At least the creative jobs can't be taken over by robots. Wait, what?

I know I have beaten the 'robots are coming to take our jobs' angle pretty much to death here over the last few years, and I really want to move on to other things like what we can learn about leadership from Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality, and why Jasper Johns is America's greatest artist, something about the automation of formerly human jobs keeps sucking me back in.

Check this excerpt from a recent piece on Business Insider titled How Facebook Is Replacing Ad Agencies With Robots, about some of the behind-the-scenes machinations that result in those often eerily smart advertisements you see on your Facebook timeline and newsfeed:

Facebook is working furiously to find more ways to make ads work better inside its ecosystem. Many of those ads, however, are untouched by ad agency art directors or "creative" staffers of any kind. And a vast number, from Facebook's larger e-commerce advertisers — think Amazon or Fab.com — are generated automatically by computers. 

If you're an e-commerce site selling shoes, you want to serve ads that target people who have previously displayed an interest in, say, red high-heels. Rather than serve an ad for your brand — "Buy shoes here!" — it's better to serve an ad featuring a pair of red heels specifically like the one the user was browsing for.

The ads are monitored for performance, so any subjective notions of "taste" or "beauty" or "style" or whatever go out the window — the client just wants the best-performing ads. There's no need for a guy with trendy glasses who lives in a loft in Williamsburg, N.Y., to mull over the concepts for hours before the ad is served.

It might be easy to miss in that description, but the key to the entire 'no humans necessary' ad creation and display process is a technology that is called 're-targeting' - Facebook (via some partners it works with), knows what products and services you have shown interest in out on the web, and then the algorithms try to 'match' your browsing trail with what the advertiser hopes will be a relevant ad. Since the volume of people and data and browsing history is so immense that a person or people couldn't actually create all the possible ads the process might need, the algorithms do all the work. 

So if you stopped at that Rasheed Wallace 'Ball Don't Lie' shirt on the online T-shirt site this morning, don't be surprised if you see an ad for similar on your Facebook feed tonight. 

Not a big deal you might be thinking, it's the web after all, and algorithms and machines run it all anyway. 

The big deal if you are a creative type person in advertising or media planning is this - if these kinds of re-targeted and machine generated ads show some solid ROI, more and more of the ad budget for big brands will follow. Budget that could be used for TV spots, print campaigns, or even more innovative games and contests on social networks, (that still, for now, have to be hatched and launched by actual humans). If machine-generated ads drive more revenue, (or drive revenue more efficiently), than traditional and expensive creative, then we'll see that impact in staffing. 

Traditional ads often run in media where it can be notoriously difficult to determine success - how valuable and how much revenue for a brand like Budweiser can be attributed to an obscenely expensive Super Bowl ad?

But these computer generated Facebook ads? The system can see in real-time how they are performing, which versions of a given campaign are more effective, and they can learn and adapt in reaction to this data. They are smart, so to speak. Almost everything about them from an ad standpoint is 'better' than the creative ad in a magazine or on TV.

Except for the fact that hardly any people are needed to create them. Depending on your point of view of course.

Be nice to the robots.

What do cat videos and unauthorized outsourcing have in common?

Let's review two recent stories of shall we say, extremely 'creative' approaches that individual workers have taken in order to get their jobs done more efficiently:

One - Collections agent develops software program to automate 95% of his job, uses his free time to play cube wars with his colleagues and watch Office Space

Two - Software developer outsources his work to a Chinese firm for a fraction of his salary, spends most of his 'workday' surfing Reddit and watching cat videos.

Pretty amusing stories, and they justifiably made the rounds across the tech news sites when they hit. Everyone, particularly occasionally too smart for their own good techies, love a good Dilbert-esque story of managerial incompetence, developer/employee creativity, and the absurdity of corporate life.

But dig just a tiny bit deeper than that and what do we see in these examples? What's the common denominator across these tales?

Well to me, they are almost completely classic examples of management (or leadership if you think that reads better), lack of attention to, respect for, and appreciation of the talents, ideas, and abilities inherent in their teams.

In the case of the collections agent, it was obvious that even a cursory attempt to streamline and automate the existing work process would result in both cost savings and increased collection rates. And in the case of the software development outsourcing, again, clearly it was a business strategy that resulted in equal or better product quality and significantly reduced costs.

Both these novel and creative approaches were so apparent and easy to uncover for these two workers on the front lines that they were able to implement them on their own, without the need of a big project team, some kind of formal process or model, without a fancy consultant coming up with the idea, and perhaps most importantly - unencumbered by corporate hierarchy, politics, and 'We have always done it this way' syndrome.

The ideas your organization needs are not locked up in some guru's head or just floating somewhere in space. They are probably right in front of you - in the workarounds, shortcuts, and 'unauthorized' arrangements that your most creative workers have already taken. 

You'd be better off trying to get these ideas more out in the open, rather than continuing to perpetuate an environment where great ideas have to hide.

VIDEO - On how ridiculous you 'big thinkers' sound

Take two minutes of your Friday to watch the video embedded below, (Email and RSS subscribers please click through), titled 'Outside the Box', by director Joe Pelling.

Outside the Box from Sherbet on Vimeo.

Classic.

Hysterical.

Familiar?

And hopefully a good reminder to any of us, (me too), who might occasionally take ourselves too seriously.

That's all I've got for the week.

Have a great Weekend all!

In a slump? Maybe you need a celebrity Global Creative Director

I was close to dropping this post into the 'Job Titles of the Future' bucket, but then I realized that the idea of a 'creative director' isn't really all that new or novel. Ad agencies, publishers, marketing companies and the like have had and will continue to have a 'Creative Director' role for some time now. But what is new, and who knows if it will eventually move past stunt hiring and into the mainstream, are organizations of all kinds tapping celebrities known for their ideas and personalities as more than just spokespersons, but as 'Global Creative Directors'.Gaga-inspired camera glasses

I'll give you three recent examples of this trend, (please, if you know of more, share them in the comments), and then offer a take on why these seem to be happening more and more, and if there is indeed anything that our 'normal' organizations can take from these hires.

1. Polaroid (surprisingly still around), hires singer Lady Gaga as Creative Director for a new line of products, and later unveils the results of their first collaboration, some new Polaroid gadgets at CES in 2011.

2. BlackBerry, (I really want to be able to come back to you BlackBerry), hires singer Alicia Keys as Global Creative Director. Keys will collaborate with BlackBerry to work "with app developers, content creators, retailers, carriers and the entertainment community to further shape and enhance the BlackBerry 10 platform, and inspire creative use through its remarkable capabilities and functionality."

3. Anheuser-Busch names actor/singer/producer Justin Timberlake as the Creative Director for their Bud Light Platinum brand, seeing JT as a talent that "is one of the greatest creative minds in the entertainment industry, and his insights will help us further define Bud Light Platinum’s identity in the lifestyle space". 

The cynical (and probably fair) reaction to all three of the above examples would be to simply assume that these 'creative director' arrangements are really just the hundreds of years old celebrity pitchman or woman gimmick just spun a little differently to make the arrangement seem a little deeper than the the typically surface-level celebrity relationships with brands.  After all, what does Alicia Keys know about modern smartphone technology, or Gaga about the technical and competitive challenges in the consumer photography market?

So why the push to re-brand or re-frame these celebrities as 'creative directors' and not just as spokespeople? 

Perhaps, (admittedly giving the companies a huge benefit of the doubt here), that these organizations have realized that talent, great ideas, inspiration, and innovation can come from all kinds of sources, and in these examples, from non-traditional ones. Perhaps, these organizations have embraced the idea that incredibly talented people from alternate, adjacent, or even unrelated fields might have something to offer, some new perspective, or fresh eyes, that can actually be of value to their businesses.

Perhaps, that being really, really, successful at something, might just be a sign of a person that could be really successful at lots of things, even if their background and resume would be one that would never 'pass' the initial assessment for any of the organization's open jobs.

These companies are all looking for something, some kind of a lift, some new energy. They are taking a chance certainly, but at least they are doing more than holding yet another staff meeting with the same assembled cast of characters and asking, 'So, anyone have any ideas?'

The Etch A Sketch and Letting Go in Order to Create

Over the weekend I caught the news that the creator of the legendary Etch A Sketch toy, Andre Cassagnes, passed away at the age of 86. The Etch A Sketch, with its iconic plastic red frame, gray slate 'writing' surface, and its dual white rotating draw wheels was an instant it from its debut in 1959.  Over 100 million Etch A Sketches have been sold since, and even in the age of computers, smartphones, tablets, and powerful design applications, the Etch A Sketch still remains popular, with a new batch of 'Sketchies', (I am not sure that is even a term, I might have just made it up), joining the ranks every year.

The singular feature and benefit of the Etch A Sketch is it's impermanence - don't like the way a drawing was turning out, simply stop, shake, and start all over. You'd literally 'wipe the slate clean' and could begin anew. Today that doesn't seem like a big deal, in this modern age of the digital 'undo' and where the marginal cost of saving one more version or taking one more digital image is essentially nothing. Back in the 60s and 70s this was a really big deal - the toy's ability to reset itself and allow the creator to start over without wasting any raw materials was a massive benefit.

But the impermanence of the Etch A Sketch worked the other way as well - if you managed to create something valuable and meaningful with the toy, (admittedly, not that easy to accomplish), you'd be tempted to set the toy down for a while, to show your creation to friends and family, and to make sure NO ONE got too grabby with your creation, lest some inadvertent jostling destroy your art.

Eventually though, you'd be forced to let go in order to continue to play with the Etch A Sketch, for as fantastic the device was, it could only 'hold' one creation at a time. To continue to create, to explore, to perhaps develop something new that could exceed in beauty or cleverness the prior effort, you'd have to bid farewell to the old and set off on creating something new.

It's an interesting dilemma really, one that many of us face today, the desire or tendency to cling too long and too fast to what we've done in the past that can constrain us from looking at today's problems and tomorrow's opportunities with fresh, unclouded eyes.

The Etch A Sketch forced you to let go in order to move forward. That was it's limitation and it's charm.

Have a Great Week!