From using motion capture tech to allow the Indian cricketing star Rahul Dravid to give personalised coaching tips for children to an algorithm trained on Shakespeare's handwriting powering a robotic arm to rewrite Romeo and Juliet, artificial intelligence is rapidly revolutionising the global advertising industry. Those AI-created adverts, for the Cadbury's drink brand Bournvita and the pen maker Bic, were produced by agency group WPP, which is spending 300m annually on data, tech and machine learning to remain competitive. Mark Read, the chief executive of the London-listed marketing services group, has said AI is "fundamental" to the future of its business, while admitting that it will drastically reshape the ad industry workforce. Now Read has announced he is to leave at the end of this year, after almost seven years as chief executive and more than 30 at WPP, as the company struggles to keep pace with its peers and also counter moves by big tech to muscle in to the AI-driven future of advertising. For ad agencies, the upheaval originates from a familiar source.

Creativity in social robots requires further attention in the interdisciplinary field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This paper investigates the hypothesised connection between the perceived creative agency and the animacy of social robots. The goal of this work is to assess the relevance of robot movements in the attribution of creativity to robots. The results of this work inform the design of future Human-Robot Creative Interactions (HRCI). The study uses a storytelling game based on visual imagery inspired by the game 'Story Cubes' to explore the perceived creative agency of social robots. This game is used to tell a classic story for children with an alternative ending. A 2x2 experiment was designed to compare two conditions: the robot telling the original version of the story and the robot plot-twisting the end of the story. A Robotis Mini humanoid robot was used for the experiment. As a novel contribution, we propose an adaptation of the Short Scale Creative Self scale (SSCS) to measure perceived creative agency in robots. We also use the Godspeed scale to explore different attributes of social robots in this setting. We did not obtain significant main effects of the robot movements or the story in the participants' scores. However, we identified significant main effects of the robot movements in features of animacy, likeability, and perceived safety. This initial work encourages further studies experimenting with different robot embodiment and movements to evaluate the perceived creative agency in robots and inform the design of future robots that participate in creative interactions.

Digital agencies are bound to change in 2020. Their revamp has everything to do with martech, automation, and Artificial Intelligence. Here are the 5 major industry pitfalls and the solutions that the latest tech advancements have devised for them, says, Oana Alexandrov, Content Writer, Product Lead. The new year is bound to catch digital agencies under piles and piles of new job attributes. They are feeling the dizzying speed at which the changes in eCommerce are happening.

Computers aren't going to replace creative pros -- but machine learning and artificial intelligence can be powerful tools in the storytelling process. The 60-second spot was directed by Oscar-winner Kevin Macdonald, working from a script that was developed by IBM's Watson AI system. To produce the spot for the Lexus ES executive sedan launching in Europe, the automaker enlisted its creative agency, The&Partnership London, along with technical partner Visual Voice. The agencies collaborated with the IBM Watson team to use AI to analyze 15 years' worth of footage, text and audio for car and luxury brand campaigns that have won Cannes Lions awards for creativity, as well as a range of other external data. Watson identified elements common to award-worthy commercials that were "both emotionally intelligent and entertaining," according to IBM.

It's 1492 and the printing press is starting to gain traction. This bothers a very select group of people very much. Monks, who had for hundreds of years been painstakingly copying out the scriptures word for word, are about to be replaced. A monk named Johannes Trithemius goes as far as writing an essay espousing the moral superiority of handwriting, claiming that handwritten books would last far longer than their printed counterparts. But nothing can stop the march of progress, and the printing press goes on to revolutionise the way we share information.

A couple of weeks ago, Coca-Cola's global senior digital director Mariano Bosaz told Adweek he wanted "to start experimenting" with "automated narratives," including using bots for music and editing the closing credits of commercials. Algorithms are already foundational to programmatic advertising and will likely only grow to be a bigger part of media buying, but can machine learning ever completely replace the creative process? It's no surprise that agencies adamantly say no, that brands still need human creatives to handle strategy and come up with ideas. But creative shops are still preparing for a time when there will be fewer people to handle some parts of the business, especially those that involve time-consuming and manual tasks. "To be honest, some of the first people who will lose their job because of AI will be marketing managers," said Firstborn's executive creative director Dave Snyder.