[Column] Michelle Waweru: How Gen-AI is reshaping OOH marketing

Past the towering skyscrapers and the snaking traffic in Nairobi, a new trend is slowly creeping up in the city's visual landscape. The models on billboards now staring back at the city's residents with perfect smiles and flawless skin, selling products and services, are getting less and less human.

As generative artificial intelligence advances, marketers are looking less into human creation and more into machine creation, a subtle but impactful shift in OOH marketing globally. This has seeped its way into copywriting. Previously, copywriting birthed popular marketing catchphrases that were riddled with cultural relevance and human mischief. Now, marketers are looking more into AI prompts to create these catchphrases, and if you pay attention, the switch is clear as day.

Online users have coined the phrase 'ChatGPT speak', which is an ode to OpenAI's LLM model. This parlance is very noticeable in the way that large language models communicate. For instance, they are known to use em dashes, among other quirks that are very clearly machine-speak. Most people can spot this AI-speak from a mile away, and when it's mounted on a gigantic billboard on a busy highway, it is hard to miss.

All in all, Out of Home marketing is changing rapidly, and only time can reveal what it will morph into.

Studies show that generative AI-created ads, and not only in OOH, significantly outperform human ads. This explains why the marketing and advertising industry has adopted gen-AI the fastest. According to the American Marketing Association, 71% of marketers use specialised image and video generators weekly.

This shift in marketing towards machine creation has rendered Out Of Home marketing simpler and more accessible, even to small industry players, by removing previous constraints such as high budgets. Old school billboards required days upon days of planning, photographers, models, and high budgets to make just one billboard. That is a thing of the past. Now, all a company requires is a good image generator, and AI will do the rest of the workfor you.

Due to the exponential growth of generative AI, AI can now create increasingly realistic images, which poses a problem for creatives who once dominated the OOH industry. As marketers look into AI for these services, models, photographers, and copywriters are being unceremoniously forced out of the industry. This leaves most of these creatives stranded, as the technology takes over their jobs.

Beyond labour concerns, there is the growing impact of AI on the environment that cannot be ignored. According to a UNEP study, AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water globally than the entire country of Denmark consumes.

Additionally, data centers guzzle huge amounts of electricity. The International Energy Agency projects that data centers will be responsible for a tenth of global electricity demand growth to 2030. Greater accessibility has led to an increase in billboards in major cities. This raises concerns about material waste since PVC materials, which are mostly used to make billboards, are not biodegradable.

Therefore, as this new face of marketing continues to shape up, companies need tighter regulations to reduce environmental degradation in the face of commercial benefit.

Despite appearing as opposing sides, creatives and technology are better positioned as collaborators rather than rivals. AI models are trained to replicate creativity, which is something that comes originally to humans. Human creativity is gained from lived experiences, which is something that AI falls short of.

For the OOH industry, the challenge ahead lies in integrating AI responsibly while preserving the creative insight that gives advertising its cultural relevance.

Michelle Waweru is a Journalist at Africa Business Communities.

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