TikTok x Contagious x WARC
Finding Your Centaur: Getting Creative with Gen AI
Insights from CXOs and creative leaders in APAC and METAP
In 1997, Garry Kasparov was at the peak of his career as a World Chess Champion. But it was also the year the Russian chess grandmaster got beaten at his own game. The opponent? Deep Blue, IBM's chess supercomputer. Many thought this defeat spelled the end of competitive chess as we knew it.
But, ever the strategist, Kasparov turned this setback into an opportunity for competitive chess players to learn and train alongside machines. He called these advanced chess players "centaurs", after the half-human, half-horse beasts of Greek mythology.
This piece of history inspired the title of our report, Finding Your Centaur: Getting Creative with Gen AI. When Generative AI (gen AI) came onto the scene, many also thought it spelled the end of creative industries as we knew it. But, if we learned anything from Kasparov and Deep Blue, it's not human prowess or brute computational force that wins the day—it's how people interact with machines that make the difference.
Download the full report to learn more about how you can integrate gen AI into your ideation, production, and optimization processes.
Delivering on the promise of Gen AI
From the moment OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, gen AI held unprecedented promise, ushering in a new age of marketing capabilities.
Two areas where marketers have been harnessing gen AI are localization and personalization. "Globalisation has really hit us, and it's almost impossible to hold a campaign in isolation," says Paul Nagy, Chief Creative Officer for VML in Asia Pacific. Gen AI takes the hard yards to quickly localize and personalize campaigns for different markets, especially in regions populated by a mix of cultures, like the Middle East.
Aakriti Goel, Head of Strategy for the Middle East and Africa at Leo Burnett, observes that marketers who use gen AI to localize and personalize brand communications become ardent evangelists of the technology.
"When you first start experiencing the benefits of gen AI and how it allows you to hyper-personalize messages to specific audiences, and then you start seeing increased click-through rates of 8% or 9%, then you start to understand the value of personalization," adds Goel.
Gen AI has also been helping agencies and brands connect the dots, generating insights from mountains of consumer data amassed over the years. This allows them to uncover meaningful consumer trends and purchase behaviors, and make informed decisions more quickly.
It used to take days, even weeks, to land on the right cultural insight when ideating. From initial testing with our partners, we're seeing up to 75% time savings on brainstorming—cutting time on discovering trends, hashtags, and even music. TikTok shapes culture, and now there's a tool to access all that magic.
Championing human creativity
Despite these advanced capabilities, we still can't discount the value of human oversight in using gen AI.
For example, while gen AI might help media planners uncover insights faster, it still can't understand broader contexts and provide explanations, says Mimi Lu, Head of Strategy at Dentsu Media Asia Pacific. "It is still up to us to explain the 'why' and the motivations behind these insights," adds Lu. "And we have to be able to understand whether or not this type of insight is right for the brand and the execution."
AI feels like magic, but the truth is, it can't create the kind of magic we create as professional creative people. It's always going to have to guess at the human experience, so it's never going to be able to deliver that true creativity. But what it does is get you to those moments of magic faster.
Reimagining the creative process with Gen AI
And it is this speed that underpins gen AI's great promise. Within agencies and marketing departments, gen AI is already expediting tedious or time-consuming tasks, such as research and storyboarding. Given this potential to produce more content in less time and effort, creatives now straddle the push and pull between heightened productivity and increased efficiency.
"We need to make sure we're steering the industry towards creating more time and space for us to think about the bigger picture for our clients and hone our craft, as opposed to getting into this hamster wheel of just generating more content," says Goel.
"Creating at speed only has an impact when brand leaders empower their creative teams through smoother approval processes or room to experiment," adds Amy Cho, Agency Lead at TikTok Korea." Marketers that make an effort to understand how gen AI can supercharge ideation, production, and optimization are the ones who will lead the way."
Ready to get creative with Gen AI?
In today's marketing landscape, working with gen AI tools is crucial to scale effectively. To get you started, we created this cheat sheet on how you can make gen AI a part of your creative process across the three key stages of ideation, production, and optimization.
Download the Get Creative with Gen AI: Cheatsheet
Read more about Symphony, our new Creative AI suite here.