Bristol integrated brand agency saintnicks has announced a further senior appointment with the hiring of Marcus Culloty as the agency’s new Creative Director.
Marcus joins saintnicks after holding the title of Creative Director at McCann Bristol. Before that, he was the Creative Director of The Mix Dublin, part of Pernod Ricard’s global in-house agency network.
With more than 17 years experience working for some of the UK and Ireland’s leading network and independent agencies including Havas, Publicis, and The Leith Agency, he has created a raft of award-winning campaigns for global clients such as Toyota, O2, Jameson and Dunlop.
Now as saintnicks’ Creative Director, Marcus will be leading the agency’s conceptual output alongside supporting with the mentoring, shaping and development of its creative studio.
On his appointment, Culloty said: “saintnicks has a great philosophy for crafting great work that helps their clients and their brands really fly. That’s why I can’t wait to dive in, be part of this experienced agile independent agency’s senior team and take things further than ever.”
It’s a time of continued growth for the Bristol agency with further new talent joining across the business. This month sees the arrival of Richard Canueto-Cook and Hannah Bain into the Client Services team as Account Directors. Both join with previous careers at Ogilvy, Havas and McCann.
The appointments coincide with another strong year for the agency after a consistent period of new and existing client growth within the automotive, sport and audio sectors and a string of industry award nominations.
Steve Davies, ECD of saintnicks commented: “The quality of talent and the versatility of skills in the agency has enabled us to generate stronger campaigns and deliver better performance metrics across the board. With over 65% of our business from international brands we are always seeking talent who can help us to take clients further, and Marcus is a most welcome and exciting addition to the team.”
saintnicks has been appointed by Ascot Racecourse following a successful competitive pitch process. The win bolsters the agency’s strong start to 2024 alongside retained client growth.
Founded in 1711 by Queen Anne, Ascot Racecourse is arguably the nation’s most revered racing venue, welcoming just shy of 600,000 visitors annually across its 26 race day events. Royal Ascot which takes place 18th – 22nd June, is the most prestigious horse racing event in the UK calendar with more than 300,000 visitors over the 5 day period. Steeped in heritage, Ascot Racecourse is a true British institution and revered national brand.
The two-year contract, which starts with immediate effect, will see saintnicks responsible for Ascot’s overall social content strategy as the brand looks to enhance its reputation further as a global ‘lifestyle’ brand.
Retained as the brand’s lead social partner, saintnicks will work closely with Ascot’s brand, social and content teams supporting with content strategy, content creation and social media management.
Fraser Bradshaw, Founder and CEO of saintnicks says: “We couldn’t be more delighted to partner with Ascot Racecourse and help support their business growth strategy. It’s a brand and business we’ve come to know well over the last few years and we’re invested wholeheartedly in supporting such an iconic national brand as their long term partner.”
Alexandra Bertram, Brand & Creative Lead at Ascot says: “We’re thrilled to embark on this exciting journey with saintnicks as our Social Media Marketing agency. With their expertise and dedication, we look forward to elevating Ascot’s presence in the digital realm. Here’s to a fruitful partnership ahead!”
The appointment follows the re-positioning of the Ascot Racecourse brand and subsequent brand voice development undertaken by saintnicks in 2022.
Having started the process in 2021, they join around 70 other companies in the region who are committed to making business a force for good.
B Corp Certification is holistic, not exclusively focused on a single social or environmental issue. To achieve certification, a company must:
saintnicks achieved a score of 88.9, but as with any company to gain the certification, they acknowledge that this is just the beginning of a commitment to do even more.
“We’re incredibly proud of the work we’ve done to become B Corp Certified, but we’re just getting started. We’re committed to continually reviewing our standards across the board, to not only maintain our efforts, but improve them.” said company Director, Chris Price.
“We’re very proud to be working with some brilliant clients, who are also committed to making positive changes to their business, so it’s a journey we’re going on together.” Price added.
Read more about the journey to becoming B Corp Certified on the saintnicks website.
We’re all a little bit obsessed with acquisition; it’s drilled into us from birth and stays with us until the day we die. From Pokémon cards and soft toys to clothes, art and tech – we progress through a natural arc of ownership in our lifetime. The truth is, we usually look to upgrade our belongings before we’ve squeezed every bit of value from our existing ones.
And we’re guilty for doing the same in the marketing bubble: often, we prioritise growing eCRM databases before we engage the contacts that are already in reach. But when acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining an existing one, there’s a compelling case for making the most of what we already have in front of us (Invesp, 2018).
It’s easy to forget that existing customers are the ones positioned deeper in the sales funnel. These are the contacts who have already experienced your brand in some capacity; they know the role that you can play in their life. Which begs the question: why have my contacts lapsed? Often, customer apathy is the primary reason for inactivity.
An overworked cliché, but a true one nonetheless, is that your database is a flowerbed, and you’re holding the garden hose. So, for dramatic purposes, let’s imagine we’re in the second week of drought. Your flowers are wilted, and the soil? Bone dry. In your absence, your contacts have become idle and unenthused. Any avid gardener knows that chucking buckets of water on a flowerbed in this state will cause the soil to repel it, instead you should sprinkle the surface lightly to encourage gradual absorption. The same applies for your marketing, if you relentlessly continue to push hard sales-led messaging upon your lapsed eCRM contacts, they will only reject it.
Take a more considered approach. Whether it’s a virtual gift card, an email to a live event, or a simple message to say we haven’t heard from you in a while, a softer approach is the most likely to warm inactive customers to your brand, ahead of overt promotion.
If you’re in a position where you have a chunky list of email addresses, and not a lot else, then it’s time to start building. Whether it’s a poll or survey with a gift or promo code for their next order, this is a great opportunity for you to understand how users are interacting with your brand. But first, you need to be sure of your objectives. Do you want to understand how satisfied customers are with your product? Are you trying to establish the customer pain points to optimise your service offering? Knowing the purpose of your research is fundamental and will help you to structure your questions and analytics accordingly.
Once you have constructed and sent your re-engagement email, the next step is analysing the results. Pay attention to any clear patterns and use them to tag specific customers with common themes. In case you’re not convinced, MailChimp research shows that segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14.31% higher than unsegmented campaigns.
Using historic data, it becomes possible for brands to track browsing behaviour, purchase history, and previous engagement to tailor communications from specific customer actions. And doing so holds impact. Over 59% of customers claim that personalised content impacts purchase decisions. In the long run, this can help brands to grow stronger relationships with their customers, increase loyalty, and ultimately drive revenue growth. By identifying and segmenting different groups within your database, it becomes possible for brands to fine tune the content within email sends to resonate more clearly with the audience at hand.
Take Nike, for example, a global conglomerate operating in more than 30 major markets: from sports to lifestyle. A track runner from Osaka and a fashion enthusiast from New Mexico will engage with the same brand in two very different ways. While the runner will be most invested in the performance-related benefits of the garments, the influencer will likely be drawn in by aesthetics, limited edition colourways, and exclusive brand collaborations. This can be reflected in granular segment-specific sends, with tweaked products, ranges, visuals, and tone.
This isn’t to say that marketers should forget about scaling mailing lists. Growing your current book of eCRM contacts and delivering content to your existing audience should happen in tandem, in fact, it’s beneficial. When you are making efforts to re-engage existing contacts, and growing a database simultaneously, you can be safe in the knowledge that you’re doing everything in your power to increase acquisition and retention.
When it comes to customer acquisition, engagement, and retention, we’re experts in the field. Drop us a line today to see how we can leverage email to maximise the value from your contacts, no strings attached.
Discover more industry insights and opinions at saintnicks.uk.com/insights
When setting out to understand a little more about a brand, a visit to the company website is nearly always the first port-of-call for stakeholders. Often dubbed as the ‘shop window’ to an organisation, a website should clearly communicate your brand’s raison d’être, offer a clear user path, and most importantly, outline your company offerings in the best possible light. And while the process of delivering a gleaming new website is often an exciting one, the launch is only the beginning.
To guarantee that your website performs to its best ability, and to stay relevant among your site visitors, it’s crucial to view your website as an ongoing project. It’s not simply a question of UX/CX updates; reviewing CRO, your goal completion, tackling outdated content, dead backlinks, and poor SEO are all contributing factors to a poor online experience for customers, which can be detrimental to your sales drive and to your brand. The good news is that these are all easily avoidable consequences, assuming you tend to your site with care. To keep your website ticking over nicely, we’ve compiled our top 6 areas of focus for web optimisation…
You should always maintain clear strategic direction with your interface, mapping out the best possible user journeys. Without directing visitors to the right areas on your website, you’ll encourage high exit rates, U-turns, or rage clicks (Hotjar, 2022). Not only does this risk conversions or other goal completions, but it can devalue the brand that you’ve worked so hard to build. Put yourself in your users’ shoes and try to experience your website with a fresh pair of eyes. Is it hard to find key information about your brand? Does the site make checkouts, downloads and forms as easy as possible? Could you improve legibility?
Websites don’t just end at launch; they need to be maintained, optimised and tested. Having the correct analytics tools to visualise quantitative and qualitative data is important, but only when you are tracking the metrics relevant to your business. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to quantitative analytics platforms, but the key metrics that marketers should be tracking are:
While quantitative research is useful in identifying data patterns and numerical trends, it’s important for marketers to understand users’ attitudes, beliefs, and motivations. This is where qualitative data can help fill in the gaps to make more informed decisions with your quantitative data. Popular qualitative research methods include:
By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it becomes much easier to understand your customer experience. Ultimately, this helps to highlight pain points and identify the content that resonates most with your brand’s audience.
A great way to ensure you’re optimising your website is by running A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) across variants. Before implementing significant updates, you might want to consider running an A/B test to justify your decision making. Netflix leads by example in this area. Unique to every user, they pool together data to produce a final homepage outcome based on behaviour and preferences. Todd Yellin, Vice President of Product at Netflix, confirms that the brand runs 250 A/B tests each year to test the different versions of the design. These tests also consider the ways in which users search for films and programs on the app (Wired, 2018). With a highly detailed level of tracking and various testing in place, Netflix’s success is entirely reliant upon data. Regularly implementing the variations from the results optimises the user experience.
It’s not uncommon for users to arrive at a website only to be deterred by complex language, over-stimulating features, or a lack of useful information. These websites tend to garner large drop off rates, with marketers left trying to figure out where they slipped up. This nearly always occurs when a website is built without a defined content strategy in place. Markets are ever-changing, and branded websites should reflect this. To stay top of mind, content needs to be relevant, useful, and findable. Marketers need to audit and refresh existing content on an ongoing basis, factoring in current trends and wider business objectives.
SEO is often an afterthought when it comes to website builds. This is usually down to the fact that organic search rankings can take time to bear fruit in contrast to paid activity. But with 53.3% of all website traffic acquired through organic search, SEO should be a core consideration during, and after, a website build.Regular SEO activity can elevate your brand and take you to the top of search engines, surpassing your competition. The key to successful performance and conversion of your website is a content strategy that considers a user-friendly experience, with digestible information for both the user as well as search engines. (Search Engine Journal, 2022).
Whilst they are undoubtedly two separate entities, marketers should make sure their SEO and PPC strategies are aligned, and both have high prominence on their marketing agenda and budgets. On average, 5-10% of your revenue should be spent on SEO activity. (Search Engine Land, 2022).
Read more about our top tips to optimise your organic search in our blog here.
Top performing websites don’t just need to look good, they need to be functional too. Ongoing website maintenance is required to keep your website running. This can be achieved by making sure your website is safe and secure, and that links and tools aren’t broken. It may seem simple but often brands focus on the launch of a new website and forget to check in on performance once it’s live. Some CMS updates can be relatively straight forward, but you’ll benefit from an experienced digital team to manage, monitor and prevent or react to any technical issues your website may encounter.
As a fully integrated agency, we build sites that talk the talk and walk the walk – from design to optimisation. If you’re looking to take your website to the next level, drop us a line today – we’d love to have a chat.
Discover more industry insights and opinions at saintnicks.uk.com/insights
Widely considered the most effective marketing medium, videos bring life to the brands that were once dependent on static and print. And whilst it has been hugely popular for the best part of a century, it has only grown more prevalent in recent years with the widespread uptake in smartphone and social media usage. For marketers, educators, and storytellers alike, video helps to engage with audiences in a far more immersive and memorable way. It can be formatted and stylised to specific guidelines, and most importantly, can simplify complicated messages comprehensively.
Cut forward to 2023, and we simply can’t get enough of it. We’re averaging a lengthy 95 minutes a day on TikTok, using YouTube to answer 1 in every 4 search queries, and collectively uploading 82 years of video content to YouTube daily. So, if you’re not doing everything in your power to make video work for your brand, you’re missing out on a sizeable opportunity.
Video can be used to suit a wide range of different formats and styles, from short-form social media content to long-form documentaries, making it a highly versatile medium that can be tailored to specific brand objectives. But with video being so widely consumed, we’ve grown to become connoisseurs of the moving image. Consumers have no time for slow starts, are becoming easily distracted, and can sniff out branded content a mile off. This shift in behaviour directly factors into the way that leading brands now develop their video content and should also factor into how you develop your own.
We’ve delivered short and long form video for high calibre clients across a variety of global markets. If you’re looking to leverage great video content for your brand, drop us a line today and let’s talk. No strings.
Discover more industry insights and opinions at saintnicks.uk.com/insights
saintnicks have promoted Finance Director Chris Price to company co-director, alongside Fraser Bradshaw and Steve Davies, as the company approaches its 10-year anniversary.
CEO, Fraser Bradshaw, said that “Chris will continue to oversee all company finance but also moves into a broader commercial role, including corporate governance and partnerships, as we expand the business.”
The move comes following a successful period for the company; with new business wins including Admiral, Akkodis and Ascot, and 9 new hires across all areas of the business.
Bradshaw added “Chris has been integral to our success over the last 4 years, always acting in the best interest of the agency, and joining us in making some of the more progressive decisions along the way. His experience and desire to grow the commercial side of the business will be invaluable moving forward”.
saintnicks is a brand agency with a strong reputation for its integrated strategy and creative campaigns, with offices in Bristol and London. The agency prides itself on being as commercial as they are creative, for their client partners. With a leadership team from client side and network agencies, the agency delivers huge expertise from an expert team. Recognised as a UK Great Place to Work this year and with B-Corp pending, the business believes in being a force for good.
Price, who has been at the agency for 4 years, has previously held the position of Group Financial Controller at Jones Knowles Ritchie, as well as spending 5 years across the WPP group finances with MEC and Grey.
Speaking about the new role, Price said “I’m delighted to join Steve and Fraser as a co-director of saintnicks. I‘ve felt a close connection to the guys since joining in 2018, and have seen a lot of changes in that time. We’ve got an incredibly strong team and brilliant clients; I’m very excited to continue working alongside them to help us go further”.
Find out more about Chris and his role at saintnicks here.
Last month, the 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces™ in Tech list was launched by Great Place to Work® UK, recognising saintnicks among 140 ranked organisations.
What this recognition confirms about saintnicks:
saintnicks CEO Fraser Bradshaw commented, “Having received recognition as a UK Great Place to Work earlier this year, we are delighted to now receive this recognition for the diverse culture and mix of our capabilities within the agency. Every agency needs to invest in culture alongside its products and services if they are going to produce truly great work. We are looking forward to another strong year in 2023.”
As Benedict Gautrey, Managing Director of Great Place to Work® UK, explains:
“Now in its fifth year, our 2022 list showcases the largest collection of Best WorkplacesTM in Tech that the UK has ever recognised.
These results are based on what employees working in the technology industry have anonymously reported to us about their workplace experience. In a fast and ever-evolving industry, these organisations are at the forefront of ensuring employees have the right environment to thrive, they are focused on providing positive work experiences, they value diversity, differences and better ways of doing things and, importantly, are investing in effective leadership to ensure continuous growth.
A huge congratulations to saintnicks for making one of our most prestigious lists.”
What comes to mind when you think of Gen Z? Tech-savvy influencers? Social justice warriors? Instagram addicts?
In reality, 2022 data published by the Pew Research Center shows that Gen Z is the only generation that has seen a decline in social media usage since 2019. This excludes TikTok, which has seen positive take-up within the age bracket. There are several theories as to why this could be the case, with most attributing the demise to over-regular app updates wearing down younger users’ trust. Which begs the question; what cuts through the noise, and resonates with the “anti-social youths” of today?
It’s no secret that there’s a clear correlation between age and attention span. Those born into Gen Z have had access to a whole arsenal of technology from the get-go, which could explain the 8-second average attention span versus millennials’ 12 seconds. Now, we’re not talking NFT birth certificates, or Oculus Rift headsets in the highchair, but rather unlimited exposure to social feeds from an extremely young age.
With so many like-minded platforms competing for Gen Z’s ears and eyes, the content that resonates tends to be delivered on a shiny silver platter, requiring minimal thought power to process. With 96% of people immediately turning to videos to learn more about a product or service, animated or video content has always taken less thought-power to consume compared to text-heavy alternatives. So, when “Entertain me in 5 seconds” is the brief, TikTok delivers. Weekly trends, dynamic transitions, user generated filters and ranked audio libraries create the perfect storm for undivided Gen Z attention. And the oldies are playing catch-up. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts effectively provide the same platform, among their original format types.
Data capture can be dystopian as hell, but frankly, the internet would be a much tricker terrain to navigate without cookies – try working in Google’s incognito mode for a day and tell me otherwise. The same rings true for younger audiences online, where personalised shopping is now the norm. For them, trading personal data for an improved online experience is a no-brainer. Because of this, Gen Z can’t be fooled by generic ads with exhausted creative. Instead, marketers need to consider using guided quizzes, self-segmentation surveys, and on-site behaviour tracking to gather higher quality data on the details that matter most. Favourite brands, sizes, categories and colours are the specifics that mean the most when delivering the tailored content that they need. In turn, we can fine tune ads displaying similar products, offers and recommendations that they actually care about.
Gen Zers can sniff out branded content from a mile off. Having been targeted by social media start-ups, drop shipping sites and 30-day free trials* (*£59.99 pcm post sign-up) for the past decade, it’s fair to say they’re wise to the ins and outs of shameless paid placements. Which is why it comes as no surprise that, in order to win their trust, brands need to demonstrate integrity.
The obvious workaround for brands looking to build trust, and ultimately advocacy, is to work with influencers to develop less corporate, and more authentic comms. But when 44% of Gen Zers claim that comparing their lives to the unrepresentative lives of content creators has negative effects on their mental health, brands must be selective with their ambassadors. Influencer fatigue is real, and we need to adapt. The creators succeeding are those combining their aspirational regime with real-life causes they honestly care about. Why on earth would a vegan food influencer have a deep-rooted passion for carpet cleaner? Gen Z are fully awake to unrealistic brand partnerships, so always seek authenticity when developing an influencer strategy.
As some brands seek out authentic influencer partnerships, others are beginning to let down their hair a little on social. While an airline provider would traditionally designate their Twitter feed to more service-orientated content, Ryanair gravitate towards pop-culture, communicating entirely through memes. By recognising and owning the typical inferences that come with budget airlines, there’s no limit for Ryanair’s internet fame. Whether it’s quote tweeting ridiculous customer complaints, or commentating on the recent F1 drama, they frame their services in a relatable, almost charming way. Frequently nodding to ‘the admin’, they’re unafraid to remind the audience that there is indeed a human behind the account – encouraging interaction on a much more personal level.
Around 58% of consumers want to see more social content that makes them laugh. Often brands try to fill a social feed with uninteresting product or service centric messaging, which overlooks the main reason that users are scrolling: they want to be entertained.
Social feeds might serve the primary purpose of entertainment, but who said learning can’t be fun? From fashion to food, there’s no denying that social media can act as a source of education. YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world, with over half of Gen Z internet users having watched a how-to video, tutorial video or educational video on the platform in the past week alone. Social now acts as the immediate solution for those everyday problems, while providing a dose of the good stuff that we didn’t realise we needed to know.
Mob Kitchen x Aldi’s Instagram Reels, Tifo IRL’s meticulous dissection of the beautiful game and Grace Woessner’s TikTok sofa flipping are all prime examples of social subcultures that can land with a Gen Z audience. Nothing is too niche; and if you’re posting about a relatively unknown area, make the content accessible and engaging for all.
Gen Z was always going to be a tough nut to crack. Behaviour on socials is evolving so quickly, it can be hard to keep up. We recommend taking the time to learn about Gen Z’s preferences and prioritise building long-lasting relationships that benefit all parties involved over those quick wins. Ready to optimise your marketing? Drop the saintnicks team a line here to get the ball rolling.
Lately, it seems that creatives everywhere have been doing double takes as AI-powered tools start to seep into mainstream media. With DALL-E creations hot on the heels of graphic designers and free copywriting sites like Jasper looming over busy marketing teams, now’s not the time to stick our heads in the sand. Instead, we want to find out whether this new wave of computer-controlled craft is really a cause for concern – or if we can make it work in our favour.
First things first: When talking about AI potentially replacing us creatives, it’s worth examining what creativity really means. Albert Einstein defined it as “seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.” Many, including a lot of us here at saintnicks, are in agreement, viewing creativity as inventiveness, as our inherent ability to use imagination to originate something new. In fact, the Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition of creativity is “the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas.” This human ingenuity is difficult to replicate – and the reason why icons like Beethoven, Maya Angelou, Matisse, the Wright brothers, or Wes Anderson are so revered.
On the contrary, others (like Steve Jobs, for example) view creativity from a more practical point of view. Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” That implies creativity is just a skill that can be learned and developed over time using reference points as inspiration. If humans, therefore, only build on what they have learned and what others have done in order to be creative, then it’s easy to argue that AI, too, can be creative. Because that’s essentially what AI does – it takes existing information (data) and, using clever algorithms, generates fresh, new content. But we’ll get to that a bit later.
In the defence of creatives, I believe there’s more to it. Sure, creativity is original, inventive, ingenious – maybe even learned. But it’s also intentional. It’s emotional. It’s contextual. As a copywriter, for example, I’m able to write with foresight and intuition. I know that an audience is likely to prefer one tagline over another, or laugh at a certain word, or be touched by a speech, simply because I share the same human experience as the people I’m talking to. I’m sentient. I consciously want my readers to feel something, I can intend for my words to elicit a response.
As humans, our thoughts, our memories, our physical sensations and the environments that surround us play huge, important parts in our lives. It’s our creativity that enables us to make connections between these things. When we create art – and I mean art in its loosest sense here, i.e. anything that’s an expression of creativity – we are either trying to discover something about ourselves, make sense of the world, affect our audience or express our thoughts and feelings. We have an innate human desire, an urge to create something meaningful.
A machine can’t do that. It doesn’t have the capacity for free thinking, nor does it have emotional intention. It can’t look at its audience and think, “I want my art to make you laugh or cry, I want to start a discussion around this topic, I want to comment on the state of the world.” Even the smartest AI can’t independently create art with meaning.
So, how can AI still be a threat to creatives if it can’t have an intention? Well, let’s look at the world of visual art for a moment.
Those who recently attended Glastonbury Festival may have crossed paths with Ai-Da, an artist who created portraits of the four headlining acts during a live painting demonstration. Although ‘live’ may not be the right word for it. You see, Ai-Da is a robot. The world’s first ultra-realistic artist robot, in fact. She uses cameras in her eyes, AI algorithms and a robotic arm to draw, paint, sculpt and perform poems. For years, she’s travelled the world, displaying her artwork in galleries, talking about her experience as a humanoid artist. You can even follow her on Instagram.
While, at first glance, Ai-Da could be mistaken for something from the year 3000, the AI she uses to create her art is quite simple. Allow me to get a bit technical here. You see, there are two different types of algorithms that can be used to create images through AI. The first one is Neural Style Transfer – where AI applies the style of one image to another. The Mona Lisa recreated in the style of Kandinsky. A photograph of an avocado re-styled as Warhol’s pop art. A pencil sketch turned into a Picasso. In order to function, the Neural Style Transfer needs both images as reference points to create its final product. This is what Ai-Da does, too. Using her ‘eyes’, she receives a reference image which she then replicates in her own, pre-programmed style. To really wrap your head around it, you can think of Neural Style Transfer as a fancy Instagram filter. Still with me?
Then there’s Generative Adversarial Networks – or GAN, for short. Unlike Neural Style Transfer, GANs can create original images from scratch. Well, sort of. GANs work by predicting an outcome based on a certain prompt. Using a set of data, they generate new examples that could plausibly fit in with the original data. So if the dataset is Van Gogh’s 900 paintings, the GAN would generate a new original image that looks like it could fit into a Van Gogh collection.
The results of GAN are pretty successful. So successful in fact, that, in 2018, Christie’s became the first auction house to offer a work of art created by an algorithm – which sold for a whopping $432,500. The artists behind Edmond de Belamy, as the artwork is called, are French collective Obvious. Using a dataset of 15,000 portraits from WikiArt, painted (by humans) between the 14th and 20th century, Obvious’ GAN created a new piece of art depicting a somewhat-blurry gentleman.
DALL-E is currently not available to the public – but the concept quickly took on a viral life of its own when Boris Dayma, a machine learning engineer, created the more accessible DALL-E mini (now called craiyon). Trained on much smaller amounts of data than DALL-E, craiyon’s machine learning improves day by day based on information inputted by its millions of users. For now, the resulting images are, at best, suited to meme culture – but as these technologies develop, it’s easy to see how they could become a part of everyday professional life. Print ads, book covers, blog headers, social posts, stock imagery, web content… the possibilities are endless. So where does that leave us?
I think the answer lies within the execution. All of these technologies, from DALL-E to Jasper, rely on prompts. They require us – the humans – to do the big thinking before they can switch on and start churning out their art. And it’s within the prompt that true creativity really lies. It’s not the machine that came up with the idea to have steampunk teddies go grocery shopping, it’s the person. The prompt satisfies both our aforementioned definitions of creativity – it requires imagination, and an ability to come up with something original, but it also requires a connection to be made, as Steve Jobs said. AI is the executioner, the maker, but we are the originators, looking at things differently, thinking up unimaginable things. To find the perfect image, you need to provide the perfect prompt. If AI can’t originate, then we creatives are still needed.
Now that we’re safe in the knowledge that AI, for the time being, isn’t going to come for our jobs entirely, we might even be able to look at how it can enhance our work and make us better. As OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman described it in an interview with the New Yorker, AI can – and should – ultimately just be treated as “an extension of your own creativity.”
In agency life, a lot of time can be wasted during the original concepting phase when all you really want to do is spit-ball ideas and get your clients’ reaction. Tools like DALL-E can be a great help to you if you’re short on time but want to present a few visuals to illustrate an idea. Even if it’s just a word on a shop front or a puppy wearing a hat. It gives a lot more power to the “What if?” when suddenly that question can be answered in minutes, rather than having to mock it all out on photoshop for hours. Plus, you’ll never have to trudge through a stock image library ever again.
One of the most remarkable features of DALL-E is its ability to make edits to an image it has already created. Want to see what a flamingo would look like inside of the pool rather than next to it? Just tell DALL-E to move it around. Boom. Little tweaks that can take up annoying amounts of time can be executed with a few verbal prompts.
Writer’s block can be one of the most debilitating experiences for someone whose livelihood depends on how many words they can get down in an hour. AI tools like Copy.ai can act not only as a timesaver when deadlines are looming but also serve up inspiration when you’ve been staring at a blank page for far too long. Using a link, a couple of words or a simple description, Copy.ai can generate headlines for Facebook, brand mottos, meta descriptions and more. It even lets you rewrite existing text in a different tone. The output is never final-product worthy and definitely needs a human eye – and hand – to finish it off for a client, but it’s a great tool for getting that pesky first draft out of the way. Full disclosure: I actually used Copy.ai myself recently to come up with some alternatives for a Call to Action button – and it worked a treat.
So, there you have it. Whilst AI might come off as a bit of a scary, magical beast at first, it can actually serve as a handy little tool to keep our creative juices flowing. And no, I don’t think it will be replacing our creative team anytime soon. We’re far too much fun in the office.
To chat with our team or learn more about saintnicks, head to www.saintnicks.uk.com.
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