AI can save the industry and rewrite the plot: Binaifer Dulani, Talented

At e4m TechManch 2024, Binaifer Dulani, Founding Partner & Creative, Talented, kicked off a session on how AI will revive creativity in the ad agency world. Creative agencies are one of the most underpaid and undervalued industries, she noted. 

“For everyone who works in marketing, I'm sure they've turned their agency over to the procurement team at some time or the other.”

Binaifer Dulani also opined at e4m TechManch that AI can write them out of the misery, which they have written themselves in, and that it will end the mediocrity on the table all around. AI can save the industry and rewrite the plot but one can't talk about how to rewrite a plot without engaging a bit with history, she noted.

“Why does any key opinion leader feel comfortable writing a clickbait that says the work that you and I do, our human creativity and human intelligence is absolutely replaceable and AI can do it faster? I find it preposterous that anyone could believe that the work that we bring to the table is truly replaceable, but I also feel that the reason that has happened is because we have given them the opportunity historically to undervalue us.”

According to David Graeber’s book Bulllshit Jobs, Dulani shared, any form of employment that's unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee can't justify its existence is a bullshit job. Now bullshit jobs are different from shit jobs. Shit jobs have shit pay and may have to deal with a whole host of indignities because of the nature of the job.

As per a Bloomberg research, Dulani quoted, it says 40% of marketers believe that their job is bullshit in some sense. “And it's ironic because we are an industry that gets to participate in discourse, we get to be in rooms we don't belong to, we get to influence massive decisions and yet we believe that 40% of our colleagues feel our job is bullshit.”

“You know why this occurs? Because most marketing rooms feel like marketers would be doing anything else with their time but this. People are on yet another call, yet another meeting that could be an email and hence the burnout – and funnily enough burnout has nothing to do with long hours of working. Primarily it tends to happen when one feels that the work they are doing in itself doesn't have true meaning and impact.” 

She further shared, “We are more primed than ever with GenAI, and all the predictive modelling that we've been hearing over today to have a 15-hour work week. Yet that is never happening because technology has always been marshalled to make us work more.”

But in making the industry work more, technology has given birth to jobs that have most aspects that end up feeling like bullshit aspects of the job because people are chasing things that they don't want to chase. For the first time, this could mean amazing news because if they play their cards right, they can define the kind of work they truly want to do with the advent of AI.

How can AI be an opportunity rather than a threat? Dulani highlighted that AI can't substitute human creativity. “AI can substitute it only because we've let everyone see us through this ridiculous education execution-based lens. If you're going to see me and the price I put on myself is, 5 social media creators, 5 sets of paid ads, of course I'm going to think AI is a threat.”

But that's not what creative people bring to the table. SOWs need to look like real solutions. Solutions that only the human mind is capable of. And AI then becomes a creative adjunct to what it really can be. 

“They're looking for real value. Agencies want to deliver real value. It just feels like there's a vocabulary gap in the way we've engaged so far, and done business so far,” she said.

At the end of the day, no one entered marketing wanting to do bullshit work. They entered marketing to have radical ideas, but got siloed into bullshit work because of the conditions that they themselves created. So if there are thought leaders, it's their responsibility to let them do their life's best work. 

Concluding the session, Dulani said, “We can continue being subservient to AI, we can consider AI to be a threat, we can go down the path of employee headcount-based pricing models that are our base, no real incentive for us to reject things, and what will end up happening then is AI will do the creation, AI will do the thinking, and all of us here will be subservient to it.”

“Or from this moment on we say that you cannot value me on the basis of an execution lens. What I bring to the table is the beauty of human intelligence and creativity. AI is always going to be a creative adjunct. And when we do that, for the first time ever, all bullshit aspects of our job could come to an end,” she asserted.