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This is ReinaMoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone. Welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity, technology, work, and life. I am ReinaMoto, the founding partner of
I&CO, a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo. Today's episode is part two of my
conversation with P.J. Kaldas, best-selling author originally from Brazil, based in New York.
This time, however, he is P.J. Pereira, the other name he uses for his day job as an award-winning
advertising creative director. He founded his own creative advertising agency almost 15 years ago
called Pereira Odell in San Francisco. His agency is known for its unconventional approach to
advertising, and he's one of the leading figures in what's called the branded entertainment category.
If you haven't listened to part one of my conversation with P.J., we talked about the
impact of AI specifically on writing. Please check it out also. So here's part two of this
conversation. Let's get started. Okay, so switching away from, you know, your writer job, you know,
AIが与える広告への影響
from P.J. Kaldas to P.J. Pereira, and just jump right into what you do as a marketing advertising
creative director. I'll start with the negative. What's the bad news about AI in the context of
branding, marketing, advertising? There are two bad news, I think. One is that if you're really
committed to the way that things work today, you may not have a job very, very soon,
in just a matter of years, right? I remember when I started in advertising,
there were still computers had just come, finally took all the desks in the creative department,
but there's still some people with that, like, ah, no, I'm still using my typewriter. There are
three writers in the whole department that still use typewriters. Those guys didn't last much longer.
They were brilliant. It didn't last much longer because the energy that they spent resisting
was bigger than the energy they spent creating. So they got distracted by the struggle and they
got kicked out. I think if you're overly committed to the way that things are today,
you may end up spending so much energy resisting AI that you're going to stop
creating and then people who are just free to create with AI are going to kick your ass.
AIのパターンベースとマーケティングの危険性
So that's one of the bad news for some people that are resisting for most of them. Some will
survive out of brilliance, but most will die, will die professionally. I've seen it happen
when the internet arrived in the agency world and most people felt like, ah, that's not cool enough.
You know, it's much cooler to do films. I know that it's going to happen again. I can feel,
I can see it. It's going to happen again. You just have to have patience and resilience because
it's not going to be overnight. It always starts slow and always ends fast. So if you stick with
it and you have that faith on what I'm telling you, you're going to stick with it and you're
going to be, it may end up becoming my boss. So just go for it. The other part of the bad news
is that AI is still based on patterns. So if we don't, and marketers have a very deep, natural
obsession for best practices and that combination of searching for best practices and tools that
analyzes patterns and find best practices is a very dangerous thing because it can make that
sad repetition because it's a self-feeding process. You know, if too many people start
to use these machines to create work that perform well and they get used and feed the system,
that becomes the landscape and then perform well. And then the machines learn from, it creates
a cycle that you cannot get out of. And it may make marketing and the creative landscape even
more repetitive than it is today. If you turn TV on and eventually find yourself watching live TV,
you can't, it's weird. It's hard to escape the feeling that every commercial feels very similar.
You know, there's some that stand out. And I think that has always been the case because
クリエイターの可能性拡大
people still try to follow what they know, what they think is going to work, what they've
seen worked in the past. But I think that that's going to be even harder to dismiss. So I think
those are the two dangers that I see. So the flip side of the question, what's the good news?
The good news, I would say that one is that creators will probably have a chance to spend
more time on the things that they, if they embrace it, they're going to have more time for the parts
that they like. It can ask AI to work as an assistant to do things that they don't like to
do anymore. So humans can focus on the more enjoyable parts of the creative process and the
things that they have real talent for. That's one of the good news. The other part of the good
news is that AI radically expands your skillset. For example, if a stylist, a fashion stylist,
who is really good at putting the best outfits for working for photographers, but he never took
the time to understand light and camera angles and everything, but he knows what looks good,
right? He has a taste, he can build a... A stylist can, with Mijorni for example, today,
can produce incredible photography by telling Mijorni what they want to portray.
So being part of the photography process and being really talented and knowing the end results,
having a vision, you can operate the tool to fill the gaps that you... With the skills that you don't
have and make it yours. An animator or an illustrator, let's say that I can... I saw this
other day, this guy did this amazing task. He took a video of himself at his own apartment
doing things that look similar to a scene on Indiana Jones. Then he used Mijorni to create
Indiana Jones-like illustrations that with his photo uses a seed. And then he asked another AI
to take his homemade apartment video, look like the illustrations that he did with Mijorni and
added the soundtrack of Indiana, the real scene from Indiana Jones. And he replicated second by
second on the video. So it looked like an animated version of Indiana Jones. And it was just one
illustrator doing it and it looked amazing, right? So imagine how one illustrator with those tools in
his hands can eventually do a picture film. You know, I had the ideas, I know how to do it,
I had the ideas, I know how to write a script, I know how to draw the characters,
but I don't know how to animate them. With the right tools, eventually he can compete with Pixar
and do an animated film. A musician that has, that doesn't know how to operate anything visual,
but he knows what he wants, can make a video, a music video for his music using the right...
So I think the expansion of creative vision is a fascinating thing that may bring us from the
industrialized, we talk about the creative industry today, right? If you go back to the
Renaissance and we say, imagine if we had said in the beginning of the creative,
the industrial revolution, we told an artist that, hey, the creative world is going to become
an industry, we're going to break the tasks into tiny little slices, specialties, just like we do
with cars, just like Henry Ford is doing with cars, we're going to do that with arts as well.
Imagine how awesome this is. So that artist back then would look at that, that's horrible,
I don't want that, I want to control the entire process, like Michelangelo used to do. That's
the nirvana, that's the beauty of the artistic process. But somehow our generation got into
artistic and creative fields today. We learned that the creative process is fragmented,
so we're okay with it. But imagine if I could tell you, Reina Motto, you are a man of taste,
I don't trust anyone more than I trust you to understand what beauty is, right? But you cannot
do a Pixar-level animation. But if you have the tools to create a Pixar-level animation,
I guarantee they can do something prettier than Pixar can do, because you have that level of
ネットコミュニティの盛り上がり
taste that they don't. They're brilliant there, but they don't have your star effect, you know?
Right, right.
That is fascinating, that is amazing news. The amplification of our particular,
specialized talent, that we can still be there, we can still do that, but now we can use
all the... fill the gaps with AI. If you're asking another person to fill the gap for you,
someone that you're not that great at, and you're asking a computer to do,
but you still have your vision. For as long as your vision is there, I think it's still wonderful,
it's still artistic, it's still powerful, it's still creative and brilliant. I think that we
are just resetting that part of this outsourcing. It's not going to be to human beings, it's going
to be to machines, but as long as your vision is there, as long as you're not just lazily
writing a prompt and being happy with whatever the AI is giving you, that's okay.
And I think that future excites me. The future of de-industrializing creativity,
I think is a beautiful one.
クリエイティブエージェンシーの重要性
You run your own agency, right? Your creative agency. You have clients like Meany and many
other big brands, and they come to you and your agency for creative solutions for a business
challenge, to build awareness, to make them more successful. What are the aspects of your agency
that you think will be relevant in three, five years? And what are the aspects of your agency
that you think can be or should be replaced by either AI or automated tools?
I like to... It's a really good question. One of those things that keep me awake at night.
Maybe it's not going to even be done by the agencies anymore, and clients are going to
do some of that themselves, and maybe that's going to be a possibility. But breaking out of the
patterns is still something that I think is going to be more essentially the work and the task
that we are going to be given. I think that the essence of a creative agency is being the ones
who can actually break the patterns and take clients out of the mindset of following best
practices to creating the next best practice, right? This is our job. We're going to be able to
focus more of our energy on that. Do you think production companies should be worried?
If they are the kind of companies that add creative twist to things, that add perspective
and vision and taste, they are actually going to be more sought after because society is going to
get very tired of those patterns very quickly, just like we're getting tired of mid-journey
initial patterns. Inspiration happens inside of the human being. The input and the poking
for the inspiration can come from a coffee cup, or it can come from a computer, or it can come
from something that your son told you, or a TV, or a book that you read. Those are all sources of
inspiration. But the inspiration, the moment, that magical moment that happens inside of you,
that's why I may read a book and like it, and you may read a book and have an idea.
It's the same book, but the inspiration is very personal. That spark and what is going to spark
is individual. People that are called creative people, they see that more often than others.
クリエイティブ産業への進出のアドバイス
Right, right, right. Yeah. If you were to give advice to a 25-year-old trying to get into,
I would just say, a creative industry. It doesn't have to be advertising, it doesn't have to be,
it could be filmmaking, it could be fashion and whatnot. But something to do with creativity,
what advice would you give to a 25-year-old individual trying to break it in?
Can I make it 16 instead of 25? Let's say my son, let's say my son.
Yes, yes.
I was talking to my wife a couple of months ago, and I was telling her how the single thing that
defined my career was actually the moment, I can pinpoint, I was seven, eight years old,
and my uncle, who was a computer programmer, he said that he wanted to teach me how to program
because he thought that I was going to enjoy it. And he did, and I actually loved it. And
I realized how programming was actually a very creative task, just like drawing or writing,
there were other things that I would like to do. So years later, the internet explodes and
everything, and that's when I got into the business and how I got into the business.
And at that point, understanding how computers think and operate was fundamental for me
to have a differentiation and be faster to adapt to those changes that everyone is going through
than my peers. So people that were more experienced than me evolved slower than I did because I knew
computers. I didn't program anymore, but I knew computers. I knew that code works kind of like
this, and this is how you can force code to operate in a way that it wasn't architected to do and
everything. And that gave me a leg up, right? The same way that other people who created then
the Razorfish of the world, the RGAs of the world, the AKQAs of the world, they're all coming from
people who had a technology, an understanding of technology. And I felt like, you know what?
I think this is going to be big. So the next, I believe that the next barons of the creative
industry, and here I am, I talk about industry again, but the next barons of industry are going
to be, of creative industry, are going to be people who understand this new kind of computing
that collaborates with you instead of just following orders, right? And I'm saying this because
my son wants to be a filmmaker. He wants to go to film school. He's obsessed with film. And I was
telling my wife that if there was one gift that I wanted to give him was teaching him how to
collaborate with a computer that learns. So I showed him Midjourney. I started to play with it.
He started to do it. And of course, like everyone else, he started to do pretty interesting things,
but that looked like Midjourney. And along the way, I've been kind of pushing, slowly pushing him
to get something that is more like him or like someone else and just getting more of a sense of
style out of it. So he started to do it and started to get really excited about taking a tool that
learns and teaching it to create something that is his, that no one has ever seen.
This is the best gift that I think right now I can give to my son.
ライトニングクエスチョン
With this episode, we started a new section called Lightning Questions. During the interview, we dig
deep into different topics surrounding creativity. On the contrary, with this section, we ask the
same questions to the guests to react on the spot, and we don't let them see the questions in advance.
So if you're not, if you weren't doing what you do today, either a writer or an advertising creative
director, what else would you be doing as a profession? I'll teach martial arts. Number two,
if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live? At a beach, anywhere. Number three,
where's the next place that you'd like to travel to? I actually not wanting to travel much. I
actually want to travel less. I think I've traveled so much in my life that travel became
work. So I don't like to travel. I don't want to travel anymore. Number four, what's your favorite
food? My favorite food is becoming more and more often the simple food and neighborhood food.
Number five, what's your favorite song or favorite type of music? Brazilian music. Music is the one
thing that I used to connect to my roots. So I have multiple playlists used to still remain
Brazilian. Question number six, what was your key turning point in your life? I think that the day
that I learned to program. Question number seven, what is your superpower? My superpower is not
caring if something is going to work before I try. Last question, what is creativity? I would say it's
the opposite of logic. This was part two of my conversation with PJ Pereira, an award-winning
AIの重要性
advertising creative director and the founder slash creative chairman of Pereira Odell. When new
technologies and new tools become available, it's important to at least try playing with them and
see what that enables you to do. As PJ was saying, it's not AI that will replace you. It's humans
using AI that will replace you. Not every tool might be as profound as AI, but it's pretty obvious
these days that AI is going to change the way we live and the way we interact. Therefore,
even if you don't think that your job is going to be taken by AI, it's worth the time to spend
at least playing with it and see what the possibilities are. It's not AI that will replace
you. It's humans using AI that will replace you. I thought that was a simple and profound statement
that I would like to take to my heart and also for the audience if you can give it a thought
and think about your own future. I'm Reina Moro and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
