Creative
For the last several months, we’ve spent a good deal of time in this newsletter talking about the trend of higher production value and our muted-by-comparison-to-the-masses outlook for generative AI.
Leave it to OpenAI to pull the two together.
This week, the company teased Sora, a text to video generative AI tool, that looks more impressive than some of the other generative AI video tools out there. As you might imagine, there’s been a good deal of “this changes everything” reaction.
Except we don’t think it does.
Almost three years ago, we wrote a newsletter here about social commerce and BJ Fogg’s behavioral model. It feels applicable here:
In his wave model, he further expands on this idea to show that, when motivation is high, ability and prompts can be low. But when motivation is low, ability and prompts need to be high.
In other words, we’ll deal with friction when we really want (or need) something.
When we shop, we have to first draw on our memory for a specific set of brands and, after that, validate whether any of them will fill our want. Sometimes, that validation takes time; sometimes, it takes information; sometimes, it takes prompts.
All of it can be plotted on Fogg’s wave model.
Add the BoF article to this worthwhile report on CX and “good friction” from Future Commerce, and we were reminded of all this this week.
The art of ecomm isn’t reducing friction. It’s knowing whether the friction you’re removing is making it easier to buy.
As that balance isn’t the same for every brand or every consumer, that’s a difficult art to master.
Remove too much friction, and you remove a lot of those prompts, a lot of the information, and a lot of the opportunities for focused dwell time. In theory, that sounds good.
Except having the right amount of those things makes it easier for us to buy: Having one less button to click is nothing compared to having the confidence to click it to begin with.
The point here is that barriers can be valuable. They can require a set of behaviors that, when mastered, produced far better results.
This is the parallel to video production in the age of generative AI, for video and for everything else. But it feels exacerbated for video.
Creating a movie, a TV show, an ad… all of it has required a level of motivation so high that it filtered out many from trying. the thought process by many appears to be that Sora (and others) will reduce the ability slope, meaning those who are less motivated can produce video, too.
While this might be true in terms of technical access, it misses the point of what makes creative so, well, creative. And thats something Sora can’t solve for.
To illustrate: Have you ever tried to write an ad like Ogilivy?
The underlying components of truly good (not even great) creative have nothing to do with technical skills—they come later—and everything to do with foundational skills. Off the cuff:
Who are you trying to sell?
What are you trying to sell?
Why are you trying to sell it?
Which critical insight are you attempting to use to do it?
Sora’s biggest advantages might be as an accelerant.
If you haven’t seen it, Yotpo’s The Frown campaign is a great example of what may come to be. From our understanding, that went from idea to launch in about three months. That’s pretty fast for B2B SaaS.
So, maybe you don’t need to spend as much time or money to get done certain things. But you’ll probably need to spend more time on the foundational aspects, because your prompt will need to be so exact and so precise to achieve most of it, lest you end up in the iterative world of creative as it is today.