AI’s Impact on a Digital Ad Agency in Phoenix

Stop me if you’ve heard this already, but ReThinc was founded in 2008 and positioned as a ‘different kind of agency’ based on how we ran the business internally and externally. I’m proud that we’ve earned a leadership position as a regional boutique ad agency.

To characterize the changes we’ve seen in our industry as significant would be an understatement. I think anyone who’s worked in marketing understands that change is the one constant we deal with every day. I’m hard pressed to think of any industry that experiences more change than what we endure in the marketing field.

The current, most prolific change we are working through involves the cost, benefit, and potential detriment* of AI platforms. I understand that this is not unique to us, other marketing firms, other industries, or even the rest of the world, for that matter.

Not to sound too dramatic, but AI is the biggest, most impactful change we’ve ever experienced. As an agency, we have analyzed, tested, and executed with various AI platforms that enhance the service we provide to our clients. We’ll continue to do so as our business and these platforms advance.

How Does ReThinc Advertising Use AI Platforms Effectively?

Note Taking

Like many businesses, we slid into using AI in a piecemeal fashion over the past two years.

AI notetaking was first. We not only found it to be a great tool, but it also alleviated the very human task of notetaking anytime we had a meeting internally or externally. The imperfections were obvious, but as time went on, improvements were made. We found that AI captured all the main points covered in the course of a call and, on occasion, mischaracterized or was confused by some of the friendly conversation we typically have with our partners.

One of the clear advantages of today’s notetaking AI platforms is their function of identifying key points in a call and action items for the various participants. Our notetaking AI platforms also send out a recap to all participants right before the next call with the client.

The platform we use for notetaking is fireflies.ai. Some of our clients use read.ai. Both do a good job of documenting our meetings. Note-taking is a very basic function of AI and one that we might even take for granted at this point.

Other solid notetaking AI platforms are:
Krisp.ai
Otter.ai

Content Creation

Content creation was quick to follow notetaking. This started easy enough with Grammarly, which made ever so gentle corrections to misspellings and improper prose. I had never realized I had such issues with commas before Grammarly came along. Grammarly is a generative AI platform, meaning that it creates content from what you’re writing.

ChatGPT was next. As a writer, I was personally dead set against it. As a teacher, I felt like we’ve just handed every student a reason to stop thinking. As a marketer, I realized that it was a good tool to have as long as you knew what you were doing and adapted the end product to be congruent to the brand voice, proper intonation, and did not make everything sound like it was written by a boorish snob.

Our digital team worked hard to make ChatGPT more functional. The platform itself made improvements, and now we use it to establish base content for everything from websites, ad copy, to blog posts (except mine, of course).

We’ve also started to adapt Gemini into our content creation process.

It’s important to note that we do not let any type of content creation be published without review and revision by a real human. Generative AI can be duplicative and, in so doing, compromise important marketing efforts as well as render the content SEO neutral.

As an ad agency, we like to think our creative brains and capabilities are far superior to a room full of data processors. We’re OK with them providing a framework, but we’ll fill in the important things our clients are trying to convey.

The key discoverable here was that AI is not a singularly reliable means of creating marketing content. Especially website content that requires a great deal of manipulation to be relevant, searchable, and able to provide a beneficial UX. It’s also important to note that ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms are subject to hallucinations. This is a term used to describe when an AI platform confuses itself and produces an unusable end product.

Here are a few other AI content platforms that we feel are worthwhile:
Blaze.ai
Jasper.ai
Rytr.me

Our designers at ReThinc utilize some limited AI tools in their day-to-day work. The most prolific of which is related to our work with Photoshop. Slight manipulations are somewhat normal for our design team, and these are made easier by AI tools within the Photoshop platform.

According to our Creative Director, Adobe is getting ready to launch a new AI tool that will help manipulate renderings in a manner that will save hours on specific projects. This and other AI tools will benefit the efficiency with which we work on design projects.

What we won’t do is hand AI the keys to a process we feel strongly needs to start and end with a creative human mind.

Here are a few other AI platforms recommended by our creative team:
Midjourney.ai
Adobe Firefly

What’s The Future Look Like For ReThinc And Other Ad Agencies?

I’m not the least bit doom or gloom when it comes to AI. In my research, I got everything from ‘the end of mankind’ to ‘it will implode soon and have no real impact … it’s just a matter of time.’ Candidly, all the research and opinions were so overwhelming that I had to pivot my blog to be relevant only to where we are with AI.

Whereas I can’t speak for other agencies, I don’t think AI platforms will allow any of them to replace their staff with a singular autonomous desktop. As with any technology, some will be better at using it than others, and it’s a fair bet that some of the more commoditized shops will look to be heavily reliant on AI to escalate their profit margins.

That won’t be us. We don’t think human disempowerment is good for our business, good for our clients, or good for our world. My best way to analogize this would be a hammer is a good tool … a hammer in the hands of a carpenter is a great tool.

At ReThinc, we know AI and we’ll use it to our clients’ benefit today and moving forward in the future. It may play a role in how we scale the business, as we do not accept any new clients unless we know we can maintain our excellence with the ones we currently have. We have never and will never put profits over people or partnerships. That has worked for us and our clients for 17 years, and nothing will ever change that.