Everything Old.
Credit to the late great Peter Allen for lyrics that show he not only knew whereof he sang but had a damned good handle on the rhyme and repeat of history.
“Dancin' at your Long Island Jazz Age parties/Waiter, bring us some more Bacardis/We'll order now what they ordered then/'Cause everything old is new again.”
On that score: last week's headline proclaiming the CTV playahs have decided AI is the wedge that can turn small and mid-sized businesses into streaming TV ad clients.
Their argument: the reason SMEs have been swallowed by social, primarily Facebook, has been the cost of other media production. Enter AI and exeunt that problem, stage right.
Or wrong.
Their inspiration: after taking a close look at how the SME’s FB liplock allowed Meta to chuckle its way through the boycott of a few years ago, they realized just how stinking much aggregate coin was involved.
Trust me, there’s nothing like the scent of stealing another platform’s ad budget to get media executive noses twitching and/or jaws salivating.
Meanwhile, for anyone who spots the big “yeah but” in all this — the “yeah but” being the zero chance that these zero-cost AI TV ads will have even the faintest whiff of brand-elevating quality — team CTV has a ready answer.
“Since most of the ads you’ll be competing with are either for drugs or car dealers, who gives a rat's?"
All of which is vaguely sad, in a tragi-ironic way, especially if you happen to believe both ends of the AIDA ladder — Attention and Action — greatly profit when your spots don’t play as just more swill in the crapper.
But here’s the other thing: we’ve danced this dance before.
In fact, local TV and radio stations used to offer dirt-cheap schedules (b/c the audience was mostly insomniacs) with “professionally produced” broadcast spots as the come-on. Comcast's Spotlight, the cable unit that morphed into Effectv and is now whatever, ditto.
All of which would be useless ad trivia, except for this: the real takeaway.
Not to worry, it won't turn into the umpty-umpth anti-AI rant you see this fine morning.
Instead, it's that we're now starting to see exactly where AI fits into the emergent advertising ecology.
Spoiler alert: it's neither "strategic" (as in, a plan to achieve an objective) nor "tactical" (as in the actions needed to fulfill the plan).
Instead, it’s 100% logistics.
A resource to support both strategy and tactics. Nuts and bolts.
And why should we care?
Maybe because it allows the real role of AI to snap into focus.
Maybe because it turns out that AI is neither transformative nor paradigm-shifting, even as it makes transformations and paradigm shifts possible.
Maybe because, and I say this over Mr. Maslow’s vehement protestations, sometimes a hammer is just a hammer.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous Peter Allen, one last time:
“Don't throw the past away/You might need it some rainy day/Dreams can come true again/When everything old is new again.”
