• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 3 hours ago

This week is the lead-up to the only major television event we can still consider to be appointment-viewing:  the Super Bowl.

In the ad landscape, all the buzz is around AI.  But what role will it play in the Big Game and the ads surrounding it?  Surprisingly, AI will play only a small role -- the last glimpse of a bygone time when ads were ads, created and run by real people in real time.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see AI this Sunday.  At a high level, AI will be mentioned as the punchline to a joke, offering mild criticism and commentary about how it has quickly become omnipresent.  AI might be used to create some visuals, but I don’t think you’ll see anything created holistically with AI, as we did during the holidays.  The stakes are too high to risk pushback from the masses, so AI will play a secondary role rather than be the primary focus.

I would guess that AI was used heavily in the development and creation of the final ads you will see this weekend.  AI is in mass adoption across agencies, enabling them to produce the same high-quality output at lower cost, increasing their margins and helping them recover from the hits and losses they’ve faced over the last seven years.  AI enables agencies to do more with less, without sacrificing the quality of the end product. 

In fact, it makes the end product better.  AI has become a tool for refining image quality and improving assets we have to work with.  It expands scenes in images to allow for more space, overlaying coloring.

This behind-the-scenes work allows production to speed up.  Editing is faster with AI removing elements in images and scene, inserting others.  This is where AI truly shines, not replacing  creative teams, but instead helping them see their vision come to life more efficiently!

Beyond the actual game, AI will be used to create near-real-time engagement on social media. In the ad space, content is still king, and harnessing the power of that content for personal and professional gain is a standard way to drive growth.  AI can capture moments, transform them into something to be used in social media, and quickly post/share/distribute to the masses of followers on each respective platform.

The Super Bowl may be considered a relic of a previous era when appointment viewing was the norm, but it also provides a glimpse into the future.  As I mentioned, content is and always will be king.  AI is simply a tool to transform that content into something more personalized and applicable to your needs.  AI speeds up that process.  It doesn’t replace the people responsible for that process.

So have fun this Sunday with family and friends,  and keep a watchful eye out for where AI is mentioned, knowing that most of what it did is likely something you won’t see -- but you will know was there.