Famous Campaigns’ James Herring is about as sick of holiday AI, and AI in general, as I am, which is about as much as everyone else seems to be.
In his recent post, he brings up the near-universal disgust at Coca-Cola for, two years running, replacing “the Real Thing” with the really creepy thing via soulless dystopian AI-generted plastic cheerfulness. And he speculates on what impact that kind of pressure — the overall anti-AI sentiment — might have on the showstopping holiday ads we expect to see from brands every year.
He highlights some truly amazing campaigns a few brands have made this year that dialed the human-craftedness up to 11, including an ad for the Oura ring with twelve sets, Apple Music’s new visual identity that apparently required a top global music artist and a Jason Statham movie’s worth of oil, and tiny DeLonghi coffee shops, like, y’all, have I told you about how much I love tiny versions of regular-size things…
I agree with Herring on everything and only want to add an asterisk to his final line:
The human touch is back in fashion. It just costs more than it used to.
It doesn’t have to, though.
The projects he highlighted — the Oura city, the Apple Music rebrand — were big and huge and expensive because “big and huge and expensive” were the point. The effort was the point — they were showing off how not-AI they are by doing something only AI could do easily, but that they were doing with great difficulty. They weren’t going to enormous lengths to show you the human hand — they were going to enormous lengths to have a human hand to show you.
(You know, like OK Go has been doing their entire career, except when OK Go does it it’s charming.)
But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Polaroid billboard about how AI can’t generate sand between your toes? That’s evocative, simple, and real, and it didn’t take a hundred-person team three months to accomplish it. When Herring quotes Etsy’s Mandy Lee in saying it’s “the imperfect human elements” that make their most searched-for items so desirable, it’s “imperfect” and “human,” not “expansive” and “expensive,” that are driving demand.
Just be real. Just be real. The human touch only costs a lot if your goal is to show how much you can accomplish with the human touch. The performativity is what’s expensive. The cost is only costly when you decide that spending a lot of money on it is the best way to show you care. If being Aggressively Not AI is the point of your ad, then yes, it gets spendy.
But if your audience is the point of your ad, and your brand, and your message, nothing about that has to be expensive to be authentic. I’ve been celebrating weepy holiday ads for over a decade now — this year’s ceremony will be the eleventh — and while some winners have been flashier than others, it’s never been the production value that’s caused the tears to flow. It was a woman with her dad’s old Chevy, or a stop-motion baby carrot, or a lonely old man who goes to unthinkable lengths to get his family back together (any other way, Opa) that did it.
Opa only needed practical effects and an audience who cared about him, and so do you.
There isn’t only “Soulless AI Coke Santa” and “mad-wicked-expensive musical oil spill” — there’s also sincere. So this holiday season, show your humanity by showing your humanity. We’re in a creative field. Both our job title and the output of our work is “creative.” If your budget won’t let you do it practically, and your assorted perfecly reasonable aversions won’t let you use AI, just… do something you can do. Make it as simple and messy and handmade as you have to make it to make it real.
Let’s be real about something: Nobody, not a single body, is going to look at the new Apple Music visual brand and be, like, “Oh, shit, that looks so harmonic. I can just hear it when I look at it.” But you know at least one person who cried literal human tears about a teddy bear flight attendant, and I think we can all agree that is the true meaning of Christmas.
(And hey, if you’re looking for non-itchy, non-wonky, non-acrylic handmade holiday gifts, I know this one lady…)