Artificial Intelligence came up in every talk our team saw at last week’s D&AD Festival — a flagship event for the global design and advertising industry held here in the UK.
But the D&AD organisation celebrates creative ingenuity and design excellence, too. Are AI and craft in competition when it comes to branding, or can they be complementary?
What does branding look like in a future defined by emerging technologies? How should we, and the industry, respond?
Craft is a constant
Quality of execution — or, craft — has always been needed to build brands. Today, though, the humanisation and emotion that craft evokes is more important than ever. Consumers have a greater appetite for meaningful interactions in a tech-driven world, and brands are seeking ways to appear more ‘human’ as a result.
This year’s D&AD Pencil winners show how valuable quality execution still is. There’s a craft to the strategy and design of brand storytelling; you need a winning idea, executed brilliantly. Camila Moletta, Design Director LATAM, Coca-Cola Company and panel judge for the D&AD Creative Transformation category said her key criteria when selecting potential winners was, “Does it have enough craft?”
Yasuharu Sasaki, Chief Creative Officer at Dentsu, whose work for My Japan Railway was awarded the highest accolade of a D&AD Black Pencil explained “We want to leverage [the] power of craft to make our communications human”. So where do technology and AI fit?
Technology needs to be incorporated meaningfully and strategically. Superficial uses of AI are nothing more than a wagon-hopping exercise, and customers will know it. How can emerging tech better connect people to each other, to new experiences, and to your brand?
Dentsu’s campaign for My Japan Railway achieves this by combining three key truths:
- A human truth (that people love collecting beautiful things)
- A brand truth (that train travel can be romantic and explorative)
- A technological truth (that playful digital interactions evoke joy)
Craft and quality sit at the heart of the whole campaign — and that’s why it works.
It’s not craft versus technology, but both together
Creative teams can’t avoid AI. And the takeaway from D&AD Festival, where the outlook for AI was optimistic, is that they shouldn’t want to either.
AI is the next internet revolution and a natural evolution for the industry. We can delegate laborious tasks to it, unlocking more time and headspace for creative thinking.
For teams, AI is best used as a creative tool — like the Adobe Creative Suite. If we view AI this way, it should never conflict with quality production. Typography best practices didn’t get thrown out with the advent of desktop publishing and we can’t let the prevalence of AI technology erode the craft of our work.
Similarly, for branding, AI and other emerging technologies can create new opportunities for connection, but never at the expense of brilliantly executed design.
Can AI enhance a designer’s craft?
So here’s the question: if AI is a future must-have tool for brand design teams, can it ever be used to create higher-quality output?
AI learns, after all. Could we teach design best practices to an AI, resulting in a predictive, co-pilot similar to the writing tool Grammarly?
Maybe. But the role of a skilled designer still won’t be replaced. AI might be able to do some of the hard graft, but an experienced (human) designer will still be needed to control and curate the AI’s output.
AI is a tool, not a team of its own.
Championing craft for 15 years and counting
Craft has always been a core value at The Unknown Creative. We approach every stage of brand strategy, identity, and campaign design with the same tenacity and care. It’s how we build brands that set a new standard.
We’re exploring AI for efficiency gains, the same as everyone else. But we firmly believe that the craft and care only a human creates is what’s truly valuable for brands, today and in the future.