Op-Ed: AI advertising: Did someone get something right for once?

You’ve heard of Pandora’s Box. AI advertising could be Pandora’s Coffin if it gets ugly. Given the sheer random chaos AI can generate at the agentic level, and its other delightful hobbies, AI advertising is a new ballgame where nobody knows the rules.

Skepticism is currency in any discussion of commercial AI, and the distrust is very high. In the pitiless world of advertising, metrics define everything. You have to sell, deliver value, and deliver strong returns.

This is huge money, like Google’s annual revenue level. Advertising on every level, from Google Ads to major marketing, takes no prisoners. “Industry standard” means nothing. Hence the wariness when it comes to mainstream ads using AI.

AI slop doesn’t sell.

With the current levels of downright hatred for any AI “creativity, it’s a big ask to get the advertising sector all starry-eyed and fizzy about AI ads.

Enter Higgsfield

To balance the scales, some people really do think AI advertising might be a good, productive, revenue-friendly way of delivering ads fast and cheap.

Adweek partnered with Higgsfield AI, an “AI native creative suite”. They put AI creative abilities to the test and came up with a very different take on AI as a creative commercial dynamic.

It’s not quite a rave review, but Higgsfield had a very relevant point to make about AI advertising at the creative and production levels. According to Mahi de Silva, chief strategy officer of Higgsfield:

“It is a new language for creators, and it’s a new form of expression—the ability for them to fully realize what’s in their brain without the physical limits of cameras, lighting, location, and budget.”

To translate for non-ad people:

Ideation to production can be excruciatingly time-consuming, expensive, and downright murderous in terms of competitive commercial advertising. You do business as an agency or indie on the strength of your ads and your metrics.

This isn’t a guessing game.

Nobody needs AI weirdness in hard commercial product advertising, where your ad is your instant image and defines how you as an advertiser do business.

One botched production can be lethal to an agency. This is a portfolio industry. “What have you done, and what was the result?” are the things that matter. There are no second prizes.

AI backlash is getting massive at the coalface

Higgsfield has taken an almost unique position in relation to the current tide of AI advertising controversies. These controversies aren’t exactly marvels of enthusiasm and acceptance of AI.

“Human-made” is now a true selling point. Hatred of AI slop is effectively universal.

Nobody’s kidding.

The current AI trust situation stinks at all levels, from chatbots to users.

The level of disruption has been too violent, too threatening. Talking about marketing, the overall marketing of AI has been worse than abysmal.

The market image is low-quality slop, job losses, and people gloating over these disasters. “Whoopee, hundreds of thousands of people just lost their jobs” isn’t endearing AI to the world. Nor is the astonishing chaos of AI deployment. Unrealistic adoption by people with “debatable” levels of competence has led to massive cleanups after failures and rehiring the experts to fix the mess across whole sectors.

This is beyond absurd.

It’s dangerous.

Trust is impossible.

If even the top AI people can’t control their AIs, what chance do mainstream users have?

Can you, as a user or a client, fix anything fast with your AI if it goes wrong?

The risks are all too real.

AIs should be “safe for baby” in the most literal sense.

The bottom line isn’t hard to find. Give barely literate people a new technology, and what do you expect?

Let’s add a dimension here. Many AI users are truly trying to get value from their AIs. They’re more AI-literate than most, and they’re very much pro-AI. They see opportunities.

The net outcome is that whatever they do, the mere use of any AI at all is a perceived major negative. “Productive”, you say?

The AI sector is responding, vaguely and indecisively, and above all ineffectively, to these issues. That’s not a good look, either. Particularly when any single AI agent out of the millions of them can trash the image more every second.

Let’s try a bit of subtle irony and look at this total shambles as an advertising campaign for AI in general:

We have a whole new class of technology.

We have no idea what it will do or why it does it.

We don’t know if we can help when things go wrong.

Buy our products.

Did somebody stick a decimal point in front of the collective IQs of the entire AI sector?

This is moron-level tech marketing at best. “Our products can kill you or bankrupt you or destroy your economy and/or species”. Some selling point you have there.

How can this utter dog’s breakfast with promises of more to come possibly be acceptable?

Let’s get back to Higgsfield and a highly relevant strategic point for AI in general. Advertising is all about presence, presentation, and above all commercial values in the most unambiguous terms. This is what AI needs to look like in the markets and at the consumer level. They’ve achieved something they can point to as an actual achievement in a super-tough commercial environment.

What they’ve obviously done is deliver AI values in a controlled, properly oversighted AI environment, generating new product. Note the use of the word “new”, exactly what AI is accused of being unable to do. They’ve been able to discuss it on Adweek, a long-running, load-bearing news outlet for the advertising sector.

A couple more questions:

Is it possible to do things well with AI?

If so, why aren’t you doing them?

AI can be a major asset for humanity. So it should be. Make it so.