Current Issue Summary
September 2022 (Vol. 62, Issue 3)
How Deepfakes and Artificial Intelligence Could Reshape the Advertising Industry: The Coming Reality of AI Fakes and Their Potential Impact on Consumer Behavior
Creative AI technologies, such as deepfakes and generative adversarial networks (GANs), enable new ways of shaping audio and visual content in advertising. Although there’s a growing body of work examining AI and its applications to advertising, scholars have yet to examine how AI could reshape the practice of advertising itself going forward. Indeed, creative tools used—changing a model’s skin tone, age or gender and even swapping a model’s entire body or voice—may, in fact, “cause potentially dramatic changes in how advertisements are conceived, produced, edited and targeted,” researchers write in this study.
Addressing this knowledge gap, Colin Campbell and Kenneth Bates (both at University of San Diego), Kirk Plangger (King’s College London), Sean Sands (Swinburne University of Technology) and Jan Kietzmann (University of Victoria) offer a review of AI. They explain how it encompasses three different types of intelligence: analytic, interpretative and creative. Then, using a combination of their own expertise and consultations with advertising practitioners in the U.S., Asia-Pacific and Europe, they describe potential “promises” and “perils” for seven advertising stakeholders: brand managers, planners and strategists, creative teams, producers and creators, talent and models, distributors, regulators and policy makers.
Among the findings:
- For brand managers, AI will likely bring easier brand innovation and collaborations, as well as cost savings due to changes in production and effectiveness. However, ads could be easily replicated, stolen or maligned. There will be higher costs of protecting brands; and brand meaning may become even more varied as ad variations proliferate.
- Creative teams will have the benefit of “boundless” idea creation in which, for example, personal decoders allow anyone to become the model they see in an ad. But because of the increased variety of ads, being creative gets more challenging, as dozens or even thousands of different versioned ads could threaten consistency.
- As a result of such developments, regulators may be forced to intervene more frequently in competitive brand attacks because of manipulated advertising.