Supporting creativity with artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is bringing profound transformation across the media and communications industry. It already forms a huge part of how content is delivered, as algorithms work to understand our behaviours and preferences. These insights are hugely valuable in understanding consumers and making communications more effective but can also pose their own challenges. "The digital advertising market is worth about $350 billion a year and growing," says Perry Nightingale, head of creative AI at creative transformation company WPP. "And we already see a lot of AI, particularly on the targeting side. Algorithms are constantly working around us to recommend the next piece of content to consume. But because of the way those algorithms work, we have to make a huge amount of content before they become effective. We need hundreds and hundreds of variations of an advert before it becomes worthwhile to split them up and show to different people, which all need to be created in the same amount of time and for the same cost."