Frank J. Oswald on LinkedIn: THE MEH-TAVERSE? My first experience in the metaverse was getting beaten… (2024)

REACH OUT AND THANK SOMEONE. If you worked in any creative profession prior to the Internet, you still likely have a huge stash of printed samples that you need to cull from time to time. I started doing so again this week when I unearthed this ad from 1991 or 92, which was part of a campaign I created based on the 1884 novella “Flatland." If that idea sounds unconventional, it was, but so was the company and its CEO who was my client for about five years, until that company was acquired.Doing creative work like this for a client is rare. In fact, I’m not sure I ever did any work as courageous—or outrageous—again in my life.Feeling re-inspired, I thought I’d look up that CEO and jot him a thank you note. But I was disheartened to learn that he had passed away two years ago, leaving me with a gaping hole of regret. (Had I ever thanked him properly? Gawd, I hope so.) Do you have someone from your past who inspired you to do your best work? Maybe a teacher, a colleague, a boss, or—like me—even an ex-client?No matter how long it has been, reach out and thank them.[Ad copy in the comments below. Illustration by the brilliantly warped Henrik Drescher.]

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A KLARNA IN A COAL MINE. We can all stop talking about how AI will disrupt marketing and advertising, because it's already happening. Quoting this WSJ article:"Swedish buy-now-pay-later company Klarna says artificial intelligence is helping to lower its marketing and sales costs by making tasks such as creating images and translating copy more efficient.""The company announced Tuesday that it had cut sales and marketing spending by 11% in the first quarter of 2024 while increasing the number of campaigns and updating its collateral marketing materials more frequently. It attributed 37% of that reduction to AI, the equivalent of $10 million in annual savings.""Using generative AI tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E saved the company $1.5 million on image production costs in the first quarter, Klarna added, while slashing its image development timeline to seven days from six weeks."

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WE ALL LAUGHED last week when Google’s AI told us to eat rocks. But, then again, so did my Aunt Trudy when she beat a machine at doing her job.Trudy glued the fabric on paint rollers; it was her job for 25 years or more. Until, one day, the company she worked for brought in a machine to replace her and her co-workers.The machine, for which Trudy had a derogatory nickname, was a laughable failure.It spewed glue everywhere, created massive fabric waste, and broke down frequently. The company’s primary customer (the name begins with S and rhymes with Beers) rejected delivery of an order due to the inferior manufacturing quality.In a head-to-head battle with the machine, Trudy and her co-workers (all women) won, and declared victory! Except it didn’t turn out to be.The machine's manufacturer spent a year at the plant learning what Trudy’s team did well and why its product failed. And the machine got better and better until my aunt, who loved her work, got pushed out of a job.Not machine learning, as we define it today, but the machine’s manufacturer was learning—from its own dumb mistakes and from what made my aunt's team so good at what they did. So I wouldn’t write off Google's AI for its embarrassing blunders quite yet. It's already learning from them at a speed far faster than the paint-roller machine that displaced my Aunt Trudy.As the old saying goes, the joke might be on us. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #GoogleAI #MachineLearning

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THE CALEB EFFECT. There’s a moment in the movie “Ex Machina” where Caleb, a brilliant young coder, realizes he’s been duped by Nathan, his boss, who heads a Google-like technology company. As Caleb increasingly becomes attracted to Ava, an uncannily lifelike android created by his boss, the coder begins to get suspicious. So, he asks Nathan: “Did you design Ava’s face based on my p*rnography profile?”Nathan pauses, but Caleb presses until his boss concedes: “Oh, sh*t, dude. Hey, if a search engine’s good for anything, right?”So, it was not surprising for me to read this morning that the Caleb Effect—my term, not WaPo’s—is reflected in the stereotypical images that AI tools generate when prompted to show a “beautiful woman.”The images not only reflect society’s biases—after all, AI is scraping images from all corners of the Internet to define what beautiful means—but also the biases of coders, many of whom are young males like Caleb.What did surprise (and disappoint) me is that despite this fact, marketers and advertisers are flocking to the technology anyway. Quoting this story:"Ninety-two percent of marketers have already commissioned content designed using generative AI, according to a 2024 survey from the creator marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, which also found that 70 percent of marketers planned to spend more money on generative AI this year."The danger is that the stereotypes that many, including some enlightened brands, have been working hard to extinguish will be re-ignited, posing serious threats to DEI progress and efforts to combat body dysmorphia and other issues.While I’m sure individual marketers will speak up about this issue—some out of self-interest—the economic pressures to use AI-generated models and images will only increase. That’s why the marketing and advertising community must take a collective stand for anything to change.Like Caleb, we cannot count on AI's creators to be beneficent. #Ethics #EthicsMatter #AI #ArtificialIntellgence #Advertising

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MY BOOK OF THE MONTH. Everyone knows the “Mad Men” era of advertising in the 1960s. But unless you were a part of it, the boutique creative agency boom of the 1980s and 90s is largely forgotten. Nick Cohen’s “Honest! A True Story of a Ridiculous Attempt to Make Advertising More Truthful” brings those times back to life with delightful—well—honesty.I greatly admired the work of Nick’s agency—Mad Dogs and Englishmen—back in its heyday, so reading his book was a nostalgia rush. But "Honest!" also reminded me how subversively entertaining the truth can be. For example, one of the ads Mad Dogs created to attract new Village Voice subscribers read, “Hell, I wouldn't have my home contaminated with a subscription to your elitist rag if you were giving away five-speed blenders. You people think New York is the friggin' center of the world." You might confuse that with snark, but that would miss the point. The work that Nick and his team were doing simply embraced the concept that most people think advertising and marketing are bullsh*t, so let’s do the opposite.In essence, “Honest!” is a book about advertising ethics without ever using that sententious phrase. But its lessons about creativity and managing creative teams are of equal or greater value. Three of the passages I highlighted:— “In advertising, it seems that being completely honest is so incredibly unusual, it triggers a nervous response in the frontal lobe of the reader’s brain—causing laughter.”— “The more a working environment encourages or insists on complete honesty, and the safer it feels, the more dynamic it often will be. As in less whispering, less judging, less one-upping and clawing. More connecting, bonding, supporting, and learning.”— “In advertising, self-effacement is for some reason rarer than even honesty, which is weird, because most of us adore the person who’s open to admitting their own faults.”Like many boutique agencies of the time, Nick’s had a short life, shuttering its doors in the early 2000s, and much of the later stuff featured in the book hasn’t aged well. But one of the lessons shared by an early Mad Dog employee endures:“One of the most powerful parts of any relationship is trust. If people don’t trust the entity who’s talking, then it doesn’t matter how big an idea they are selling. It's unbelievable—a lie.”And that’s the truth, regardless of your professional endeavor.

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A. Taylor's "Higher Ground" was one of the texts for my course this semester, and it helped provoke discussions about the difficult tradeoffs that corporations face and the growing responsibilities of communicators. I highly recommend the book if you're looking to refresh your fall syllabus. Oh, and she's right about this, too: "Our metaphor for the corporation has been that it is a self-interested, profit-maximizing black box… if the corporation was a person, they’d be a psychopath."

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ERR ON THE SIDE OF SILENCE. Harvard should no longer speak out about "public matters that do not affect the university's core function*," according to a report issued today by a faculty working group. When there is disagreement about whether an issue relates to Harvard's core function, university officials "should err on the side of avoiding official statements." The three-page report [link in the comments below] includes this defense, along with several others, of the proposed policy: "We feel empathy for those affected by events of great moment, whether wars, natural disasters, or different forms of persecution. [...] Yet in issuing official statements of empathy, the university runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others." "And because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others." Despite what this Harvard Crimson headline implies, I don't believe the working group's recommendation has been adopted by the university as official policy. Perhaps the group released it to test how faculty, students and other key stakeholders will react to it. I suspect that many other large institutions—including universities and corporations—grappling with the same issue will be monitoring those reactions intently. * From the report: "To succeed, the university cultivates an environment in which its members can research, teach, and learn. This is its core function."

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PERPLEXING POLL. Warren Buffett once said, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." But are either still true? — Last year, NVIDIA didn't even show up in the Axios/Harris Top 100 Reputation rankings. This year, it is #1. — Bayer wasn't on last year's list either. This year it is #38 despite compiling enormous losses and battling an estimated 170,000 Roundup weedkiller lawsuits. — Alaska Air is a newcomer, too, showing up at #50 even though one of its pilots turned off the engines of an aircraft mid-flight and a door plug terrifyingly blew out of another. — 3M ranked #2 in this year's Axios/Harris poll despite settling a widely publicized multi-billion-dollar lawsuit for poisoning the world with "forever chemicals." — Adidas soared 17 spots to #5 demonstrating that consumers have short memories about its controversial association with Ye (Kanye West). — Mattel, another newcomer to this year's list, ranked #25, propelled solely by the popularity of "Barbie."So, was Warren Buffett wrong? Can corporate reputations now be established and/or resuscitated in less than a year? Or should we question headline-making polls that purport to measure "reputation"?

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FOLDOUT FRANK. Forty years ago today, I packed up a black Chevy Celebrity and drove 1,000 miles from Milwaukee to South Norwalk, CT, to start a new business—and a new life.My mom gave me a Rand McNally road atlas and wished me good luck "everywhere life takes you."Now 6-foot-8, I’ve shrunk two inches since this immodest promo. But what I've lost in stature I hope I’ve grown in soul. It took me far too long to learn that the only way to become a giant at anything is by not calling yourself one.

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