has much broader applications than I think something as discreet as Photoshop.
Charles (06:29):
Two of the elements of this sort of struck me in the conversations and the background reading and listening I've been doing, is that one, it seems more and more that certain aspects of AI have a personality. I was listening to an Ezra Klein podcast. He was talking to an expert on AI who said, if you tell ChatGPT 4 that you're going to tip it a hundred dollars, you will get a more comprehensive answer than if you don't tell it that. If you ask ChatGPT 4 a question in August or December, it will give you a less full answer than the rest of the year, because it thinks it's supposed to be on vacation in those years. So it is, in at least in some instances, emerging with a personality, however you might define that. And then obviously, the other aspect of it is the speed with which it's developing. How do you think those things make it different from traditional creative tools?
Nick Law (07:28):
Well, I mean, we've got to separate the toolset from the technology, right? So, I was referring to Photoshop. It was a false equivalency because the equivalency was, is really software. So software was this large way of processing the world. I think that's true of generative AI. And then there are different tool sets within that platform, right? So, I mean, it's interesting. I'm not sure if I, the Ezra Kline things, I don't know how accurate they are. They may or may not be. If they are accurate, I don't think it's because generative AI is sentient. I think it means it's synthesizing what is, from a language model, that is affected temporally by what's in it, or affected you know, for, it's taking all the sort of different motives from the collective.
And one way I think about this, is that what the internet did in the most basic forms, it connected everything. And by connecting everything, it meant that you had to start thinking about, oh, since all of these things are connected, how do we integrate them? So that became, if using Cannes as a way to look at this, this sort of integrated campaign as a category didn't come along until the internet, because all of a sudden you had this challenge of how all these nodes are connected now, so we need to figure out how to put things in these nodes that relate to each other. What these generative AI tools do is, it's less about connecting, it’s more about synthesizing them.
And so instead of worrying about if all the things that are connected relate to each other, it's like, do all of these things make something interesting and unique? So it's a sort of synthetic as opposed to a connected process. So we're thinking less about integration and more about intelligence. And, by the way, none of this means that the past paradigm goes away. I mean, there was a time in the late fifties when radio was giving away to broadcast as the most popular medium. But we still have radio today. So these things layer up each, up on top of each other, like sediment. And that's another interesting thing about these large language models is, it's collapsing these sediments.
So the interoperable problem that each of these different technology or platforms create, maybe there's a sort of a solve through this interface called generative AI, because it can be multimodal and connect these things, synthesize them in ways where we're not worrying about interoperability as much. So, you know, all of this stuff is just trying to figure out the nature of this technology and how we can interact with it. But the answers are really going to come from people playing with it, you know, because the creative output is not predictable. I would say that.
Charles (10:25):
And do you think the speed of its evolution is going to have a significant impact on how people start to play with it? It's moving so quickly, isn't it? What you hear about it last week is different this week.
Nick Law (10:37):
Yeah, and I think that this is a race between technology and culture. I mean, that they have a relationship to each other. Culture creates technology, and then technology affects culture so that flywheel is spinning a lot faster. But it also means that our ability to create sort of social norms, and a facility around these technologies, can feel a bit shocking, and you’ve got to sort of rush to catch up. So I think that some of the moral panic is just around this piece of it, and trying to get your head around it. The sort of confidence around a technology is the first step to then using it. It's why, incidentally, a lot of time creative people can be resistant to technology, because they've spent their 10,000 hours getting good at one technology, and then all of a sudden, they've got this other thing. And they built a career, and in some cases became advertising famous because of the technology, you know, because they got to walk on stage at Cannes, and then all of a sudden that's threatened by this new thing.
And so it's natural for you to say, well, this new thing it's either not important or it's just an extension of the old thing. And most of the time that's not true. It is different.
Charles (11:51):
Most visible examples, many of the most visible examples we're seeing, are connected to the creative industries. I mean, SORA, for instance, I think took everybody's breath away with A, that it was possible in the first place, having been told literally the same week that it wasn't possible. And then, the evolution of it.
Nick Law (12:05):
Yeah, it's incredible.
Charles (12:07):
It's incredible, right? So, do you think that the leaders of the creative industries, however we define them, are they responding fast enough to what this thing is going to be able to give us, and also potentially might take from us?
Nick Law (12:23):
I think it's pretty uneven actually, the response. I think in many cases they can't because they're in big organizations, that haven't adapted. Or they're working with clients trying to figure out what it means. So again, going back to the difference between having a life at home where you might crack open ChatGPT or use Midjourney or something personally, which I would encourage, incidentally for anyone. To understand it more, there's nothing like using it to understand it. But there might be a big gap between that and what they're doing in their professional life in big companies that haven't been able to move quick enough. And then there are, I think, an emerging sort of new group of creative people that have gone all-in. I mean, it's a lot easier to explore things and have fun with these things if there's not a lot at stake.
And for these big companies, there's a lot at stake. So there's always that challenge, you know? And unless you are a company like Accenture where, actually, we've been doing, we've been in AI, you know, since beginning, and we're selling the new thing to clients. Unless it's already established sort of way of working, and you have to change the big machine, it's hard. And so I actually, you know, I'm not seeing a consistent response from the creative leadership, because I think there's a difference between being a little independent that's decided to create a production company entirely based on a diffusion models, to belonging to a big agency that has a great history in these other technologies, and a muscle memory and systems and processes that haven't changed yet. So, it's pretty uneven. But I do think, I mean, I was actually having this conversation earlier today with someone. I think we're going to look back, and there will be a great changing of the guards.
Charles (14:16):
What do you think that looks like?
Nick Law (14:18):
I think it looks like new companies emerging, you know, new companies that are born and have built their whole premise of this technology, as opposed to trying to adapt older ways of working to a new technology.
Charles (14:34):
One of the big perceived threats is that under the current structure of the way the industry is set up, it's going to require fewer people that these technologies are going to come in and say, we can do a lot of this stuff that agencies charge a lot of money for. Do you see that as a legitimate threat?
Nick Law (14:49):
I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think in some cases, yes. I do think we're underestimating something, which is that just because all the things you need to do to get from an idea to getting it out in the world, required a process, required people, that may not be true.
The sort of back end of the process could get filled in. So if the front end of holding the idea in your head, using the tools to sculpt that idea and put out in the world, is now being collapsed and there are less people, or less services, less things involved, because you can write a prompt and get a pretty high resolution results straight away, the back end of that process becomes the opportunity, right? Because there's a world where you get such infinite choices that you go from spending your time crafting one thing to trying to make a decision from a million things. Creativity in the end is just making decisions, and you get more decisions if you can make infinite things.
So the process of refining, combining, editing the output, I think, is where our creative energy is going to go, as opposed to just sort of getting to the first visualization or realization of the idea. And it'll probably be quicker to do that, but I don't think it's going to be as instant as we're thinking, As sort of auto magical. And there might be, for example, different jobs in that part of the process, right? Like, if I can create more things, then maybe I need more people to help me to decide where those things go.
I mean, the other thing, which I think is why creativity is harder to predict than say, for example, automation or efficiencies and stuff that we know we're already getting out of these technologies, is that sometimes the very thing that creates something that we react against. So, an example I would give is that no one could have imagined expressionist painting or abstract expressionism before photography, because there was no need for it, right? And so I could imagine, like, us inventing new ways of expressing ourselves when the old ways of expressing ourselves become sort of easier and more automatic. And we don’t know what that's going to be or what that's going to require from a human, you know, imagination and effort point of view. So, you know, I would say I'm more optimistic, especially in the medium term.
Maybe in the short term, there could be a bit of a sort of awkward transition because of the speed of it. But, there there is something, like using that example of abstract expressionism. It's like, that is the workings of a perverse human mind. It's not the result of synthesizing everything that's happened. It's about imagining all the things that haven't happened. Now, there might be a point where you, in exploring using these tools, you might get halfway there, or do you get there, and then scale it using these tools? So the tools will still be involved. But I think the creative mind is still an important ingredient.
Charles (18:15):
And it seems to me that part of the challenge is where thinking time is invested is perhaps going to be different, almost certainly will be different, but still needs to be included. Because to your point, when you have the ability to create a lot of things much, much faster with nobody else's involvement, the risk of that, I think, from a brand voice standpoint, brand consistency standpoint, is that, today the cost, the time it takes to make stuff—albeit faster than it was 10 years ago—but nevertheless, there's still a cost implication, there's still time, there's still an allocation of resource questions. So you have to make decisions about is this the right message? Is this the best way to say this? You have to edit those choices. When you can make stuff faster, the risk, I think is going to be much less scrutiny over, okay, we can make this, but is it the right thing to make?
Nick Law (19:03):
Well, also, I think what's happening is that we're seeing sort of a garden of models start to sort of be created, right? And so, and there will be models that are created specifically for brands, right? And you need to feed those models. So, it might be that when you are using the tool to create, it feels fast and seamless, but even getting the right data and getting the right rule set and the reinforcement learning for that model, that's also jobs that we never thought about before. If we are going to be able to create images or compositions or films or interfaces, any sort of multimodal creativity that are true to a brand, then they're going to be pulling from elements that constitute that brand.
Otherwise you don't have a brand, as you say. Like, if every result of a prompt, you know, or output from of these models is magically different because it's just synthesizing whatever synthesizes, you don't have brand anymore. You've just got output. And so there are rules and things that have to be designed. You need to think about this. There's a modularity to the what you're going to be putting in the model so that you get these synthesized things, which belong in a family. So the brand thing is, and then we haven't even thought about, we've thought about a little bit, we haven't thought about it at large, because we're just so impressed with the technology that we're getting used to the parlor trick.
But once we are used to the ability to create these things magically, then we're going to look at the things that come out of these models and scrutinize them more, be less impressed with the fact that they were created in two seconds, and really interrogating them with, are they good? Is this composition good? Is this true to the brand? Does this feel like the brand? And is it communicating what we need to communicate? And that's when we'll really start mastering the medium because the output will be more intentional rather than just a parlor trick.
Charles (21:11):
I want come back to the architecture of the industry just for a second. This is an industry, you know, from multiple perspectives, built on scopes of work. Scopes of work have a tendency to be valued based on, how efficient can we make them. Reduction in headcount is going to be sought after certainly by some people who control the checkbooks. With that in mind, this is an industry that's also built on selling labor on a marked up basis by the hour. Is this an opportunity to reconstruct the entire foundations of the economic architecture of the industry? And can we actually start putting real value again on human creativity and the distinctiveness that it provides, and find a different way to compensate people for that and the value that it provides?
Nick Law (22:00):
Well, I think this is the conundrum for the incumbents. Because the model is, as you say, it's about headcount. And we're going to have to come up with a new way to charge for that. But the other thing which concerns me about the big established holding companies, is that the business is media. And the business has become media for two reasons. One is that, because we separated creative from media, and once you did that, you started to see the ability to get economies of scale in media that somehow you couldn't get in creative. Now, I'm not, by the way, I'm not sure you can't scale creativity, because I think that one of the biggest companies in the world that I used to work for did that pretty successfully. But I do think that the leadership, especially in the holding companies and in the agencies in general, there are less product people in leadership roles.
So, there are less creative people that are actually taking on business roles. This is why David, I think is an important leader in our industry. It's why Dan was so important, Dan Wieden. But, you know, the David Ogilvys of the world has been replaced by people that are managers and CFOs and operations people. And, through their eyes, I can see why media becomes a bigger opportunity, because it's more scalable right? Now, my problem with that is if you've made that decision and then you give away creative as a loss leader for the thing that you're actually making money on, which is media, I don't think in the long term that's defensible. I think the only thing that's defensible when there's a world of sort of infinite creation is creativity.
If our ability to create sort of best practices becomes something that everyone can do, then where's the value? The value is in creative thinking. But again, you'll have to have a different way of charging for that, because it won't be an army of art directors and copywriters sitting in cubicles all around the world. So yeah, that's why I think that a new sort of company will emerge built on the new, the economic realities of this technology, and they'll be less concerned about defending the whole thing as it declines, as they build a new thing, which is a hard and complicated thing to do.
Charles (24:16):
And do you think clients will buy that premise and that value proposition?
Nick Law (24:22):
Well, it depends if they want quality or not. I mean, this is the thing in the end, I think clients will get quality that they've had to pay for. And for an example, you know, if I look at, we may have talked about this, talked last year, actually. Is that I feel like we missed a trick with a lot of the lower funnel, you know, programmatic and display advertising, where we never really dignified that work with great concept and craft. And somehow we decided that it was enough to reach the right person at the right time. So, get the pipes right and don't worry about what you put in the pipes. And I think there's always been a great opportunity in performance marketing to actually do beautiful performance marketing. There's no reason why you can't. I mean, there's no reason why you can't have good writing, good design, beautiful things, at least well-considered and branded things.
Why aren't we dignifying that stuff with the same and care that we're dignifying with some of the upper funnel stuff? And the answer is because it's written by an algorithm, we think, and we think the magic's the algorithm, not the creative. But every study that I've seen shows that the thing that actually multiplies media is a creative, and we intuitively know that, right? As humans, if it's useful and interesting, we're going to pay more attention than if it just happens to be in our feed or chasing me around the internet. So, I'm saying that because I don't want to assume that clients are going to want to pay for quality. But it only takes a small group to start paying for quality and then separating themselves and the rest of the group, when I think that the value will be apparent.
So, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful, you know, that it won't be enough to be chasing best practices, won't be enough, you know. The big mediocre middle is what you want to separate yourself from. I think it's going to take more than just getting all of these machines working in the right way. Now, by the way, that is a sort of foundation. If you don't get these sort of efficiencies, you still need to do that. I'm not saying you can skip that step. You’ve got to build on top of that. It's really important. And then also it's quite possible that you get the efficiencies and the better work at the same time. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive at all. Using this analog example, we know that a single great creative team can take less time to create something better than five mediocre teams working over six months. Which is, it goes back to the absurdity of the headcount, you're paying for headcount, because sometimes you're actually paying more for worse work.
Charles (27:15):
So, you and I agree completely that we're going to see the birth of new businesses, new companies working in new ways. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of existing businesses, not all of whom will survive, but many of whom can. You've have such a diverse range of experiences at the kinds of companies that you've worked at over the last 25 years. How would you define the characteristics of the kinds of companies that you think will be able to adapt and take advantage of these technologies in ways that are going to be impactful, meaningful, and financially rewarding?
Nick Law (27:53):
Well, I think there'll be two types of companies, and I think this is a pattern that happens over time, but it's particularly true now. There'll be companies that get really good at one thing. But if they get really good at one thing, they're going to have to be open to connecting with other companies. Because the other model is actually having more than one thing and connecting them in unique ways, which is a more comprehensive solution. There's a version of this for the big advertising and marketing companies where they've connected, you know, not all that convincingly in some cases, but media and creative and CRM and service and all that sort of things. Now, obviously, I'm now at a place where we have a breadth of capabilities, right?
So we're not going to be one of those smaller companies to do one thing. We are going to do a lot of things and connect them. We are an open model where we can connect with other companies, obviously, we have lots of great partners. But one of the benefits of actually doing what what we're doing, which is, you know—so we have at Accenture Song, we've got design and digital products, marketing, service, and commerce. Now, all of those things are discreet disciplines, but from a customer's point of view, those things are connected, overlap, sometimes you can't even parse them, because they've become one thing. And so those four disciplines need to be combined, and be able to influence each other.
The way I talk about is, they need to rhyme. And it doesn't mean that we can't sell discreet things like a standalone company might do, and that's a really important thing. You need that depth, specialization is always important. but as I said, they'll have to be able to connect to these other things because they live in a world where things are not just being connected, but they're being combined in interesting ways. Or the other model is a lot harder to do, and we're lucky because we've got the scale and we've got actually a history of being able to do this, but of actually having multiple capabilities that you combine in different ways.
Charles (30:00):
What are you looking for within your own business and your own organizational structure?
Nick Law (30:05):
I think what we are uniquely built to deliver on is understanding not just the customer facing experience, but the business impact. And the thing is that the bigger a company, the higher it is to connect those things because, you know, it becomes siloed. And so there are times when I think there are business decisions that make sense from a business point of view, but result in a bad customer experience, and so were counterproductive. And then, vice versa. There are times when a great customer experience could be magical, but actually doesn't help the business or even makes it worse. The analogy I use is a restaurant, which is a small, small business that you can sort of understand, right?
You could have an amazing kitchen, that is really efficient, that buys its produce, and gets exactly the right margins, but then they serve the food and it tastes like rubbish. And so it doesn't matter how well everything was happening in the kitchen, because the customer is ultimately unsatisfied and they just don't come back. And you could do the opposite. You could create beautiful food that people love and think is great, but you're not doing efficiently, you're not making money. And so in both of those cases, your restaurant closes. So understanding that these two things are connected, like, you don't have a business without a customer, you don't have a customer without a great product. It seems obvious and trite to say something like that, but these large companies create these sort of parallel economies that sometimes aren't connected.
So that's why I think how you structure a creative company, you shouldn't assume that just because you're making amazing things, that it's going to be a good business. You need to do, have the rigor around both, and vice versa. And it's not easy, by the way. It's not easy to do that because, you know, you've got to create the structures and incentive and all that sort of stuff. But the results, I think, are just worth it, so it's worth the pain.
Charles (31:59):
And you have to break down the internal barriers as well, right? You have to break down the silos. You have to break down the emotional resistance to collaboration. You have to break down the not-invented-here syndrome that happens everywhere.
Nick Law (32:09):
And that's part, that's how you structure to encourage incentives. Like, if you were a copywriter, at a more traditional agency, and you say, “You know, I don't want to work with art directors.” Well, you don't have a job anymore, because that's part of your role. So that's structured into the position of being copywriter, you've got to work with an art director. Similarly, you've got to have these structures where you don't leave it up to good intentions. It's not enough to say, “You know, I really think that you should collaborate with that person over there.” It's like, sure. And you set up weekly meetings and then after a while you get bored and you don't do it. Like, it needs to be a part of the structure. And the other thing, which I think is even more important in some ways, at least with smaller companies, it's harder, is a culture that wants to do something excellent and different.
So if you say, as a technologist, you are going to have a much more interesting life and create amazing, famous things, if you work with a creative. And as a creative, you'll be able to realize ideas that you never imagined and maybe even be able to refine ideas that started somewhere else in technology. That's what's exciting. It's not going to be easy. You're going to have to work with people where the overlap of skillset is pretty slim, because you've got really diverse capabilities. But, it's going to be worth it because we're going to be able to do stuff that no one else can do. And so when you create that sort of culture, that's a product culture, a culture of excellence, where people really want to be a part of an endeavor that's doing something new and interesting, then that goes a long way, too. So structure and culture, got to get them both right. And it's never easy.
Charles (33:54):
And it feels to me that part of this evolution with the technology that AI brings to the table is allowing people and encouraging people to find out more about themselves and their own creativity, their own capabilities. I mean, neither one of us quite old enough to have lived in the industry back in the fifties when the writer slid the copy under the art director's door and never saw it again until it showed up on air, right? We've come quite a long way from that. But, we have grown up in an industry in which the writer and the art director was very clearly and specifically defined. It feels to me, even just in my own experience with things like Midjourney, that you discover aptitudes, mindsets, perspectives. When you have, when you take all the restrictions and the limitations, when you don't have to know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator. You can just say, “This is my concept. Show me what that looks like.” That changes the nature of the kind of talent we need to find and develop, do you think?
Nick Law (34:50):
Yeah. And the combination, so I mean, I thought about this a lot in the last Cannes I gave a presentation where I said, look, I think this is what the team looks like that you should be creating. And recognizing that creative, creative teams, the thing that characterizes their dynamic is, it's a conversation, not a handoff. So what you described with sliding the copy under the door for the art director to color in, that's a handoff. And what you get in a process like that is that you get the art director illustrating an idea which is not going to change. And so much so that you can then look at the print ad that comes out of that process, take the image away, and it makes sense, to take the copywrite away, it makes sense, because they're parallels of each other.
One is illustrated and the other. There's no conversation. Whereas if you look at another print ad like, “Lemon”, you know, the famous VW ad, that doesn't work once you take the image away. It doesn't work when you take the copy away because, and that is a result of a conversation. So the collaboration is a conversation, not a handoff. And I think it's important that we understand this, that that's a sort of organic thing. Now, what happens when the conversation's not just with another person, but with this model that will keep, you'll have a conversation with it. You'll ask it something or it’ll bring something back. And I think that you are still limited by what you can think up to prompt, right?
And so that's why in my mind, the perfect creative team to use these tools is a tripod. It's a design thinker. Someone who thinks spatially, architecturally. It's a storyteller. Someone thinks temporally, because I think creativity lives in time and space, right? And, but typically great writers are not great designers, great designers aren't great writers. And when I say designers, but to art direction, because I'm thinking about design in terms of creating interfaces and patterns and understanding the relationship between things and complicated spaces. I think you need them. But then the other thing, which, and I know there are models that have creative technologists, but I think creative technology is particularly important here. Not just because they have knowledge of the language models or the sort of data sets you'll be pulling from.
But they'll also understand how they need to be adapted to specific purposes. And because I think, when you're doing that, you are creative. To me, it's a technologist, a designer and a copywriter all mediated with this AI in the middle that is part of the conversation and helping solve things. So I think to me, that's, it's something like that. It's, you know, there might be different variations on that, but I don't think it's going to be a lone person sitting there in their room, having the conversation with the AI, for a lot of stuff, because I just think we're, we all have our 10, 10,000 hours and we want more diverse nodes, which have a different 10,000 hours, connecting and creating.
Charles (38:03):
Could you see though, that that becomes the model one day, or the reality one day? I mean, again, going back to some of the stuff I've listened to talks about the fact that if you've got kids who are teenagers, they will have AI friends. And those AI friends in many ways might be more valuable to them than real people, because they'll be more dependable, more reliable, they'll understand them better, they'll be more empathetic, apparently. Could you see us getting to a point where, maybe not our generation, but generations to come see the difference between human relationships and AI relationships as being indistinguishable from their standpoint? And therefore working with technology as a partner is just as viable, and maybe in some cases even more so than working with human partners. Could you see that?
Nick Law (38:45):
I mean, the thing is that our social norms adapt to new technologies. I think part of the dissipation that are happening now is that these things have happened so quickly. Like, you could ask, if you were a Victorian and you were looking forward, and you are watching someone sitting on a sofa watching TV, you might ask the same questions. Well, does this person ever have to experience everything ever again? Because they can see it all through TV. Why does this person need to have a conversation ever again, if they listen to podcasts and they feel intimately connected? It's a matter of degrees, I know and understand. And it might even be that what we think is quite normal, a Victorian would find horrifying.
You know, I mean, there might be a tipping point where it just becomes too much. I doubt that our kids and grandchildren will be so naive that they'll actually think that, you know, that a generated person is a person. I think they'll know. But in the same way that we know when we're looking at TV, that when the train comes towards us on the TV, it's not going to rush into the living room and crush us. We know that, right? We've decoded the media and it may create, it might create behaviors which people in the past would find repellent, but we've all figured it out, you know? So I don't know.
I'm actually seeing, again, they're through reactions and reactions. I've got four kids, and they're all different ages, and I've seen them, some, they have very different relationships with technology. They're trying to figure it out. My older kids are more likely to start, not because they're trying to be healthy, but just because it feels better. They're interacting less, in some cases, doing other things, you know, trying to figure out balance. I don’t know whether to be optimistic or pessimistic, I really don't. I think it's going to depend on a lot of things, but we've tended to figure these things out.
Charles (40:42):
Yeah, I think we're all struggling with that, aren't we? How do you think we need to adapt our leadership of talent, given everything that you've posited?
Nick Law (40:51):
I mean, one way to look at it is, and a lot of people have said this, we're going to need more talented people than ever, because that's what's going to make, be the difference between everyone having the same tools. It'll be the talent. What that talent looks like, you know, it'll evolve a little bit. There'll be some things that we recognize, people now, interesting minds, people that can come up with ideas that are unexpected and are not generic, or people have got amazing taste. You know, that's a real thing. Taste is a real thing. If it wasn't, then people wouldn't be walking around with beautifully designed smartphones in their pocket, and they wouldn't be paying the premium they are for that. Taste matters, you know? So there are these more human qualities that you can hire for.
Charles (41:39):
And do you think this changes the talent supply chain?
Nick Law (41:44):
it's interesting because being in the creative industries, I've never looked at anyone's credentials. I look at their work. And there's something very simple about hiring creative people. It’s, you hire them based on their body of work, or the work, the potential you see from their body of work or their way of thinking. So as long as I can discern that in an honest way, then I'll be hiring for that. Not based on what elite university they went to. Because typically a lot of people in our industry are not academics.
Charles (42:22):
Right. And the democratization that this technology potentially offers creates possibilities that people who didn't realize either that they had creative capability or had interest or the ability to express themselves reliably enough creatively, that they could pursue a career in these kinds of industries. I mean, that's a problem at the moment, right? That there are too many talented people who don't know they have a talent that is marketable.
Nick Law (42:46):
I think you could argue that that's already happened. You know, there was a time when I think the winners at Cannes came from, like, three countries, because it wasn't as democratized, and the world got connected with internet, and there's great work happening everywhere. Even domestically within the US, I think the rise of great agencies outside of New York was a lot easier when everyone's connected. It's a lot harder back in the fifties, I think, to have an agency in Portland, for God's sake. So I think that's been a trend generally. But I think what these technologies will open up is, you'll be able to be sitting in a small town, you know, in Algeria or in Norway or wherever you are, and create something that looks like a full-length feature film using an AI model, which is pretty incredible.
Charles (43:44):
Yeah. PJ Pereira showed me a piece of animation he's created for the publicity for a new novel he's written. And he said, “I did the—”, it is extraordinary. I'll send you a link when we're finished, but he said, “I did this in three hours on my phone sitting in bed while my wife was sleeping next to me.” I mean, to your point, it's just extraordinary now. He's said, “I'm trained and I've been spending a lot of time with this stuff, so it's not zero to a thousand in a minute,” but nevertheless, to your point, it's going to create possibilities that are extraordinary and limitless.
Nick Law (44:14):
But it also means that there'll be a lot of people that create garbage, too.
Charles (44:17):
Yeah.
Nick Law (44:18):
PJ's talented, you know, and so no matter how easy this use technology, when desktop publishing first come out, I was working in design, and a big part of the design community was working on these annual reports. I don’t know if you remember, annual reports used to be these magnificent documents. The upfront was basically a marketing thing, and in the back of it, was all the financials. And they were apprised, creative created project for people in design. And when Quark Express and desktop published came around, everyone was, “Oh my God, this is going to ruin everything because, you know, the assistant of the CEO's going to be able to design the annual report.” I was like, what? Yes, they could. It's not going to be very good though, right? So having the tools and the ability, so as you say, but what it will mean is if you do have the ability, it doesn't matter where you are.
Charles (45:10):
I was going to say, the assistant of the CEO might be a very talented graphic designer who'd never had the opportunity.
Nick Law (45:15):
That's exactly right. Yeah. And, or will have the opportunity to become a really good designer have with the tools and the practice and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.
Charles (45:25):
So last couple of questions for you. As you roll the clock forward, in your head three years, what do you think the successful integration of AI looks like inside these current businesses that exist today?
Nick Law (45:36):
Well, like all great technology, it'll be invisible. And so we'll just be doing great work. We'll be doing it quicker and hopefully in a more considered way, right? So it won't just be a great vomit of content that we spray all over the world. But, you know, the ability to do more doesn't mean that we should do more. It might mean that we do more different things, not more of one thing. It might mean a whole lot of things, but I do think if part of what advertising does is try to get people's attention, that attention is finite. And you can't put infinite content against finite attention. So, you'll have to be more considered and thoughtful, but you'll be able to do that, I think, with the right talent at a speed and fidelity that, you know, has been unmatched.
Charles (46:28):
And as you look at the future of AI, what are you optimistic about?
Nick Law (46:32):
I mean, as a creative, I'm optimistic about what we were just talking about, which is, you know, the more people that have access to these tools, the better the cream will be, the top, right? I'm excited to see what people can create because more people are going to be creating. I can also imagine being exhausted with the amount of stuff that's being created. So, the ability to sort through the mediocre stuff is going to be an important part, too.
Charles (47:03):
And as you look at the future, what are you afraid of?
Nick Law (47:08):
So none of this is inevitable. So, you know, I use the example of, I think the missed opportunity in performance marketing, where we just worried about the pipes, not what’s in them. And we assumed all sorts of things as professionals that certainly weren't true as civilians, right? So when, you know, we all get advertised to, and there are times when sometimes those ads are the things that we're looking for, but often they're not. So, I hope that we dignify this new technology with the sort of care and creativity that it deserves. And don't just think it's this sort of mechanical task of connecting all these pipes, and that somehow these little nodes at the end of the pipes called humans are going to want everything we put in them just because we've got the pipes, right? It's not like that. So I'm excited by the technology, but, I think we should want what we put in this to get out of this technology and share with this technology. I want it to be inspiring and interesting and useful, not just a sort of big industrial effluent.
Charles (48:13):
Nick, I really want to thank you for coming back on the show. Your multi-dimensional experience and I think your multifaceted thinking, that combination is so rare. And I'm just grateful to you for providing us with such a lot of insight and thought provoking content to start thinking about this subject. Thank you.
Nick Law (48:28):
Appreciate it. No, thanks for inviting me, and I'll see you in the south of France.
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