How BBDO Is Supercharging the Creative Process With Generative AI

At BBDO, creatives have begun looking to a new creative partner to flesh out storyboards or brainstorm visuals for campaigns: artificial intelligence. The Omnicom-owned agency is exploring how cutting-edge image generation can play a role in its production process with a version of the popular tool Stable Diffusion, which it has tapped to workshop ideas and produce internal materials. The agency expects these kinds of tools to eventually play an indispensable role in graphic design and production, and is holding workshops for its creatives to get them up to speed on using them. JCPenney Brings Artificial Intelligence to the Makeup Counter BBDO is one of many creative agencies and marketing departments that are evaluating how recent strides made in realistic machine learning image and text generation technology might best serve their needs. Meanwhile, the makers of legacy creative tools are starting to integrate features built out of this technology into their platforms for the first time. And generative AI has become a new watchword in Silicon Valley, where creative tool startups like Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion, are raising eye-popping sums. Agencies and marketing departments have long used machine learning algorithms to sift through data, spot trends and steer creative campaigns. But the use of AI to create imagery or copy from whole cloth had largely remained in the experimental stages before this year, as most programs produced only rudimentary results. New research advances in the field now seem to be hurtling the technology toward a tipping point. An image BBDO generated with the prompt: "Krampus the Christmas demon sneaking behind a building and playing a martin acoustic guitar in the Lower East Side of Manhattan." Access across the agency That's why BBDO decided earlier this year to make these capabilities available to every employee for experimentation and evaluation. The agency looked at each of the major image generation tools on the market—like research group OpenAI's Dall-E 2 and a small research lab called Midjourney—and decided Stable Diffusion was most cost-effective. The agency was able to cover the price of its experimentation with a credit balance on the platform of around $500 per month and the ability to scale or adjust its plan depending on its future needs. "We expect this technology to be incredibly transformative, and so we want to make sure that not just our creatives, but everybody understands not only the use cases, but how to go in and play with the tool itself," said BBDO head of digital operations James Young. "This area is evolving so quickly, we also wanted to make sure that we were able to be flexible to move with that evolution," he added. "So if a new tool comes out, or this tool has got a better way of being implemented, we can switch over and evolve with the technology." How Experts Are Attempting to Combat Artificial Intelligence’s Racist Tendencies Implementations like these propelled Stable Diffusion maker Stability AI to raise $101 million in October for a reported valuation of more than $1 billion. Trained on more than 2.3 billion images, the platform can create detailed and sometimes photorealistic imagery in seconds based on a simple text prompt. Other tools offering similar capabilities include OpenAI, which is backed by $1 billion from Microsoft, and Midjourney, which is run through a Discord server operated by a small startup. "All these different platforms have their own kind of pros and cons," said BBDO creative director Martin Staaf. "Stable Diffusion doesn't have a lot of refinement built into it, so you need to be very specific in crafting these kinds of text prompts—it's like learning a new language, figuring out what the algorithm and the AI understands and what it doesn't." BBDO created this image with the prompt: "Caribbean fruit stand hut in Times Square, ultra realistic, 8k, photo real, pineapples, coconuts, depth of field, no filter." Use cases The agency has found the tool specifically useful for laying out storyboards for internally visualizing campaigns or creating art for slide decks and idea sessions. Some of their work with the tool is campaign specific and some is about expanding its internal library of digital art assets, according to Young. "Being able to just quickly visualize without having to spend time sketching it out—I think it's really going to cut down so much of the tedious tweaking and fixing and that manual labor part of it," Staaf said. "That is going to allow us to focus more of our time on the ideas and the conceptual components." The agency is also creating custom datasets for ideation purposes. For instance, Young plans to take all of the photos from an upcoming location shoot to train a model within Stable Diffusion that will then be able to visualize new places or items in that location. "Let's say it's a store that we're capturing, we could say, 'Alright, I want this store. But now can you put these types of people in front of it or this type of current product or change that sign or change this color or change the background?" Young said. The agency has yet to actually use the tool's output in a finished campaign, but Young said it has proven useful for this kind of visualization and ideation."It's not just a tool for output—it's a tool for exploration of an idea," Young said. "If a creative is trying to figure out how might this look or what might a version like this look like, it's giving you much more of a point of view of that exploration process for the individual [that] they might not have had otherwise." Prompt: "a baby biker, mustache, tattoos, bandana and leather waistcoat, detailed 3D cgi art, ultra realistic, ultra detailed, unreal." Still figuring out best practices When working with technology this new, there is hardly a rulebook to follow, and the process of figuring it out can be full of surprises. Creatives at BBDO look to online AI communities and share ideas at internal workshops in order to flesh out a set of guidelines for how to get the most out of the tool. "The AI can be really pleasantly surprising and sometimes very awkwardly surprising," Staaf said."Internally, it's about leaning on what our own learnings are but also the massive community on the internet. There's sub-Reddits, Discord channels, all these people collectively trying to figure this out and then sharing what they find." For now, the agency is approaching this tech as just another creative tool, much like Adobe Photoshop, and it is being implemented in a collaborative capacity with the existing creative process, Staaf said. But the technology—and its commercial implementation—are changing fast and it's hard to know what kind of change it will ultimately bring to the industry. "Obviously, it's going to open a lot of doors. And it's so new that it's hard to say what's behind all of those doors," Staaf said. "It kind of lowers the barriers for all of visual expression. If you can imagine it in your head ... you can visualize it."

AI News

How BBDO Is Supercharging the Creative Process With Generative AI

The agency has every employee working with Stable Diffusion

Patrick Kulp

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Patrick Kulp