can we have this converstaion
i’ve been trying to have a conversation with my peers in the commercial advertising space
about what the future is going to hold and where we should be focusing our energy and our time
this has proved an almost impossible conversation to have
i don’t know if it’s fear, or maybe people are busy enough, but they’re very reluctant, if not completely dismissive, about having this conversation
i feel that this is the only conversation that we need to be having
i feel like as the democratisation of words has happened over the last couple of years with large language models, the democratisation of imagery is coming, and video is next
we’ve watched people in the space, particularly journalism, have to pivot dramatically
and we have a lot of lessons that we can learn from what they did and how they responded, because some of them figured it out
i am not sure that our industry is the same
and i can’t even work out, for example, are the people that actually won in this transition journalists at all?
meaning that i feel like we’re standing in a similar moment
i’m standing on set and i’m looking out on these big productions
and there’s an incredible, incredible level of expertise
like a hundred people on set shooting a massive commercial, doing incredible work
i had this conversation with a guy that used to live in detroit
and experienced what happened there when it went from the richest city on earth to the poorest city on earth in short order
and i can’t help but think that i’m like that person in the ford factory
that’s looking over at one of my colleagues being like, oh my gosh, how incredible is that level of skill
how incredible is that level of craftsmanship that that person is doing
and how could it possibly go away?
i don’t know if this is our moment
but i’m looking out into the landscape
and the hardest thing to have a conversation about right now is what it will look like
because some of the solutions that i’m seeing out there
i don’t think include the creatives that are currently doing what they’re doing
if it’s going to be a prompt engineer, a director, and let’s say a producer to produce some content
i don’t believe, for me, that that’s the reason why i do what i do
i think it has something to do with problem solving
it has something to do with creativity
and it has something to do with novelty
maybe one of these things is present in that next system
so i always ask a very stupid question
it might not be a popular thing to say
but what are the tastemakers going to do in this world?
because even directing, if that’s the solution
and photographers and all these people flood into the space of directing, which i’m seeing a lot of people do
that’s not the reason why you do what you do
most definitely, you’re interacting with people
you’re interacting with a team
in order to problem solve a specific situation
in order to get a result
this is hard
this is difficult work
so are we dinosaurs?
are we the person in the ford factory?
and one of the things that i have responded with recently
is that i have transitioned to being an artist first, before being a commissioned artist, if you will, in the commercial space
but i don’t think that this is a solution either, long term
because this space will get saturated
i don’t think this is a good solution either
and i don’t genuinely know how to have this conversation
but what is happening to us is happening extremely fast
and we’re not talking about it
we’re not talking about it
this should be the only thing we are talking about
every single day
every moment
until we come up with a solution
so can we have that conversation?
i’m asking you, can we have that conversation?
what are the tastemakers going to do?
what are the image makers going to do in this world?
and what should we do?
because it’s changing really fast
and i’m not sure
not sure if it’s what we want
or what we would like to do
anyway
let’s see if we can have this conversation
