Woke up Australia: Win the war against the mundane with diversity and creativity

As artificial intelligence threatens quality creativity, diverse teams and humanity will yield the most powerful competitive advantage for businesses in the future.

Tara McKenty is chief innovation officer and co-executive creative director at BMF

The era of automated creativity is upon us. Some are ready to embrace AI -based creative tools. Others want to put their heads in the sand and continue to design websites in Flash.

It is time to “woke” up.

The polarising word “woke” was historically used as a term to alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.

But in the context of creativity in both business and how businesses communicate, I will use it to describe the awakening required as an industry to embrace difference and our humanity to compete against a new common enemy.

If creativity’s biggest threat is automation, we need to invest in our humanity to ensure human creative capital will continue to beat the automated at capturing the hearts and minds of audiences, which is key to establishing authentic connections between brands and its consumers and creating communication that is reflective for them and their community.

AI-based creative tools are becoming more prominent in our industry. These tools are rule followers, the algorithm automatically formulates the rules from the data.

Creativity – the original, innovative and growth-driving kind – is, by nature, best expressed outside of rules.

Beyond this, AI uses historical creative datasets to fulfil prescribed prompts. These historical data sets often contain baked-in bias and negative stereotyping borne from the outdated perspectives from the creators of the initial artefacts that machine learning (ML) models are trained on.

To put it simply, representation is lacking.

This essentially means that automated creativity is Mad Men’s Don Draper. It can be misogynistic, patriarchal and has a point of view which is exclusionary and irrelevant to the cross-section of society that makes up our modern-day audiences and consumers.

In the era of automation, it’s our responsibility as human creatives to protect the present audience from the past and ensure that the progress we have made in humanity continues to be reflected in media and communication as we continue to utilise these tools in our creative practices.

We need to “woke up”, and quickly. To be able to compete and beat the Don Draper terminator – whose threat to the world is average ham-sandwich outdated advertising en masse – we need diversity in our businesses, in our board rooms and in our creative rooms.

To save Australia from a future of bad ads, diversity of perspective and difference is how we do it.

When we as industry and as businesses “woke up”, we will have a true competitive advantage, we will have increased our ability to create more interesting, effective and relevant work.

To validate why diversity matters and is key to both business and the creative industry’s success, I recently created a data set on the extent of female exclusion within creative industries and analysed the significant and meaningful advantage of gender diversity in core creative teams.

I acquired the entrant data from the D & AD Advertising Awards, one of the most respected shows in the marketing and advertising industry.

Taking the entrant data from 2016 to 2020 (the years when the show had gender balance on their juries), I analysed the gender balance of the awards’ entrants by cross-referencing the entrant data with a naming application program interface (API).

The API naming database was made up of more than 6 million global names from 189 countries.

What this meant is that for the first time we could look at a global database of the industry and identify the gender of the creative entrants with 98 per cent accuracy.

Access to a database of the size, quality and global reach provided a unique opportunity for quantitative testing to irrefutably prove the hypotheses of why diversity is good for creativity, and the business outcomes it influences.

Mixed-gender teams had a 12 per cent advantage in moving from a shortlist to an award. Overall, they also were three times more likely to acquire a high level of award. This shows the advantage of gender diversity (referred to in binary).

When creative departments are brimming with difference, and when we welcome dimensions of diversity, both inherent (diversity that you are born with) and acquired (diversity you acquire that shifts your perspective), imagine all the beautiful insights and experiences brands can obtain from creative teams who have both. Just imagine the potential of those ideas to drive impact and make change. Take that, Don AI!

Saving the world from creative and advertising mediocrity is not the only the benefit to embracing the woke world – brands also win.

According to Deloitte, research, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) initiatives are not only beneficial for workers, but they’re also good for business.

Belonging at work can lead to a 56 per cent increase in job performance, 50 per cent reduction in turnover risk, 167 per cent increase in employer net promoter score, and a 75 per cent decrease in sick days.

To get to different, new creative ideas and solutions that are relevant, entertaining and useful for real people, and different unique human thoughts that will leave Don scratching his AI algorithmic head, DEIB is our secret to success.

We need to continue to find and mine beautifully diverse minds to win this war against the mundane and the same.

If we train ourselves as creatives, creative businesses, and each other on the dataset of difference, and celebrate diversity in all forms, our future remains bright.

How we create will, of course, be accelerated with the aid of the Don Draper AI terminator. But Don will never be in the driver’s seat – our humanity will.

Tara McKenty is chief innovation officer and co-executive creative director at BMF.