HOW TO KNOW BEFORE
YOU GO
One of the reasons that the failure rate of new
restaurants is so high is because - even in cases where new operators are
moving into existing locations - so much of the necessary capital investment is
required upfront for renovations and/or new construction. You’ve got to build
out the entire business before you know if the “dogs” are going to eat the dog
food, say nice things to their friends, and keep coming back. A rule of thumb
is that a successful restaurant needs to convert about 15%-20% of its customers
into regulars if it’s going to make it through the first full year of
operations. These required retention numbers may have even increased now
because fewer diners are drinking as much as they did in the past so each
customer is likely to be less profitable. (See https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/60-40-restaurant-rule-food-beverage-glp-1-ozempic-wegovy-mounjaro-alcohol/91323202 .)
And, as we all know from the media’s obsession
with opening weekend box office results, it’s pretty much the same front-end
loaded situation with film studios making expensive motion pictures and then
hoping that the crowds show up at the theatres so that the players don’t lose
millions of production costs and marketing dollars essentially on Day One. Of
course, there are occasional attempts with early screenings and test audience
previews to get a reading on viewers’ likely reactions and, in some very costly
cases, to actually attempt to shoot additional or alternative scenes and
re-edit sections of the films. But as noted writer, playwright, and filmmaker
David Mamet once said about fixing others’ failed efforts: “it’s
hard to polish a turd”. Once a movie is in the
can, it’s a crapshoot at best as to whether it’s gonna be a triumph or a
tragedy. But at least it takes a while for the ultimate reckoning in the film
business because movies take years to finance, approve, and actually get made.
In the advertising world, where social media commentators
and trolls lurk every day around every corner of the web, expensive new ad
campaigns which suck, offend some segment’s tender sensibilities, or have the
“wrong” spokesperson are condemned, roasted and rejected the same day they are
released and sometimes (in the case of Super Bowl ads in particular) even
before they are widely distributed and shown to the general public.
Millions of production dollars are flushed down
the toilet, media buys and expensive marketing commitments are wasted, and – in
some especially problematic cases – as
PepsiCo (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_for_Now ), Kendall Jenner, and many others have
learned - even more dollars are spent
trying to make amends, repair wrecked brands, resurrect reputations, and
apologize to millions of people who may not have even seen the offensive
material in the first place.
While there are no guarantees or crystal balls
in the ad biz, I wrote many years ago about a company called Dumbstruck (www.Dumbstruck.com), an emotion analytics company founded
in 2018, that had developed some crucial technology which reviewed,
evaluated and analyzed both proposed videos and actually produced ads in order
to determine how that content would be received by the target populations and how
they would respond to it. (See
https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/catch-me-if-you-can.html). The basic idea was to keep offensive and
ineffective materials from ever reaching the marketplace. As I said at the
time, it’s much smarter to avoid the potholes than to get a great deal on the
cost of the tow truck that pulls you out of the ditch.
But in too many cases, while Dumbstruck’s
impressive tools (which measure emotional, behavioral and cognitive reactions
to displayed material) could highlight the prospective issues and shortcomings
of completed videos, actually making those improvements
could require costly edits or reshoots that campaign timelines and budgets
simply didn't permit. The insights could still inform media decisions and future creative
development, but improving the finished asset itself wasn't always practical. The horse had already left the barn. So, the tech
worked, but the insights it provided often came too late in the creative process
to provide its clients with the ability to cost-effectively fix the problems
that its software had identified.
The good news for the clients – but another
unfortunate blow for the traditional creative business – is that through a new
technology partnership between Dumbstruck and Luma, which operates a multi-modal
general intelligence platform based in California, there may finally be a fast,
cost-effective and readily available approach the companies are calling
Creative Intelligence which combines Dumbstruck powerful insights and
observations about which elements of a given ad will work and connect with viewers
and which other parts need to be revised, eliminated or enhanced with the AI-infused
tools called Luma Agents that Luma has built which permit editors to: (a) implement
the Dumbstruck recommendations and changes in real time into the existing video
materials without extensive delays or costly reshooting of scenes and (b) even
more importantly - and somewhat frighteningly at the same time – to digitally
create and add elements, props, environmental effects and even new actors to
the video on the fly and in the moment. The new system combines AI rendering
abilities with human response data and applies all of this to the content being
developed and enhanced. When the content is revised, updated, and improved, it
is retested by Dumbstruck to confirm its value, impact, and effectiveness.
It’s actually hard to imagine a more enormous
and disruptive offering which is entirely likely to upset the entire ad
creation and production industry in short order. If you can write it and
envision it, it’s becoming very clear that the actual video materials including
all the personnel and props can now be digitally generated in 4K quality in a
matter of hours rather than weeks with all of the obvious cost and time savings
which that kind of technological advancement offers. What’s more, specific
variations of the content can be made at little or no incremental cost to be
directed to slices and segments of the overall audience. But the cost-effective
abundance of content and the ease of production isn’t really the critical question,
which is whether Dumbstruck’s technology determines that the finalized content will
get the job done and resonate with the consumers. After all, at the end of the
day, the ultimate goal is to sell something.
If the traditional ad biz wasn’t already
plagued by the same basic time crunches, talent costs, and production issues that
many other industries are facing as well as also being under new serious
pressure from the rise of inexpensive and ubiquitous user generated content
(UGC) as well as A.I. slop that are swamping all of the available channels (See
https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/ai-trend-traditional-ad-agencies-creators-influencers/91366965.), the Luma-Dumbstruck technology partnership
may be one of the final blows to the old leisurely days of Madison Avenue when who
you knew was much more important than what you knew and could do. A long-past
time when how a particular ad did for a client was a matter of good fortune
rather than careful planning, precise execution, and after-the-fact analysis
and accountability.
Today, thanks largely to Dumbstruck and Luma,
advertisers can now “know before they go” exactly how their ads are likely to
resonate with their target audiences and also have the immediate ability to
improve their ads before significant media dollars are spent.
