McCann Japan hires AI as Creative Director (Is it April already?)

The robots are taking over! McCann has appointed an articificial intelligence creative director named AI-CD β in Japan reports The Drum. It's a smartbot that joins the agency and will be attending McCann's new employee welcoming ceremony on 1 April. This is an April fools joke, right? Please let it be an April fools joke.....

AI-CD β was actually created by the agency under its ‘Creative Genome Project’, the first in a series of projects undertaken by the agency’s ‘McCann Millenials taskforce’.


The artificial intelligence can give creative direction on commercials because the data that forms the basis of the algorithm includes deconstructed, tagged and analysed TV shows, as well as data on the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commersion Confederation’s CM Festival.


According to McCann, AI-CD β will work as a creative director on real client accounts and is the first logic-based creative direction that’s based off the historical success of TV ads.


President & CEO of McCann Japan, Yasuyuki Katagi said: “Artificial intelligence is already being used to create a wide variety of entertainment, including music, movies, and TV drama, so we’re very enthusiastic about the potential of AI-CD ß for the future of ad creation. The whole company is 100 percent on board to support the development of our A.I. employee.”


The AI has been built to respond to a product or message with the optimal commercial direction, based off historical data. The AI has also been built to then learn from the results of the campaigns its directed, in theory creating an increasingly more effective AI creative director.

McCann Japan creative planner and the founder of McCann Millennials Shun Matsuzaka explains how the bot came about to Adnews.au:

“Our team didn’t have a creative director, so we thought, why not create one ourselves with artificial intelligence? That’s how the Creative Genome Project got started. Our hope is for our AI creative director to work on many projects, gain experience, and to grow into a world-class creative director that will leave a mark in the advertising industry.”

Well at least they may have programmed their AI-CD to be a nice guy?

Human Creative Directors aren't all that worried, yet , as Ad Contrarian managed to snark it out in less than 140:

@brunoleoribeiro @davetrott - Nothing new. I've known dozens of artificially intelligent creative directors.

— adcontrarian (@AdContrarian) March 29, 2016

But, it does show how automation is taking over more and more jobs. Websites are built with templates, social media is run by bots, why not have an AI as Creative Director? He can't be any worse than the asshole who insists you only work on his ideas, and then gives you no credit for executing them.