AIとクリエイティブの交差点
This is Reinamoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Welcome to The Intersection, a new segment and audio version of my essays exploring what
the future holds at the intersection of creativity and technology. I am Reinamoto,
the founding partner of I&CO, a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo.
Based on the conversations that I have with the top creative practitioners from various industries,
I write a weekly essay to dig deeper and analyze where we may be headed as creative
and business professionals. We will be bringing this segment as a bonus episode to you.
So let's get started.
POV is greater than AI. Written and read by yours truly, Reinamoto.
Oh, clients have to pay, says Poum Lefebvre with a laugh.
Poum is an award-winning creative director with more than two decades of experience in design and
advertising. When she says this, she is referring to a client project in which she utilized AI
heavily to produce the work. As a co-founder and chief creative officer of Design Army in
Washington, D.C., Poum oversees all creative coming through her agency's doors. She is a
dear friend of mine who, like me, is from Asia. We built our respective careers in parallel in
different corners of the design and advertising industry as immigrants trying to make it in
America. In 2023, she and her team launched Adventures in AI, an advertising and branding
campaign for one of her clients, Georgetown Optician. A campaign of this caliber without
AI would have taken several months and cost $500,000 or more to produce, says Poum.
Naturally, my question at this point in my conversation with her is this,
how much did it cost? I can't tell you, said Poum. Fair enough, I expected as much,
but I can make an educated guess. This project started with a phone call from the client, Poum
says. She had worked with Georgetown Optician before. We are opening a new store and would
like your help promoting it, the client said. Typically, she would be given several month
notice for this type of ask. Four months to be exact, according to Poum. I concur,
having worked on numerous campaigns of different sizes before.
For Poum and I, as creative directors, our instinct would be to gather a team that consists
of a strategist, a project manager, a copywriter, and a designer or two to start. This would be what
we consider to be a minimum viable team. It would take at least several days to formulate a project
plan, a proper brief with specific deliverables and metrics for success, to name a few. From there,
we would want to give several days to a week to the creative team to come up with ideas,
and then a few more days for the creative director to push the team and refine the ideas.
What we present to the client would be initial ideas with some visualizations to help bring
them to life. We see the client's reaction, address their feedback, and go back to the
client a week or so later. We might repeat one more round, and by this point, about four or five
weeks in, we want to have a clear, refined direction that is approved. We then can start
preparing for production. I'll spare the rest, but to break it down, the whole process would look
プロジェクトの流れ
like this. Week 1, call from client, prepare project plan, and brief team. Week 2 to 3, concept.
Week 4, present initial ideas to client. Week 5, refine and present again. Week 6, revise and
finalize. Week 7 to 8, prep production. Week 9 to 10, shoot and production. Week 11 to 14,
post-production and client reviews. Week 15 to 16, finalize, create variations, and deliver.
This is a 16-week or four-month process oversimplified for the purpose of this essay.
It is not an unusual or unreasonable timeline if a client wanted something that was professionally
produced, or at least it would not have been before AI. As middle-aged creatives like Pum and I,
sorry, Pum, for calling you middle-aged, we have many drawers inside our brains.
The more experience we gain, the more drawers we build. Tinker Hatfield, the legendary sneaker
designer of Air Jordans and other numerous hits from Nike said this,
Creativity is a function of the library in your head. When you sit down to create,
it's a combination of everything you've done and experienced up to that point.
What differentiates a creative director from a creative is that creative directors,
good ones that is, know instinctively which drawer to open and pull out an idea at a
moment's notice. They can add a twist to the idea to make it appropriate to the given problem at
hand. Many of those ideas in our drawers are random and we just never had the right opportunity
or client to present. Others are ideas that we did present but never saw the light of day for
whatever reason. For instance, I'm working on bringing an idea to life right now that I
presented to the client in 2018. That's six years ago. The idea was well-liked and we spent about a
month preparing the execution but it turned out to be too expensive. In 2024 and beyond, AI could
change that. For ideas to be bought and brought to life, numerous factors need to align. Perhaps
that is a topic for another essay. When getting the call from the client, Poom says her client told
クライアントの要求
her they only had four weeks instead of four months. This was tied to the opening of a new
store so there wasn't flexibility. As not to digress, let's not ask why the client waited
until the last minute to call Poom. To be fair though, there are often reasons beyond their
control that we might not understand. At the time of the client's ask, Poom happened to be
experimenting with mid-journey as a hobby to design an imaginary living room or fashion outfits
for herself. This turned out to be a moment she could open one of those drawers of ideas and
inspirations. Quote, I always had this idea of space tourism and people dressed in a stylish
retro-futuristic way, unquote. By this alone, it's just an interesting visual. To make it relevant to
the client and eyewear brand, Poom did three things. Those three things came from Poom's experience,
story, craft, and speed. This is how Poom was able to connect this loose visual idea to Georgetown's
petition by creating a backstory. Quote, what if these people, all fashionably dressed, traveled to
an imaginary planet and this planet had a different climate with UV and dust that required travelers
AIを活用したプロジェクト管理
to wear glasses to protect their eyes, unquote. This was a twist she added to the original idea from the
drawer inside her brain. Without it, there will be no conceptual connection between the product, glasses,
the visual space tourism. The cherry on top was to name the idea Adventures in AI where AI is the
imaginary planet. Without a name, we don't know what to call this idea or how to refer to it.
In just a few words, this name creates a clear and memorable impression.
Second, craft. One of the most surprising yet most important steps that Poom tells me that she took
was how she rendered glasses, the very product that the client sells. Having experimented with AI,
she learned that AI was good at rendering imaginary things but not good at generating actual things
precisely as they exist in the real world. She resorted to using photos of the products
and compositing them into AI rendered figures. This might not sound like a big deal but I do
believe that this was the make or break aspect of her work. It's one thing to realize the limitations
of a tool. It's another thing to know how to compensate for those limitations and decide what
to do. That requires experience. This insight reminded me of another conversation I had with
Chef Yoshihiro Narusawa last year. A Michelin star chef and voting number one in Asia in the past,
Chef Narusawa creates highly elaborate dishes combining traditional Japanese, French,
Spanish, and Chinese cuisine methods with newer gastronomical techniques.
Although he has dozens of chefs working under him, it's Chef Narusawa himself who comes up with the
recipes. When I asked him how he manages to generate such complex recipes, he says that based
on his experience, he's able to imagine the taste of the dish he's creating. After the call from the
client, it took only a week and a bit for Poom to go back to and present the work to the client.
In the old traditional way, it would have taken her and her team of designers at least a couple
of weeks to come up with initial and unfinished work. In this case, not only was she ready to
present the idea in a week or so, but she was able to present work that was pretty much finished and
almost ready to go. Quote, how many designers did you have on your team? Unquote. Is my next question
at this point in my conversation with her? Quote, it was just me. Unquote. Poom says with both
confidence and a slight hint of guilt. On this project, unlike regular traditional projects,
since she had only four weeks, here's how it rolled out. Week one, call from client and concept. Week
two, present almost finished work. Week three, add team and expand work. Week four, finalize and
deliver. On this project, Poom played the roles of a strategist, writer, designer, director,
cinematographer, wardrobe stylist, and quite possibly more. And she did so in a week. In the
second week, she did bring home additional designers to help her expand the work and make
it more holistic campaign. She also knew that another one of the limitations at the time of
mid-journey was that it was not able to render type well at all. This is where she utilized
additional resources. Regardless, before AI, this just wouldn't have been possible. My educated guess
クリエイティブプロセスのコスト
is that she would have needed at least few people supporting her after the initial week of her
four-week process. Let's assume the average cost of a creative contractor is $125 an hour.
I could imagine having two designers and animators full-time and additional resources such as a
project manager and writer at half-time to support. For this lean minimum viable team for a month,
the cost could be somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 for a month of work.
But that's pure cost for the agency. Instead of $500,000 and full month, her client might have
gotten something in four weeks and for less or slightly more than $100,000. In theory, that is.
In reality, however, things don't align this neatly. There are several factors at play here.
For one, the relationship Puma had cultivated over the years and the trust she had earned from
the client. That is years in the making and therefore costly. Second, the many drawers
in her brain. When Paula Scherer, a legendary graphic designer, gave a sketch of a potential
logo in a meeting for Citi, the client asked how a logo could be done in a few seconds.
Scherer replied, it's done in seconds and 34 years. In Puma's case, it was done in a week
and 25 years and with AI. In addition, the cultural zeitgeist of the moment in time.
If she were to repeat the same process now, the work probably would not be as interesting
or relevant. As a whole, the process Puma went through isn't easily repeatable or replicable.
ブランド活動の価値
As we are talking about the price of creativity, Puma brings up another past campaign she worked
on and one of her signature pieces for a ballet company in Hong Kong. A beautifully styled and
wonderfully choreographed, it is a modern Wes Anderson-esque take on a classical art form.
It has 228,000 views on YouTube. On the contrary, three behind-the-scenes clips she shot on her
iPhone and uploaded to her agency TikTok account have combined 11.3 million views.
That begs the question, which is better? Spend half a million dollars on an expensive shoot and
month of work that gets 250,000 viewers or $500 and shoot on an iPhone that garners millions of
viewers? In this case, the cheap and quick option would not have been possible without the expensive
shoot on location. But this question is something many brands wonder about. For most brands,
the answer to this question is that one is not better than the other. Of course,
there's nuance and gradation and each brand needs to calibrate. However, if we are skimping on a
budget for making and advertising activities, it will catch up with us and we'll either not
gain enough or end up paying the price in some other way. It is a mistake to make a decision
purely on price. The real question for creatives is the following. Why should a client come to us
and pay more? If the answer is the former, we're in a commodity business. The harsh reality that
we face is that the price is and always will be a sticking point with clients. Technology
throughout history consistently commoditized an aspect of many businesses and therefore forces
the price down. It's an inevitability that we can't turn away from. For creative businesses,
視点の重要性
we just didn't think it would happen to us so soon. Are they coming because they want something
cheap and quick or do they want our point of view and value it? The answer may not be as black and
white as we want it to be. There'll be shades of both. But without a POV, a point of view,
we may as well let AI take over. I started writing this newsletter in 2023 as a way to
organize my thoughts that come from various conversations with many creative practitioners.
Over the course of several months, I see and notice new patterns and new insights gained from
multiple people and I take the time to organize and write them down so that they can be useful
and hopefully helpful to you as listeners and readers. If you're listening to this on Spotify,
there's a Q&A field so please do send us your questions and comments. And if you like our
podcast, please leave us a 5-star rating. We'll be so grateful.
I'm Ray Namoto and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
